It’s become second nature to me to google ‘stoic philosophy’ when I’m having a bad day.

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”

“Don’t seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will”

“Focus only on what is within your control”

My ‘Stoic Philosophy’ playlist on YouTube has 23 of these videos and I expect it will continue to grow.

But while I can appreciate the importance of these teachings, I sometimes need a more tactical way to actively shift my mindset when I’m in a downward spiral.

What I’m saying is — if I’ve just CC-ed a whole bunch of people in an email when it should have been a BCC — it’s more than a little challenging to “wish that everything happens as it actually will”.

What has worked for me is to reframe these lessons into questions that I ask myself — out loud if at all possible — every time I start to get bogged down by negative emotions. By directly challenging myself to respond, I’m forced to confront those negative behaviours and emotions head-on, and it often helps to speed up the process of shifting my mindset.

But first, go for a walk

Seneca said “we should take wandering outdoor walks, so the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing.”

I find the best time to ask myself these questions is on a short walk outside. I find it’s not hard to make time for a short walk every morning, or even at the office if there’s been a bit of a screw-up.

As there are a few questions to get through, one way for me to organize and recall them is time-based — I.e. whether the questions are targeted at negative emotions about the present, past, or future. That being said, that’s just one way to do it — the questions work perfectly well on their own, and some of them have relevance to past, present, and future at the same time.

Let’s start with the most important segment of questions: the present.

Dealing with the present

1. Rather than worry about people or things that I cannot influence, what is one small task that I can do right now, that is within my control?

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.” — Epictetus, Discourses

Getting started on a small task that is within my control is the best way to remind myself that that is what I should be focusing on, rather than the actions of others.

2. “Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?” You’ll be embarrassed to answer.

Our challenges — most of the time — are fairly mundane. At any point in time, people all around us are dealing with things that are far more taxing. This is a direct quote from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and every time I ask myself this question, it’s helped me put my own relatively minor issues in perspective.

3. Is this thing that I am about to do consistent with the person I want to be?

“The work of philosophy is just this, to examine and uphold the standards, but the work of a truly good person is in using those standards when they know them”. — Epictetus, Discourses

I’ve always been good at putting things off. I’ll eat KFC two days in row and say to myself — tomorrow I’ll eat a healthy meal. But there is only the present, and if I can’t hold to my standards in the small things, how will I hold to them for the things that matter? This question, posed at the right time, becomes an important way to pull myself back in the moment from giving into temptation.

Facing the future

4. Do I want to be miserable in advance about things that could happen, and in that way be miserable my entire waking life?

“It is ruinous for the soul to be anxious about the future and miserable in advance of misery, engulfed by anxiety that the things it desires might remain its own until the very end…such a soul will never be at rest…[and] will lose the ability to enjoy present things” — Seneca, Moral Letters

I ask this question to remind myself that worrying my entire life away is a real possibility.

5. Should the thing I am worrying about happen, why do I not have faith that I can handle it, like any of the challenges I’ve faced before?

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

When I worry about the future, I usually tend to focus on the things that could happen, rather than asking myself if I’ll be able to handle it. When I ask this question, it’s a way of reminding myself that I have faced numerous challenges and inconveniences in my life, and after all of it — I’m still here. So there’s no reason to think I can’t handle the typical challenges that come my way.

6. Should I not be fulfilled in my daily work, rather than chasing the fleeting happiness of an uncertain outcome?

“In short, the wise man looks to the purpose of all actions, not their consequences; beginnings are in our power but Fortune judges the outcome, and I do not grant her verdict upon me.” — Seneca, Moral Letters

It’s easy to be focused on the next big outcome — like getting that next promotion. But if we do that, we’ll spend 99% of our time in anticipation of an outcome that may or may not happen, in a state of perpetual anxiety.

Instead, we should spend that time being proud of our actions, and of doing our part in society.

Focusing on the means, rather than the end, is what we need to be happy.

7. Who is this person whose approval I am seeking, and do I wish to continue basing my happiness on their approval?

“I’m constantly amazed by how easily we love ourselves above all others, yet we put more stock in the opinion of others than in our own estimation of self” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

One desired future ‘outcome’ that has a particularly strong hold on most of us is the desire for the approval of others.

Explicitly naming the person whose approval (or lack thereof) is affecting my entire day is a way for me to remind myself that no one should have that ability to take away my happiness like that.

Accepting the past

8. What kind of person would I be if I never faced any challenges?

“…the mind adapts and converts any obstacle to its action into a means of achieving it. That which is an impediment to action is turned to advance action. The obstacle on the path becomes the way” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent — no one can know what you are capable of, not even you.” — Seneca, On Providence

In all likelihood — a weak and boring one.

If there’s one thing that’s certain about life — is that we will all face challenges. In many ways, those challenges are amplified the older we get — with illness, the loss of loved ones, and greatly expanded responsibilities creating the possibility of greatly expanded screw-ups.

Challenges that we face now are an important way of training our resilience and ability to adapt to more difficult situations we may face in the future.

And if nothing else — they make you a more interesting and faceted person — no one can relate to someone who’s perfect.

When I reflect on opportunities I’ve missed, insults thrown at me, or bad decisions I’ve made in the past — I remember that all of these things made me stronger…and probably a more interesting, less one-dimensional person.

9. Am I grateful enough for everything that has been given to me to this point?

“You need very few things to be happy…when you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

These quotes from Meditations are self-explanatory. It’s easy to compare ourselves with others, and to regret decisions we’ve made in the past — but if we take just a little bit of time to pause and reflect on the blessings we’ve been given — we can remind ourselves that we have just what we need to be content.

So in summary — take a morning walk, listen to some calming music (I can recommend the ‘Floating in Space’ playlist on Spotify) — and try asking these questions the next time you have a rough day. I hope they can help you as much as they’ve helped me!

I’ve written this example user interview script as a way of codifying some of the key things I’ve learnt over the last 5 years of conducting and observing user interviews as a product manager.

This guide will be written from the perspective of a hypothetical app development project, and will illustrate how a user interview script could be written for the discovery phase of this specific project — i.e., before any concepts, solutions or prototypes have been developed.

The principles behind the questions are fairly universal, however, so you should be able to apply the concepts illustrated here to your project fairly easily.

For this example, I will be taking the perspective of a designer for that most classic of apps — the to-do list.

Why conduct user interviews in the discovery phase of a project?

When you’re launching a new product or feature, exploratory user research is a critical first step to understand and validate your target user’s needs and pain points. That way, you can be sure that whatever product or feature you’re developing will be solving real problems for users. User interviews are one of the fundamental tools that you’ll be using most often to conduct exploratory research.

However, an important point to note according to Nielsen Norman Group — “a discovery phase does not involve testing a hypothesis or evaluating a potential solution”.

While it may be tempting to go into an exploratory user interview with some product concepts to test, by creating concepts to test even before you’ve completed any user research, you’ll risk fixating on solutions that aren’t based on problems that have been validated with users.

Testing concepts would be more appropriate in a subsequent phase, after you’ve consolidated the insights from the interviews in the discovery phase.

Setting research objectives

All user interviews need some specific objectives, to ensure that the interview can actually achieve some actionable insights.

Context-setting:

• To-do list apps aim to help users manage and recall their tasks
• To-do list apps are only one way of managing tasks, other ways include other apps (e.g., calendar apps) or physical products (e.g., post-its, handwritten lists)

Assumptions on user needs and pain points:

Before going into a user interview, you would often have some idea about their key needs and pain points. This could come from secondary research, or even from the experience of the team members’ themselves (this would be true in this case, because most people would have used a to-do list at some point in their life). An example of an assumption is below:

• Assumption: Users have too many items on their to-do list, leading to them feeling overwhelmed and not being able to complete their most important tasks

Objectives

Based on the above context and assumptions, we can set the following objectives for this piece of research:

1. To understand how users currently manage and recall their tasks
2. To understand users’ key pain points in managing and recalling their tasks
3. To understand users’ key pain points when using to-do list apps
4. To validate our assumption that users have too many tasks on their to-do list, leading to an inability to complete their tasks

Recruitment:

Since many of the questions would require us to understand how users use other to-do list apps, the main screening criteria would be that the participant must have some experience using to-do lists in the past (they need not be currently using them, since someone who used to-do list apps before but eventually stopped might be able to share interesting insights about why they stopped).

A minimum of 5 participants would be required for these interviews (more is possible, but since you’ll be having a separate set of sessions for usability testing, it might make sense to stick to 5, to manage the time spent on this project). Check out this useful article from Nielsen Norman Group on why interviewing 5 users is sufficient.

Note Taking:

1. Ensure that you have a note-taker — facilitating an interview while taking notes isn’t fun
2. Where possible, notes should be taken without rephrasing what the user is saying. If you’re unable to type fast enough and there is a recording, take note of the time that the user mentioned that point and include it in the note so you can go back to recording and review it
3. When taking notes, one recommended approach is to use an app with sticky note functionality like Miro

• Notes for each of the interviewees should be taken in a different coloured sticky note
• When synthesizing the research, this makes it easy to move the sticky notes around and cluster them, and to quickly identify which insights resonated with multiple users

Example Interview Script

Preamble:

1. Thank the participant for their time
2. Engage in some light opening conversation to help build rapport and put the participant at ease
3. Clarify the objectives of the session — but try not to use the word ‘interview’ e.g., ‘Today is just a casual chat for us to find out more about how you manage your tasks and use to-do list apps’
4. If appropriate, clarify that all findings from this interview will be kept anonymous, and that any insights shared from this session will not mention specific individuals
5. Ask for permission to record the session

General questions about how the user achieves a particular objective (in this case, managing and recalling tasks):

1. How do you currently manage your tasks?
2. Walk us through the last time you had to manage your task list.
3. What’s the hardest part about managing your task list?
4. How do you currently recall tasks that need to be done?
5. Tell us about the last time you had to recall a task?
6. What’s the hardest part about recalling tasks that need to be done?
7. How do you work around [issue mentioned by user]?

Note: We ask these questions separately from the app-specific questions because users may have their own ways of achieving an objective that may not involve applications (e.g., in the case of task management, they may be putting post-its on the fridge, or keeping a handwritten task list on their desk).

We also wouldn’t ask about their usage of apps immediately because the user might fixate on software issues and not raise more fundamental issues.

App-specific questions

1. What to-do list apps are you currently using/did you use in the past to help you keep track of your tasks?
2. How did you find out about this to-do list app?
3. Is this a paid or free app?
4. What platform do you use this app on (mobile/desktop/both)?
5. Walk us through the most recent occasion when you used the app.
6. What did you like most about managing your tasks through the app?
7. What was the biggest problem or the hardest part about managing your tasks through the app?
8. How did you work around [issue mentioned by user]?

Remember to probe deeper when users raise issues. For example, the user might mention an issue in passing while describing how they used the app, at which point you should ask additional probing questions such as:

• Could you tell me more about that issue you just mentioned?
• How did that affect your process of completing your task?
• Tell me more about why you felt that way?

Testing specific assumptions:

Assumption: Users have too many tasks on their to-do list apps, leading to them feeling overwhelmed and not being able to complete their most important tasks on time

1. Tell me about how you would go about completing tasks on a day-to-day basis.
2. What is the hardest part about completing tasks on your to-do list?
3. How many tasks do you typically have on the to-do list app?

When reviewing the data, we can then see if users with a relatively high number of to-do list items compared to others in the participant group face more issues with completing their tasks.

Note that the question on ‘how many tasks do you typically have on your to-do list’ is asked at the end, so as not to lead the users into referencing that point.

General tips:

• Always prepare a script.
• Have someone join as a note taker, or at the very least take a recording of the session.
• Make sure to let users finish their thoughts — this entails being a bit comfortable with silence. If you move on too quickly as soon as the user has paused, you may lose out on key insights.
• Don’t share your own experiences, even if it seems like a good way to build rapport — this will distract from the key purpose of the interview which is to find out more about the user.
• It’s important to remain neutral and not affirm users’ ideas or statements one way or another — this could lead the user to try and say what they think you want to hear.
• Where possible, ask users to recall a specific time when they performed a task, rather than asking them how they generally go about performing it. This will guide them to share specific insights rather than more general impressions.
• Remember to probe deeper. The ‘five whys’ technique is an established technique to determine the root cause of a problem by repeating the question ‘Why?’. You generally won’t need to ask it 5 times, but you get the point!
• Stay under 20 questions — this gives you more time to probe the participants’ responses further.
• Make sure not to ask leading questions — keep your questions short and don’t include any suggestion of an answer or response in the question.
• Users might make mistakes in an interview (e.g., while describing how they used a particular app). Don’t correct them during the interview, as this might spoil the flow of the interview and make them feel guarded. Just note them down and inform them at the end of the interview if it’s helpful.

Outcome of the interviews:

After the interviews are completed, the notes should be grouped into various insights about the user (this is where sticky notes come in handy).

At the end of this synthesis process, you should have insights on some specific problems that users need to solve (which may or may not include the assumptions you originally had at the start of the process) that can form the basis for ideating what your product will look like.

That’s it for this example user interview script! If you found this useful, I’d love to hear from you.

How to write a user interview script— a (fairly specific) example was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Need to figure out a way to convince your management team that their latest idea is going to be a waste of resources? Break out the 2 x 2.

Struggling to decide between feature enhancements with your engineering team? Gotta be the 2 x 2.

Not sure what to order for lunch? Sure, it can’t hurt to map out impact vs effort for that too.

The 2 x 2 is the swiss army knife of prioritization, and its usefulness is undeniable. There’s also something deeply satisfying about seeing those items appear in that top priority box.

But there are occasions when it can be challenging to get right, in particular when trying to prioritize in large groups in a workshop setting — some people can get analysis paralysis when ranking two items against each other, to say nothing of an entire board with two axes. You’ve probably also been in a situation where after the 2 x 2 ranking is finished, you’ve realized the conclusions it’s giving you are really strange (usually due to poor selection of your secondary axis — I’ve illustrated a couple of examples of how that happened to me below).

So if you’re prioritizing, is there really no alternative to doing the consultant thing and breaking out the 2 x 2?

Well — if you’ve spoken to your technical team and have estimated a rough effort score for all of the options, then…yes…there really is no alternative to the ‘Impact vs Effort’ 2 x 2.

But that board above has 7 sticky notes on it — and it would have taken time for your engineers to estimate the effort for each of those items. And before you get to that point — you may have had 20 or 30 items that you want to work on. How do you prioritize those 20 or 30 items down to the 7 work items you see in the above impact-effort table?

Well — you could use another 2 x 2, for example, Impact to Revenue vs Impact to User Satisfaction, and you’d probably want to do that in a workshop with your key stakeholders.

Challenges I’ve faced with a 2 x 2

However, it doesn’t always make sense to force that second axis when there really is only one key consideration.

A case in point was a recent workshop we had where we were brainstorming system improvements to our grant management workflow with our stakeholders, and we realized that our key consideration was the processing time by our finance team.

While there were secondary considerations (e.g. security implications, adherence to grant policy guidelines), none of these warranted having an entire axis on its own.

When doing some pre-work for the workshop, we also found that certain secondary axes were somewhat redundant — as in the case below where finance processing time had a direct correlation with the impact on customer satisfaction — making this 2 x 2 fairly redundant.

Other problems arose when we tried to map out impact to finance officers’ processing time vs impact to our account managers’ processing time (as they’re also involved in the grant application and claims process). The issue here was that this would have made us prioritize 3 less critical that impacted both finance and account managers over our most critical item that impacted the finance team alone — essentially rewarding quantity over quality.

Making the decision to use a bullseye framework for our workshop

To see if we could overcome some of these issues, our UX lead, Arun, recommended that we try using a bullseye prioritization for the actual workshop.

Before we started, we got our team to list out everything that they considered important when prioritizing these system improvements.

It looked something like this:

• Speed of processing of internal finance officers (key factor)
• Speed of processing by account managers (secondary factor)
• Better coordination between finance and other divisions (secondary factor)
• Meet compliance and documentation requirements (secondary factor)
• Adherence to policy guidelines (secondary factor)

Many of the above are related to and contribute to each other, but it helped to have these in mind as they went into the prioritization exercise.

Then, we split the group into 2 groups of 5 (to ensure the group sizes were small enough to give everyone a voice), and had them prioritize these system improvements on a target board, instead of on a 2 x 2.

The 18 system improvements were listed to the left of the target board.

We then told them they could put:

• 2 in the innermost ring (highest priority)
• 5 in the middle ring (medium priority)
• 11 in the outermost ring (lowest priority)

(Adjust the numbers as needed, but generally the number of items you can fit in each ring should exponentially increase, somewhat proportionate to the volume of that ring; this is one reason bullseye prioritization is so effective — it instantly and visually conveys the need to focus only on the most important items)

When the two groups came together, they compared their boards and were able to jointly come up with a revised board that had input from everyone.

Looking back on the results

After running the exercise, we realized a few key things about bullseye prioritization:

1. It’s much faster: We ran the entire exercise in an hour — prioritizing 18 system improvements over multiple factors — with enough time for the 2 groups to come up with their own target boards AND synthesize those two boards into a single joint board. By using a single target board, the users could more fluidly rank while considering multiple factors, rather than methodically ranking against both axes each time. Also, by only ranking in tiers, the users didn’t need to rank each individual item against each other, making them work a lot faster.
2. By extension, we were able to get through a large number of items: I haven’t seen a 2 x 2 survive with more than 10 items — but this bullseye diagram ranked 18 system improvements without breaking a sweat.
3. It allows users to consider secondary factors rather than focusing them on just 2: We were able to focus on the key factors (improvements to processing time) while still considering other secondary factors (which are important, but not important enough to deserve their own axis on a 2x2). This is simultaneously the biggest drawback of a bullseye diagram — that you can’t systematically ensure how each person is prioritizing, and what factors they’re considering — that needs to be carefully facilitated during the discussion.
4. The findings in both groups were consistent: The findings across both groups were remarkably consistent — which was something we haven’t noticed with 2 x 2 ranking exercises before this (where depending on the axis chosen and how the group interprets them — results could vary wildly).

And after we finished the exercise, we only needed to take the 7 prioritized system improvements from the 2 inner rings to our technical team (and yes, eventually, to weigh those different options, we did bring out the impact effort 2 x 2), but in a smaller group that was more used to performing that kind of prioritization.

TLDR

A 2 x 2 is still an incredibly versatile and powerful tool when you choose your axes right (such as in the case of impact/effort analysis). But let’s say you’re not ready to consider effort scores, and you need to get alignment quickly and with people who may not be so used to doing that kind of analysis (e.g. in a workshop setting) — consider bullseye prioritization.

Dear product managers — tired of the 2 x 2 matrix? Consider bullseye prioritization instead was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.