Transitioning into a product role: my first user interview process
And what I wish I had known before I started
In 2017 coming fresh out of college I landed my first job at SumUp.
Back then I joined the Operations team, where I was responsible for creating reports, running analysis to generate insights, and leading improvement projects in logistics and customer service.
About a year ago I decided to make a transition into a Product Management career. SumUp promptly provided me with the opportunity to migrate into a squad as an associate product manager. This role often can mean different things in the market, but in this case it meant working side by side with a PM helping her to drive the product’s initiatives while learning from a very senior person that I admired. Pretty amazing, right?
In order to make the most out of this opportunity, I immersed myself in tons of materials, articles and lectures. Since this journey started I’ve learned a great deal about “how to create tech products that customers love”. There’s a lot of content available that guided me through the main principles and methodologies. However, most of what I consumed was pretty theoretical and all that studying time invested failed to provide me with tips and hacks to face the reality of working as a PM. For that reason I decided to document some of my initial steps. This article will focus on my first experience running an user interview process. So if you are just transitioning to a PM role, I hope this can help you to run smoother discovery initiatives.
First, I would like to point out a few items to keep in mind:
- Adapt. You should be learning and iterating on your process from the beginning.
- Involve your main stakeholders. Besides getting additional perspectives to the process, you’ll have much easier prioritization discussions if you are aligned on your user’s biggest pain points.
- Keep the whole team involved! Being in contact with your user enables the team to materialize their problems and empathize with it. That will help you to make clearer connections between the daily tasks and their outcome.
- Numbers will guide you through the process, but they are not the only thing that matter. Don’t get too attached to it.
That being said, let’s jump into a step by step user interview tutorial:
1.Evaluate your current scenario: Analyze your north star and main KPIs to identify your biggest gap or improvements opportunities.
2. Determine the main goal: what is the problem that you are trying to solve?
3. Determine secondary goals: Define the assumptions you want to validate or — even more importantly — invalidate.
4. Run quantitative analysis: Identify groups based on user’s behaviour and demographics, you might have different approaches among them.
5. Translate your goals into questions you want to answer.
6. Write a draft for your interview script:
- Use open ended questions
- Try to organize them in a linear thinking process
- Write two or three questions similar to each one of those. You’ll need them if your user cuts straight to the chase, or if he rambles onto any other random topics
- Avoid yes/no questions
- Make sure not to bias your user with your own opinion or expectation
7. Run your first interview as a test: adapt your script with the learnings you had.
8. Invite a note taker: You’ll need to focus your attention on the participant and having someone there taking notes will save you an enormous amount of time.
9. Summarize your results: Did you answer your initial questions? Did you find any other relevant patterns?
I recommend two methods to do the analysis: top down and bottom up. Start with the top down by identifying main topics and scanning through the answers. That aims to uncover the questions mapped in the planning phase and can be easily accomplished with a simple spreadsheet, like the one in the image below.
Then start looking for patterns in the answers, not necessarily related to the briefing questions. In this bottom up approach Miro can be very helpful by creating affinity maps such as this one:
10. Over communicate it: After an extensive and — hopefully — extremely insightful process you should be focusing your efforts on telling the world all about your new findings. Remember, this will be one of the main drivers of your future strategy, which is why it is essential that your team and stakeholders are well aligned on the users biggest pain points.
If you have completed all those steps: congratulations! You’ve got through your first user interview process. From now on you should have a pretty good idea on where you can generate more value and you’re ready to start promoting prioritization workshops with your team and stakeholders. But that’s a discussion for a whole other article.
