Tour de listening

“When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.” ― The Dalai Lama

Published in

Bootcamp

8 min readDec 16, 2022

Two abstract beings listening to each other — Illustration by Dinos&Teacups from Dribble

Have you just joined a new team or a company? Or are you setting up a new function from scratch and you are looking for ways to deepen your knowledge about the company, business, product, and people, so that you can strategise yourself and position your function accordingly to solve real problems and uncover opportunities? Then there is one great tool that can help you get started: The listening tour.

This one tool helped me a lot to identify high impact opportunities while setting up a product ops function for a product portfolio company, so I wanted to share some tips and tricks that will hopefully be helpful for you too.

What is a listening tour?

The listening tour is mainly structured as a series of interviews to listen to people, get to know one another on a personal level to start establishing trust and empathy, all the while getting an understanding of what the person does and the inner workings of a team, function or company, along with what works well, what can be improved and how you (your role or team) can support them and work well together.

When taking on a new challenge, it is always great to bring our previous experiences and look at the best practices across the industry. The most important thing is to blend those with the actual needs of individuals and organisations to design the solutions that fits best to our new specific context, because every person and organisation is in some way unique and different from the other, even if they have some traits in common. The listening tour enables us to do exactly that, i.e. to understand these unique needs.

How to conduct one

As it is with everything, it is very helpful to plan ahead and make the necessary preparation in order to get the most out of the insights you’ll gather from the listening tour. So let’s take a look at what to cover in each major step.

Before the interviews

→ First of all start with defining what you would like to learn and what you would like to achieve by going on a listening tour, and based on this define your scope. For example, you might be looking to get insights on a specific topic, such as how we currently manage release notes as the product team and how it affects customers and customer facing teams. You could also rather keep it a bit more open, like to understand what the current operational pain points in the product team are and how that impacts collaboration with other departments.

→ Based on your goal, identify the team members and stakeholders to interview. This step is really important as it will shape the insights you will gather. As you need all the different perspectives to draw the full picture, the best is to think about all the people and functions you and your team interacts with or should be interacting with. For example, while setting up the product ops function, it was important not only to understand the inner workings of the product teams, but it was also crucial to understand how they work with other teams be it legal, documentation, customer success, sales, learning and development, and many more as it takes a village to create the best possible experience for the customers and to bring value to the business. So make sure to have representatives from all the necessary stakeholder groups on your interviewee list. If you already have your stakeholder map that’s already a great starting point for your list. If not this will be the perfect opportunity to start building one.

At some point you might realise that you have way too many people on your list to interview (as we did!) given the limited time and resources you have. In this case start with a simple prioritisation (primary and secondary) as we always do with everything and try to cover the primary stakeholders first and then go through the secondary ones if you still have the time.

→ Prepare base themes you would like to cover together with some guiding questions: Remember that these will just serve as a conversation facilitator where your dialogue will take things forward. So you should have the flexibility to discuss some topics in more detail where you might even find yourself exploring some other aspects that you haven’t even initially had in mind. In this case you might want to discuss these newfound topics with the other interviewees down the line as well. While doing that also make sure to cover the same base themes and topics to find patterns in the answers. On top of all these, as a principle try to use open ended questions to learn more about people’s experiences, thoughts and feelings.

Here’s an example outline for the interview structure including potential themes and topics to cover along with some guiding questions for inspiration which you can use and build upon based on your needs.

Intro

Meet & greet, review the goal and agenda.
Tell me about yourself and your personal story at the company.
Tell me about your role and your current team.

Deeper Dives

What are your current touch points with team [x]?
How is the current collaboration and communication?
What are your dependencies to each other and how are they managed currently?
What works well?
What is challenging or can be better?
Which topics do you think would need immediate attention from me or my team?

Closing Thoughts

Do you have any additional thoughts or comments?
Who else would you recommend that I should be connecting with?

Next Steps

Say thank you, share and explain what people can expect as an outcome of this conversation, if and how you will engage with them in the future and what will happen afterwards to manage expectations.
Define the appropriate duration for your interviews:
From experience, I can say that make sure that your sessions are at least for 40 mins as anything below that is just too short to get acquainted and dive into topics. Also feel free to set up follow-up sessions if needed.

→ Pre-interview communication: Before sending the interview invites, get in touch with the interviewees to say hi, introduce yourself if you haven’t met/e-met yet and give a heads up about the upcoming meeting request they will get together with its intent so that they are fully onboard and at ease. Doing it via Slack worked the best for me as it is a bit more laid back.

→ Send the interview invite: Make sure that you give an explanatory but chill title. I try to make it a bit more amicable by naming it as “ [topic] chat ☕” to come off warmer and more friendly and that people don’t feel like they are going to be interrogated. Make sure to add adequate information in the description again explaining its goal, what they can expect and how they can get prepared for it.

→ Keep in mind that the best is to meet on a 1–1 basis: It helps to have deeper and more open conversations, but be flexible if people would prefer to hold these meetings in groups. If this is the case just adjust the meeting duration accordingly.

During the interviews

→ Make sure that you take meeting notes so that you capture all the important insights and that nothing falls between the cracks. Depending on your context you might also want to run the interviews with one of your team members. In this case it might be good to split the roles where one moderates and the other focuses on taking notes and that you discuss learnings together afterwards.

After the interviews

→ Right after each interview, directly unpack what you’ve heard. It is best to do it right after the meeting rather than the following day or later because people tend to forget approximately 50 percent of the information they receive the next day if not rehearsed right afterwards based on the Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve. As you might already be familiar from my previous articles, I’m a big fan of Miro and that’s the tool I chose to gather the key insights and do affinity mapping (clustering) over time. After a couple of interviews, it is super exciting to see that some buckets start forming around the same topics.

→ After completing the interviews, analyse and synthesise those findings. You can do that in different ways. If you need the contribution and the buy-in of your key stakeholders, then you might think of having a workshop with them to analyse the insights and define the next steps together. For example, if you are setting up a new function, then it might be helpful to involve the leadership for prioritising focus areas and defining the strategy. You can also just analyse and define next steps by yourself if the scope is only relevant to you, for example if your aim is to understand how your new team functions and what the needs of your different team members are.

→ Regardless of the way you choose to analyse and define the next steps, always share your findings and plans (assuming that you’ll plan some action items or projects based on the outcomes of your listening tour) with interviewees afterwards as their work might be dependent on you and your work or they might just be interested in the outcome for better alignment. You can either do it via a detailed report and share it via email or if the topic is more private then you can just try to cover them in your 1–1s.

As you’ve uncovered all the amazing insights, synthesised them and came up with an action plan now it is the time to make them happen!

As we are getting closer to the end of the year, please also make the time to listen to yourself, reflect on the past year, see what you would like to achieve and where would you like to be personally next year to plan and take the necessary steps to get there!

Here’s to learning more about ourselves and others around us, which will help us shape the best possible future!

The listening tour is one of the most useful methods you should have in your Product Operations toolbox. If you are looking for help to conduct a listening tour or setting up and scaling Product Operations in your organization feel free to reach out here.