The Product Manager’s Guide to Interviewing Customers
How to be an empathetic listener — but a focused questioner
This post appeared in my weekly newsletter on Product Management.
Sign up here to get the next post straight to your inbox.Until I landed my first PM job, I had never really interviewed anyone.
The first time I interviewed someone was alongside a User Experience researcher (who did it for a living). I was a new PM trying to validate a product idea that we thought was exciting and solved a big pain point for people. Our target market was small business owners, so we cold-called a bunch of small business owners and set up meetings.
In sum, we wanted to interview small business owners to validate our assumptions about the burning problems they had. The goal was also to figure out whether or not the burning problem was bad enough that people would pay to have it solved.
So there I was. My first interview ever. We were interviewing this small business owner who after every few minutes of answering our questions, drifted sideways, talked about things that weren’t directly relevant to what we were looking to learn. But my colleague (the UX researcher) never interrupted him. At the time, I wondered why.
