68: Customer Interview Best Practices

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and  Soumeya Benghanem welcome Jennifer McGill Walker (Pearson) and Chris Hess, Ph.D. (Pearson) as they discuss the best practices in interviewing a customer. Good PMs need to be able to know the best way and approach to reach out to customers to understand their feedback and concerns that can help to improve a product or service.

Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.

Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:45 The importance of discovery
• 03:22 Interacting with customers will lead back to why you’re doing what you do
• 04:27 Types of interactions with customers
• 06:34 The interaction format depends on the goal
• 08:26 Constantly talk with customers
• 10:37 Use Zoom for recording
• 12:50 Check your confirmation bias
• 14:02 Start a earlier than the actual interview when selecting your sample size
• 15:24 Work on the art of questioning
• 17:28 Being representative of the population as a whole & be comfortable with silence
• 19:04 Bring in other people from your team
• 21:52 Biggest threat to discovery work is time
• 26:54 Talk about what you’ve learned & learn from other
• 29:03 Setting up your work calendar 
• 34:15 How to approach a customer?
• 35:54 Overcoming suspicion
• 39:01 Scheduling customer interviews & reaching out manually or automatically
• 48:13 Final thoughts