Product Discovery and Delivery: The Importance of Using Interviewing Techniques and Usability Testing with Mike Guiler and Anitra Pavka

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May 10, 2024

Mike Guiler and Anitra Pavka discuss the importance of user interviews in product discovery, emphasizing open-ended questions, active listening, and cultural shifts towards customer-centric innovation. They highlight the value of small experiments, usability testing, and iterative product delivery with a focus on customer empathy and continuous learning.

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Introduction

00:00 • 3min

Mastering User Interviews for Product Discovery

03:24 • 11min

Cultural Shift Towards Customer-Centric Innovation

14:39 • 6min

Encouraging Small Experiments and Prototyping in Product Discovery

20:46 • 5min

Importance of Sharing Observations and Lightweight Feedback Process

26:03 • 2min

Iterative Product Discovery and Delivery with Emphasis on Customer Empathy and Continuous Learning

28:31 • 4min

This week, Justin Thatil, your host, welcomes Mike Guiler and Anitra Pavka. Today, they address the product discovery phase and some of the challenges the engineering Team usually faces while identifying what they will build and which special skills will be required to perform the task effectively. Also in this episode, they explore interviewing techniques and usability testing.

Key Takeaways

Interviewing users is universally helpful.

Interviewing users is so important that it should be done every week.
We need to be informed, and the only way to do this is by talking to the users.
Before the interview begins, you need to make sure you know what you want to obtain from the conversation. A discussion guide might help to lead an interview and make it more consistent.
Focus on allowing people to keep on talking.
Engage in the conversation with active listening skills
Open-ended questions are ideal for promoting a deep conversation.

Fall in love with solving the problem and avoid fixating on a particular solution.

Put an effort into understanding the underlying motivations to solve a particular problem.

The organizational culture needs to promote the Discovery and Delivery Teams to talk to the customer and get feedback.

Encourage small experiments that try to address a problem from a different perspective and use a different tool to solve it. If the experiment is successful, the new approach could be applied to other matters.

Usability testing:

Was the product easy to learn? Was the user able to get through the product efficiently? Were there errors along the way?
Search to find out answers to questions about value.
You can use moderated and unmoderated usability tests to get the feedback the Team seeks.
Share the findings across the Team. They can influence how they approach the following prototype and evolve the solution.

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