Should User Interviews be Influenced by the Founder's Point of View on the Problem?
Decoding the user’s pain points and figuring out if you should build the product ?
PMs and founders often conduct the interview with a point of view. In this article, I detail some mistakes I made or almost made during my founder journey.
Approach user interviews with bland curiosity
As founders often we are invested deeply in our hypothesis and a hustler-founder is always trying to sell his wares. But it dawns with experience, while interviewing customers/possible users of the product, one must always be in a frame of mind to expect the unexpected. Founders/ PMs should desist from pushing a sales pitch to the person being interviewed. One must keep in mind that nobody wants to break the news that the pain point you are trying to address isn’t a pain point. Even more so that it’s not a pain point a user will pay for.
Talk to all stakeholders as well as buyers in the process
Though design and development of a product is heavily influenced by the user’s pain points, it is sometimes necessary to take a look at the stakeholders and the decision makers for the tool. Many times the B2B product has a strong user pull but its sales might hit unexpected roadblocks. This happens when your positioning does not reflect the pain points that a decision maker/stakeholders are willing to spend on.
Context is the king
Go where your targeted set of users naturally work or have fun or naturally cluster around. This could be the water cooler or Reddit or reaching out to users in their work space. There are a lot of things are left unsaid by the users which makes it impossible for the founder/PM to understand the underlying context of everything said in a user interview. In my experience of building a software product for data scientists/Machine learning engineers, I realized being close and in the team of data scientists in the office helped me uncover certain subtle behavioral tendencies in an AI team. People for one do not extensively talk to each other about their work and work in silos of their own tasks. This insight led me to built a collaboration tool where machine learning engineers could share their work without being forced to interact extensively with each other.
Interviewing with a point of view
Often we have a strong point of view on the product and we ask leading questions to users because of our strong bias. People almost always respond affirmative to such questions for the fear of looking dumb or for the fear of hurting your perception of the problem. Always double check the user questionnaire for such biases.
As a closing remark to the article, I have a question for the audience and readers with product background. Do you make a product that people don’t realize they need ? The outright answer to this might be NO. But I have observed that in many cases people are used to inefficiencies and do not realize that they can be made better. In this case, I am curious if there is a way to make the product 10X(much) better than the current system of inefficiencies, yet a build a product that users want. Eager to hear your thoughts on this.
I am eager to hear your views on the article, please leave a comment here or reach out to author, Priyanka at pn@vevesta.com or LinkedIn
References
Experience from the field
Interviewing Users By Steve Portigal