What does it take
to talk to customers?

READ ON

PUBLISHED

Aug 30, 2024

READING TIME

4 min & 29 sec

Dear Reader,

Together with my friends at Orbital (a company I advise), I recently ran a LinkedIn poll about user interview behaviors. My goal was to get a rough overview of how product teams approach preparing customer interactions.

Here’s what I learned from the 320 total votes:

Who schedules your customer interviews?

Most (55%) of participants schedule interviews themselves, which indicates the healthy democratization of research access to scale Discovery in companies. While it requires the right skills and tooling, I have seen many situations where enabling a product team to recruit themselves simply reduces friction. And it creates the capacity for roles like user researchers to focus on the big rocks.

How long did it take you to schedule and conduct your last five customer interviews?

But do teams get the access they need? What's the point of being able to do your research when it takes you ages to get to the next reliable insight? 53% of participants shared that setting up their last five interviews took less than two weeks. Depending on the quality of the participants (and, consequently, insights), this feels good enough. Faster is often better, but you sacrifice interviewee quality for an artificial cadence.

How do you target interview participants?

Speaking of which, How do teams ensure they talk to the right people? Product Analytics data (38%) and Screener responses (32%) are the go-to qualifiers for the participants of this poll. This is probably the result of a team's context: The former depends on the available tooling and interview infrastructure, and the latter "only" requires skills to craft revealing screener questions.

Lucky for you, Orbital can help you in these three areas.

Disclaimer: I see the scientific shortcomings of LI survey data and the potential skewing of results. It's one valuable (and, frankly, fun) data point.

HOW TO PUT THIS THEORY INTO PRACTICE

Where can you remove dependencies? What tooling and skills does your team need to talk to five customers in the next 2 weeks?
Can you shorten the lead time to insigt? It might not always have to be an interview. What is the next most critical piece of insight to reduce uncertainty further and what is the activity with the shortest lead time to get to it?
Who do you NOT want to interview? If you can't name a customer segment whose problems you're deliberately deprioritizing right now, you probably get lost in averages. Be clear on your WHO.

Did you enjoy this one or have feedback? Do reply. It's motivating. I'm not a robot; I read and respond to every subscriber email I get (just ask around). If this newsletter isn't for you anymore, you can unsubscribe here.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

Tim

How to Dive Deeper into Product Discovery

Learn how I helped companies like Deutsche Telekom and Forto hone their Product Discovery practices. I closely work with product organizations through workshops and coaching to introduce and adapt Product Discovery.

Learn more about my Discovery Consulting

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