How to Conduct Customer Interviews

Giff Constable posted a very excellent summary of tips for what he calls customer development interviews. One of my favorites is number 5 on disarming "politeness" training.

People are trained not to call your baby ugly. You need to make them feel safe to do this. My approach was to explain that the worst thing that could happen to me was building something people didn’t care about, so the best way they could help me was absolute, brutal honesty.

My other favorite is what he says to do after the interview: Look for patterns and apply judgment.

Customer development interviews will not give you statistically significant data, but they will give you insights based on patterns. They can be very tricky to interpret, because what people say is not always what they do.

You need to use your judgement to read between the lines, to read body language, to try to understand context and agendas, and to filter out biases based on the types of people in your pool of interviewees. But it is exactly the ability to use human judgement based on human connections that make interviews so much more useful than surveys.

The way I do this in my own work is to collect my notes on a series of interviews and then review them one at a time, recording the incidence of certain problems, requests, needs, characteristics and other concepts. Extracting structured information from unstructured notes, though (as Giff says) not statistically valid, does help to bring out patterns. See my entry on qualitative vs. quantitive research methods for more on this and what to do next.

NetProspex Is Looking for a Great Product Manager

Product Manager is the best job in the world for those who are up to it. And a small, growing company trying to reinvent a tired old industry is the best place to do this job; you get to write science fiction and then guide the development team into making your vision real!

As a key member of our talented product group, you will lead a development team charged with developing, launching and managing products for NetProspex. This extends from increasing the growth and profitability of existing products to developing and launching new products for the company. You will build products from existing ideas, and help to develop new ideas based on your industry experience and insights gleaned from customers and prospects. You must possess a unique blend of business and technical savvy, of quantitative analysis skills and creativity; a big-picture vision; and the drive to make that vision a reality. You must enjoy spending time in the market to understand their problems, and find innovative solutions for the broader market.

You must be able to communicate with all areas of the company. You will be hands on with engineering to define product release requirements. You will collaborate with marketing to define the go-to-market strategy, helping them understand the product positioning, key benefits, and target customer. You will also serve as the internal and external evangelist for your product offering, working with sales and key customers.

A product manager's key role is strategic, not tactical. The other areas of the business will support your strategic efforts, though you will sometimes also be asked to help support their work as well. This position reports to the VP of Product (that would be me).

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Manage the entire product life cycle from strategic planning to tactical activities
• Determine market potential, trends, and opportunities
• Specify market requirements and manage backlogs for current and future products by conducting market research supported by on-going interaction with customers and non-customers
• Drive the success of your product across teams (primarily engineering and marketing) through market requirements, positioning and messaging
• Lead development of a company-wide go-to-market plan, and collaborate with all departments to execute
• Analyze potential partner relationships for the product and collaborate with business development to execute

REQUIREMENTS

• 5-10 years of software/internet product management experience
• Knowledgeable in technology, passionate about its possibilities
• Excellent creative instincts, a deep understanding of technology and strong project management and analytical skills.
• Entrepreneurial experience and success creating great products is highly valued
• Computer Science or Engineering degree or work experience a strong plus
• Significant people and organizational management skills, a natural leader and consensus-builder
• Roll up the sleeves attitude, proven ability to execute
• Strong communication skills with the ability to evangelize the merits of NetProspex products internally and externally
• Position requires occasional travel to customer and non-customer sites and industry events in North America

The position is posted formally on our jobs page. In the meantime, if you're interested and you think you qualify, email me with resume and cover letter at jobs@netprospex.com. I look forward to speaking with you.

Incidentally, this job description was adapted from the excellent sample description developed by Steve Johnson at Pragmatic Marketing. Thanks, Steve.

A Product Manager Persona

Young Jedi product manager

Surveys from Pragmatic Marketing, Jama and Quantum Whisper paint a pretty detailed picture of a product manager and his or her job. I've assembled this composite persona from that information, my own experience, and many discussions with other PMs over coffee or beers.

I've recorded it here to get your input and feedback. Is this you? Is it like other PMs you know? With your help, this will form the core user and buyer persona for a simple, affordable requirements and roadmap tool. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Luke the Product Manager

Luke is a product manager in the software industry. He’s 39 years old and has a college degree. He wonders if he should go back to get his MBA because many of his colleagues have one but he doesn't have the time because he is already working 50-60 hours a week. He makes $117k per year in total comp, including a bonus he gets most of, most of the time.

Luke's Team

Luke is one of a group of 6 product managers at his company, reporting to the VP of Product Management who reports to the CEO of his company. Luke is responsible for 3 products and $23 million in annual revenue.

He works as part of a small development team of 18 people. The team is spread out over multiple locations and time zones, so Skype and Microsoft SharePoint are every day tools for him. Recently, however, he’s also been looking at Google docs for sharing.

Luke's Job

He’s good at his job but puts in long hours, including frequent evening and weekend work, and never feels as though he’s really caught up. He wants to spend more time talking with customers, doing win/loss analysis and thinking strategically about the future of his market and where his product should go. Instead, he spends many hours composing, organizing, prioritizing and communicating requirements to engineering and to the many other constituencies around the company that need to know about them.

As part of his job, Luke must gather information about market requirements and communicate information about these requirements and the status of development efforts to meet them to a variety of stakeholders, including people in marketing, sales, sales engineering, customer support, finance, development, architect, C-level management, partner, customer and prospect roles.

He’s getting more attention from the C-level execs at his company, which is gratifying and he assumes will be good for his career, but it is also creating more work in preparing materials suitable for that audience.

Luke is managing his first nominally Agile project, learning as he goes. The team is not following a pure Agile process, however, preferring to retain some of their established methods, habits and tools.

Luke's Process and Tools

Luke is a gadget hound, carrying iPhone and iPad wherever he goes. He meticulously records interview notes with customers in Evernote and captures feature requests in Excel. He dashes off UI mockups in Balsamiq.

Luke writes requirements in Word as a single Product Requirements Document, uses Excel to prioritize those requirements, and uses PowerPoint to communicate the committed roadmap.  Luke’s PRDs and Prioritized Feature Lists contain a lot of information and a large number of features to manage. He usually has to make multiple versions of each type of document as projects evolve, and it is a challenge to keep them all up to date and in sync. 

Luke enters features into JIRA one at a time once they’ve been agreed to. In that process, he modifies and makes the requirements more detailed, obsoleting those parts of the PRD and leaving unimplemented features orphaned in a doc no one will look at again.

Luke wishes he had a tool for managing requirements that was easier to use because it would save him a lot of time and effort in maintaining and publishing his many disparate documents.

Luke's Work Style

Luke is fairly technical, thanks to his background in engineering and as a sales engineer. He is also an excellent communicator, which makes him good at bridging the gap between business problems and what Engineering needs to know to solve them.

He is a good listener, very easy to approach and talk to. He likes learning about people's jobs, their challenges and goals. Luke asks good questions. He is also very analytical and does a good job synthesizing all he learns into a coherent plan. His most difficult challenge is prioritizing the myriad requests and ideas he gets for features, bug fixes and other work in a way that serves the strategic needs of the company, keeps customers and other stakeholders happy, and can be explained clearly and defended using objective criteria.

Does this sound like you? Post your thoughts in the comments.

Netflix Abandons Quikster

Duh.

Are You an Inventor?

I was once asked in a job interview if I was an inventor. I said that any competent engineer can "invent" something new but it was only those new things that solved a significant problem for someone that anyone remembers. PMs are experts in market problems and they collaborate with engineering to create inventions that matter.