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Poornima Mohandas is a business-journalist-turned-product-marketer with over 17 years of professional experience. She runs productmarketingfortech.in, a product marketing consultancy based out of Bangalore. She has launched and handled multi-million dollar enterprise SaaS products in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as emerging products in the Indian startup ecosystem.

Poornima Mohandas

Rahul Mohandas is a product advisor with over 25 years of experience in the product management and technology world. Apart from being an advisor to several startups, he’s also an adjunct faculty for online programs on product management at some of the country’s top B-schools like Indian School of Business (ISB) and Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIMK) through Emeritus.

Rahul Mohandas

I was once watching a video recording of a senior product manager, Abhay, interviewing a customer. The customer was using a competitor’s product and Abhay wanted to build a competing offering. He posed questions such as: :
<ul>
<li>Which features do you use?</li>
<li>What are your favourite features?</li>
<li>What reports do you use?</li>
</ul>
The customer gave suitable answers but they were limited to the UI/UX of the product.
After a few similar  interviews, Abhay built a me-too product that missed key capabilities and struggled to compete in a cluttered marketplace.
As product professionals who have done over 2,000 customer interviews over the last two decades, we thought it pertinent to write about this topic. So, if you are wondering what went wrong in Abhay’s interview, read on.
<h3>Why bother with customer interviews?</h3>
Too many companies today build products because a competitor has already built it, or because of investor heat or just because they can.
Interviewing customers has manifold benefits. It helps you:
<ul>
<li>Understand your buyer, their challenges, and motivations</li>
<li>Decide what to build and what not to build</li>
<li>Position and price your products right</li>
<li>Reach the buyer through the right marketing channels</li>
<li>Understand why you win or lose deals</li>
</ul>
You can then combine this rich qualitative data with a quantitative method like surveys to validate trends and arrive at the macro picture.
<h3>Different types of interviews</h3>
Ideally, you want to conduct customer interviews at every stage of the product life cycle &#8211; each time with a different objective. Here are some of the different types of interviews we recommend from our experience:
&nbsp;
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Type of interview</td>
<td>Objective</td>
<td>3 questions you must ask</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Discovery</td>
<td>Find the market problem</td>
<td>
<ol>
<li>What are you trying to achieve?</li>
<li>Tell me what your typical day looks like.</li>
<li>What are your challenges and frustrations?</li>
</ol>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Buyer persona</td>
<td>Understand the buyer</td>
<td>
<ol>
<li>What are your motivations?</li>
<li>How do you discover new products?</li>
<li>What sources of information do you trust?</li>
</ol>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>User persona</td>
<td>Understand who uses the product, how, and why</td>
<td>
<ol>
<li>How do you do things today?</li>
<li>What does success look like for you as an individual?</li>
<li>What are your pain areas?</li>
</ol>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Product validation</td>
<td>Derisk and excite customers</td>
<td>
<ol>
<li>What do you think about the product?</li>
<li>What problems will this solve for you?</li>
<li>Is there anything missing?</li>
</ol>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Win loss</td>
<td>Improve win rates</td>
<td>
<ol>
<li>How did you first hear of our product?</li>
<li>Tell me about your buying journey.</li>
<li>What were your top 3 decision making criteria?</li>
</ol>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Product feedback</td>
<td>Improve product. Increase stickiness</td>
<td>
<ol>
<li>How has your experience been using our product?</li>
<li>What do you like and dislike about the product?</li>
<li>What value are you getting from it?</li>
</ol>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Adoption problems</td>
<td>Remove obstacles to adoption</td>
<td>
<ol>
<li>Tell us about your experience with the product so far?</li>
<li>What are the major obstacles to adoption?</li>
<li>How are you solving your problem today?</li>
</ol>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3>Best practices for customer interviews</h3>
We have broken the best practices into 3 sections:
<ul>
<li>Before the interview</li>
<li>During the Interview</li>
<li>After the Interview</li>
</ul>
<h4>Before the interview</h4>
Set an objective 
When doing any customer interview, be clear on your objective. Based on the objective you can identify the list of customers you want to target. For instance:
&nbsp;
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Type of interview</td>
<td>Typical customers to target</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Product feedback interview</td>
<td>Customers with NPS of &lt;50</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Buyer persona interview</td>
<td>CFOs of mid-sized companies</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Product adoption interview</td>
<td>Customers who signed up for Product X but are not using it</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Prepare your questions
Needless to say, do your homework. Between your CRM and your account manager, you should have plenty of background information.
<img decoding="async" src="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/33daef4e-e78c-43ef-aa96-7095651fa8a2_homework.gif" />
Based on your objective and the background information, prepare a rough list of questions you would like to ask them. Don’t be married to the script. Let the conversation flow. When the customer says something interesting, be sure to ask follow on questions.
Ask questions that are likely to get the customer talking. As a general rule, avoid close ended questions and leading questions. These will just get you monosyllabic responses.
Here’s a list of commonly asked bad questions and how to turn them around.
&nbsp;
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Bad question</td>
<td>What’s wrong with the question</td>
<td>How to turn it into a good question</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Do you like using our product?</td>
<td>Close ended</td>
<td>How is your experience using this product?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>How do you like Feature X?</td>
<td>Too narrow</td>
<td>How well is this feature solving the relevant problem?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>What features is my product lacking?</td>
<td>Not the customer’s job to tell you this</td>
<td>What else can we do to improve your experience?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Will you pay for this?</td>
<td>Customers are likely to say Yes</td>
<td>If you didn’t have this tomorrow, how would you feel?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Would you like a mobile app for this product?</td>
<td>Leading question</td>
<td>Where would you use this product from?</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Questions that revolve around features which we saw Abhay use in the opening paragraph are, as we say in the table above, too narrow, miss the big picture, and are too focussed on the solution rather than the customer’s problem.
Offer an incentive
Offer a gift card as an incentive. This can help you get more customers for your interviews.
Have a communication plan
Here’s a sample we have seen work.
<ul>
<li>Start with an email asking for time.</li>
<li>Once they confirm the time, send out a calendar invite.</li>
<li>One hour before the meeting, send out a reminder. This can significantly increase the chances of the customer showing up.</li>
<li>Once the interview is done, send out a thank you note with the incentive.</li>
</ul>
<h4>During the interview</h4>
Set the stage 
Ever so often we have seen product folks just start the interview by firing off questions at the customer without setting any context. The customer is caught off guard and likely to clam up.
Try a more structured approach instead:
<ul>
<li>Thank the customer for their time. Do a quick time check to make sure they are still available for the scheduled time.</li>
<li>Start with a short introduction about yourself. This helps build your credibility.</li>
<li>Be upfront and tell them the objective of the interview. Try something like:</li>
</ul>
“I’m here to learn and better understand your business so I can do a better job of serving you and businesses like yours. Trust me, I’m not here to sell.” 
That usually sets them at ease and makes them more willing to share.
Record the interview
Ask for permission to record the interview. Make notes of the key points so it is easy to summarise.
Be humble, curious, and respectful
Being humble is the only way you can learn. The customer will have perspectives which you need to understand.
Be curious not just about your product but also about how the customer goes about their job, their challenges, and how you can help them solve it.
Respect their time and their feedback. Avoid being defensive about your product. Some customers will tell you that your baby is ugly. Steel yourself for the tough words.
Pause for the golden words
Pause between questions. Everyone is uncomfortable with silence so the customer will try to fill it  with words. In that time,  they may actually share something incredibly valuable.
Maintain a 70:30 split
If you are doing a video call, call recording software like Chorus and Gong will easily analyse talk duration for you. Ideally, you want to talk for 30% of the time and let the customer talk for the lion’s share. Just ask your question and shut up. The more the customer talks, the more you will learn.
Do a time check
Two minutes before your scheduled time is about to end, do a quick time check. If you need extra time or a follow up interview, this is the time to ask.
<h4>After the interview</h4>
How to leverage your customer interviews
Look for patterns across interviews which can lead to great insights like a market need or a potential untapped market. Share notes and a summary with key stakeholders.
Customer insights should:
<ul>
<li>Feed into your business strategy and product roadmap</li>
<li>Inform internal audiences on the buyer and user persona</li>
<li>Educate leadership, sales, marketing, and product teams</li>
<li>Help prioritise marketing channels to focus on</li>
<li>Sharpen your competitive positioning</li>
</ul>
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
In an era of ever-faster product innovation, you should build products for customers that revolve around their pain points. Talk to customers as often as you can. Once you start talking to customers, the adrenaline rush that you get will keep you wanting more. If you are not already interviewing customers, this article should give you a framework to get started today!

Interviewing customers has never been more important – here’s how you do it

Poornima Mohandas

Rahul Mohandas

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