The art and science of great customer interviews - Part I

How to listen for what your customers are not telling you.

Oct 30, 2022

Some people say give the customers what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. —Steve Jobs

This famous quote by Jobs is misinterpreted to mean don’t talk to customers, they don’t know what they want. Wrong. The key to what Jobs said is in the second sentence — Our job is to figure out what they're going to want. We can’t do that by ignoring their lives. Your customers know what gives them joy, what frustrates them, and what causes them pain. What they don’t know and frankly don’t give a hoot about is how YOU are going to address that need. That is entirely up to you.

But here’s the trouble that Jobs’s first sentence suggests: we humans are cagey about revealing our true motivations. We are more likely to project the image we’d like to see of ourselves than our sordid reality. We don’t always do what we say or say what we do. As marketers and product people, one of the ways to get to the underlying motivations and aspirations of your customers is to do in-depth interviews.

There is an art and science to doing great customer interviews, and I’m calling it Rigorous Observational Interviewing. I’m going to use the acronym RgOI (not to be confused with ROI - return on investment). RgOI goes beyond what the user says or even does to find those nuggets of insights lurking behind their words and behaviors. Over the years, I’ve done countless customer interviews, and in my early years doing this, I made many mistakes. In this newsletter, I want to share some of those mistakes as well as approaches I’ve used to get to those nuggets of insights.

brown camel on brown sand during daytime

You see but you do not observe. —Sherlock Holmes

Don’t see or hear. Observe.

This was my first mistake when I started conducting customer interviews and focus groups. I was so focused on the questions I wanted to ask. I wanted to capture everything that was said, and I did not observe how they were said or the dissonance that existed between what users said and how they truly felt. So my manager at that time asked me to tag along to an interview she did and told me just to observe the interviewee. Boy, did I learn a lot from that exercise! Everything from the way a person sits, whether they lean back or forward when they speak, if they fidget, how they dress, and what’s on their desk and on their walls tells you a lot about them. In fact, it tells you more about them than their own words, and it will give you clues on whether they mean what they are saying.

What if you are doing a lot of these interviews on Zoom like I am these days? Observe what you can. How present are they? Are they comfortable or anxious? Are they pacing the room? Are they distracted or nervous? Animated or detached about the topic of conversation? Forthcoming or evasive in their answers?

RgOI is like being a good detective or a good therapist. You are not taking anything at face value. You are looking for those details, those breadcrumbs that can help you get closer to the truth.

Like Daniel Kahneman talks about in his bestseller Thinking fast and slow good interviewing relies less on System 1 (reactive, quick thinking that relies on previous knowledge and is therefore biased) and more on System 2 (slow thinking that observes and logically analyzes what’s being observed).

Another great and easy read on the power of observation is Maria Konnikova, book Mastermind where she writes about how to think like Sherlock Holmes.

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While interviewing prospects for a finance app I asked them how they would describe their financial lives. The responses were:

Simple
Straightforward
Uncomplicated
Nothing I can’t manage

After a little while, I came back to this question and asked them to describe their routine when it came to managing their money. I asked them to walk me through the nitty-gritty details. Below are some of what they shared:

I log into my bank account and download a CSV file of the transactions. Then I categorize them using a pivot table.
I log into Mint when I get an alert, but many times it tracks things I don’t care about and alerts me about them. Sometimes the miscellaneous bucket is huge, and I have to unpack that.
I can never make sense of my credit card payment cycles, and I spend too much time online trying to figure things out.
I had to plan a wedding that was fantastically expensive, and I had all these spreadsheets to manage the expenses, what stocks to sell, which accounts to close, etc. It was crazy.

Does any of this feel simple and straightforward? Hell no! We humans are notorious for saying one thing and doing something else. We don’t lie intentionally, but more often than not, we share aspirations over reality. These users wanted their financial lives to be uncomplicated, and it was anything but. It’s critical to get to their actual behavior vs. their perceived ideal or how they choose to project their lives. In observing their actual behavior vs. what they aspire to be we can identify areas of opportunities prime for innovation.

Look beyond behaviors to emotions

When doing RgOI we are not only looking for behavior but also for feelings and emotions behind those actions. Emotions are the engine that powers our behavior which is why brands spend millions of dollars on building that powerful emotional connection with the consumer.

While interviewing prospects for the finance app, they all described their financial lives as simple and uncomplicated, but when I asked them how they felt about their finances, the words they used were telling:

Dread
Anxiety
Tough
Lingering doubt
Tedious
Avoid it if I can

Notice how different their response was to this emotional question when compared to the logical question earlier (how would you describe your financial life?). Capturing this is critical so you can identify those gaps when what the user says and how she feels don’t match up.

They want their financial lives to be uncomplicated, but the reality was that managing money was not fun for most of them. They all felt like others were doing it better than they were and they were in the dark about best practices. They felt they didn’t have the time, and because the topic invariably induced anxiety and guilt, they avoided it until some external event (buying a home or having a baby) made it a necessity.

As a product leader, if this core insight is not addressed in the product, then no matter how functionally sophisticated the product is, it will lag in adoption. These insights are also a gold mine for marketing to test pain messages and aspirational messages.

Lives to be lived, not just jobs to be done

As organizations grow and more structure is imposed on them, the work gets compartmentalized. One major downside to this is organizations fail to see the customer as a whole human being living a full, complex life.

The art of doing good RgOIs is not asking users what they want or even understanding what jobs they are trying to get done. In my humble opinion, this is too reductive. We are all more than the jobs we do, and while Clay Christensen’s framing of jobs to be done is helpful in informing product development, by solely focusing on this, we miss out on something much bigger: Who are your user aspiring to become? What lives do they aspire to live?

This matters not only to B2C brands but also to B2B brands because, at the end of the day, it is a human making a purchase. A human making a decision. A human using it. A human aspiring to achieve something.

When interviewing customers don’t focus only on the narrow aspect of their work and work process that is directly impacted by your product. This causes a kind of blindness, and it’s easy to miss opportunities. Open the aperture to understand how this specific aspect of their work or work process fits into their lives. Here are a few questions that I use to get to this:

What does your world look like when_____? (the problem is addressed or the pain is gone)
If this problem is solved, how will it change you or your team?
How does it make you feel when____? (the problem is solved or left unsolved)
What would you rather be doing if you didn’t have to do this?

Don’t just follow the script

This was another mistake I made in my early days of interviewing customers. I worked hard on the questions, and I wanted to make the most of the time I had with them. So I stuck to the script. I was too focused on getting all the questions answered and did not leave much room for deviation. I’ve learned now that good RgOIs are those where the customer takes the reign, and I just watch and learn. When I ask a question and that question naturally leads to another deeper question about their workflow or gets them to talk about an experience they had recently, I encourage them and follow along.

Going back to the finance app example, one of the questions I asked was, “Do you budget and how do you budget?” One responded said “I don’t budget. I don’t have the time for it.” If I’d left it there and moved on to the next question, I would have missed a lot of rich information. I followed up with, “Ok. Did you have a major expense recently? Something you hadn’t anticipated?” The respondent did. He had a major tax bill he hadn’t anticipated. I asked him to tell me more about how he handled it. This is what he said:

“I had to pay this huge tax bill, and I freaked out for a few months… I had to move a bunch of money into different accounts and there were so many different accounts and money was flowing in so many different directions. It was a mess! I had to write this big check from this one account, and it took four days for the money to transfer from various accounts into this account. I was up against an IRS deadline. It was super stressful.”

If I hadn’t followed up with that question I would have missed some very key details of his life. Yes, this person didn’t budget and didn’t have the time for it. But based on what he shared about his tax bill experience, he clearly needed it! If an app could find ways to use this insight and make this process simpler by identifying key events ahead of time and alerting the user or even making it easier to transfer money faster — it could all remove a significant pain for him.

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