Ask Teresa Blog: What Are The Best Customer Interview Questions? Flashcards
What type of interviewing helps us to overcome potential cognitive bias?
Story based interviewing
What is story based interviewing?
Story-based interviewing helps us to overcome some cognitive bias by prompting our customers to share a specific example of a past behavior rather than a generalized explanation of what they think they do
Story based interviewing also helps watt?
Story-based interviewing also helps limit the interviewers bias by focusing on the customers context. Instead of asking customers about the specifics of Our product, and potentially opening ourselves up to the escalation of commitment bias or confirmation bias where we fall in love with our own ideas and ignore any evidence that contradicts them, we put the spotlight on our customers and their experiences.
When talking about the best customer interview questions to ask a lot of teams conflate to concepts, what are those two concepts?
One is the idea of your research questions, which is what you’re trying to learn. And the second concept is your interview questions, or what you are going to ask to learn that.
Here’s an example with streaming entertainment company Netflix. When we are trying to ask customer interview questions. My intuition is if I wanted to learn about someone’s Netflix behavior, I would ask them things like, what do you like to watch?, Where do you watch?, Who do you watch with?, And what device do you watch on?
These are my research questions. They are what I am trying to learn.
The problem with asking research questions and interviews is what?
The problem with asking research questions in your interviews is that humans are bad accurately answering direct questions out of context. When we ask someone a direct question, their brain generates a fast response. That fast response feels true, but often it’s not.
This means your customer is going to be able to answer every single one of these questions. The problem is their answers won’t necessarily reflect their behavior in reality. Not because they are trying to be deceptive, but just because they all get filtered through a set of cognitive biases.
What is the problem when someone generally answers to a direct question?
Generally answers to direct questions are not very reliable
When doing customer interview questions We want to look at the set of research questions and ask what type of questions give three examples?
What’s a specific story I can collect that will get me answers to those questions? And then I want to spend my interview collecting that story.
So in the Netflix example I might say tell me about the last time you watched Netflix? Tell me about the last time you watched Netflix on the go? Or tell me about the last time you had to choose a new show to watch. And then in the context of that story I’m listening for answers to all of my questions.
Some people say it’s challenging to find the right scope for your interview questions. How do you make sure they are not so broad that you get to the end of an interview without narrowing in on the opportunity you want to discuss?
First, it depends on your outcome. Your outcome sets the scope of discovery.
Continuing with the Netflix example, your team might be tasked with finding new market opportunities, e.g. developing brand new products. In this case, you would not want to start with, tell me about the last time you watch Netflix? Instead you would start out with something like tell me about the last time you did something fun?
On the flipside, if you were on the mobile team, you might not want to start with, tell me about the last time you watched Netflix? Because you would get a whole bunch of stories about watching Netflix on a TV. In this case, you might say, tell me about the last time you watched Netflix on the go?
You can change the scope of your interview questions to match their income.
As you choose a target opportunity to focus on, you will still do what?
You will still ask the same interview question, but you might dive into more detail on different parts of the story.
For example, if I’m working on an opportunity like, I can’t tell if this show is any good, I might spend more time on the part of the story were you choose what to watch then on the part of the story where you are watching the show. I still want to ask for the broader story, so that I can keep investing in understanding the opportunity space, but I can Taylor my focus based on where I need more detail now.
I also want to mention that was story-based interviewing, you won’t always?
You won’t always collect the story you want. That’s OK. The golden rule of interviewing is to let the participant talk about what they care about most.
What is the golden rule to remember when interviewing?
The golden rule of interviewing is to let the participant talk about what they care about most.
When doing storybook interviewing questions, you might encounter some participants who simply don’t cooperate. They might not have a relevant story. They might be motivated to tell you about a different part of the story. He might not want to tell you a story at all. They might give you one sentence answers. Or they might want to share their feature request or gripe about how your product works. In these instances, you should do what?
In these instances, you will want to do the best you can to capture the value the participant is willing to share, but don’t force it. You always want to respect what the participant cares about most. Remember, with continuous interviewing, you will be interviewing another customer soon enough. When we rarely interview, a disappointing interview can feel painful. When we interview continuously, disappointing interview is easily forgotten.
