I have an adage I live by at work – “If the user doesn’t want it – I will not build it”.

I cannot emphasize how important user interviews are as part of Product Management. If you asked me to write a thesis on Product Management then I would choose my User as my subject. As a PM knowing who your ideal user is, what are their likes and dislikes are, how tech savvy they are, their average age, their purchasing power and everything along these lines are paramount to building a product that users actually use. You cannot build something and then figure out who your users would be. Everything must start with the user because everything ends with the user.

So what exactly is a User Interview ?
User interviews consists of a set of questions asked to users (could be potential or existing users) which are meant to understand their views, opinions & problems about a specific product/service or situation.

User interviews should delve into the user psyche and the purpose must be to get a clear understanding of what a user wants or what problems she faces. I will cover in extensive detail how you can go about doing your User interviews successfully. Successful enough to draw tangible conclusions from it and not return empty handed.

We will learn about

1. Choose your demographics wisely
2. Preparing the questionnaire & interviewing
3. Post Interview steps

Finding the right focus group

Focus groups are your set of users. There’s a lot of conventional wisdom out there on how you can select your focus group but I will boil it down for you. There are certain criteria by which you should be selecting a focus group for your product.

1. Choose your demographics wisely
If you are building an app for food delivery, there is no point in targeting users who are below a certain age and above a certain age. If you are targeting users for an insurance application then the type of user will be based on multiple criteria. If you target a wrong audience or for that matter a mixed group of correct and incorrect users, the responses you will get might most certainly change the whole trajectory of your application. This will eventually leady to a decline in usage. So how do you determine the right target audience ? Although the answer to this question will depend on your industry and use cases, I have listed down a set of questions which will help narrow down your target users

• Whom does my app/feature serve ? (Who are my first users ?)
• Does my audience need to be geography specific ?
• What is (or could be) the ideal age of my users ?
• Is there an income group / profession I should be targeting ?
• Are there secondary users ?

Asking these questions is vital for selecting your target users.

This bring us to the Ideal User. An ideal user is someone who ticks off every item from your target user criteria. Not missing a single item. Right demographics and tech savviness are important traits of an ideal user. If you have the right demographics but if the user is not technically inclines or refuses to use technology there is no point going further. That is not your ideal user. As a matter of fact, he is not even a member of your target audience. As a product manager, you will hit gold if the majority of your target users turn out to be ideal users. The kind of insights you will get will shape your product in the right direction.

2. Preparing a questionnaire

If you don’t ask the right questions, you don’t get the right answers. A question asked in the right way often points to its own answer. Asking questions is the ABC of diagnosis. Only the inquiring mind solves problems.
~ Edward Hodnett

I took this quote randomly off the internet. But you get the point. You don’t want to be the PM who after an interview realizes that you have missed some critical questions. Your questionnaire must have some key characteristics to it.

• Questions can be closed ended or open ended – choose them according to your need.
• Certain questions must be followed up with a “Why?”
• There must be questions along the lines of “Why you do what you do ?”

Building a rapport with the user is important however making the user understand why you are taking an user interview is equally important. If a user genuinely feels the problem, they will be invested in the user interview and they would want a solution.
Often, you will get a barrage of requirements from the user which might not be related to your interview. Note them down because they are gonna come handy in your next roadmap 🙂

3. Post interview steps
What you do after the interview always makes the difference. The actions you do will alter your product. Not everything that the users says is of importance. Only extract relevant information from the interview that fits your roadmap and start working on its documentation. I cannot emphasize the importance of documenting the data, you will trust me go back and forth while building the PRD/FRD.

In conclusion, User Interviews are crucial because you get to interact with your user , understand the current needs/problems and they are also your point of contact for future features. Sometimes they also point you in the right direction 🙂