User Interviewing is hard
Oct 20, 2021
When I started at the current role, I brought in a lot of steam from Mode to talk to a user every day. Looming large in my memory was a conversation with my manager where I was telling him about a wonderful conversation I had with a user, and I said, “Why don’t we do this more often?” And he said, cryptically, “Yeah, why don’t we?”
I think that emphasis is in the right place: why don’t we talk to users every day?
We might not because:
- Account Management owns the relationship to the customer, and we can’t go around them
- We can’t get [Support Tool] access because a full agent seat costs $X per month
- It’s time-consuming and costly to perform the scheduling logistics
Observing myself and PMs at the current role, I think those are all dissemblances. I think it boils down to two things:
- It’s hard to be vulnerable and I’m scared of what I’m going to hear
- I am overloaded and can’t send out emails and schedule meetings with users
(2) is the easier one to solve: you can buy tools (e.g. Dovetail, Sprig (née UserLeap), UserFlow) or you can hire a person (in the “Things You’re Allowed to Do” sense)
(1) is the limiting reagent and the one that Product Teams have to really face