Interview Your Customer Advisory Board

If your customers are particularly hard to reach (e.g., doctors, CEOs), or if you have a small market (e.g., Canadian business schools, movie studios), the recruiting strategies we’ve covered will be challenging. Your customer’s time is either too valuable, or you’ll have concerns about reaching out to the same customers over and over again.

While most product teams worry their customers are too busy to talk with them, for most teams, this won’t be true. We dramatically underestimate how much our customers want to help. If you are solving a real need and your product plays an important role in your customers’ lives, they will be eager to help make it better. However, there are some audiences that are extremely hard to reach. In these instances, setting up a customer-advisory board will help.

Most companies use their customer-advisory boards to host focus groups. That may be valuable, but it’s not a replacement for interviews. You can also use your customer-advisory board as interview participants. Invite your advisory-board members to participate in a monthly one-on-one interview. Offer an ongoing incentive as a reward for their participation.

You can scale the size of your customer-advisory board to reflect the number of interviews that your product teams need each month. If you have three product teams that each want to do one interview per week, you would invite 12 customers to participate on your advisory board.

One advantage of interviewing the same customers month over month is that you get to learn about their context in-depth and see how it changes over time. The risk is that you’ll design your product for a small subset of customers that might not reflect the broader market. You can pair this recruiting method with one or two of the other methods to avoid this fate.