Avoid These Common Anti-Patterns

As you start building your continuous-interviewing habit, avoid these common anti-patterns.

Relying on one person to recruit and interview participants. If someone on your team takes the lead on recruiting and interviewing participants, it’s easy to let them keep doing it. However, you want to avoid this. What happens when that person goes on vacation or is out sick unexpectedly? You don’t want to have to skip or, even worse, cancel an interview because someone else on your team can’t fill the gap. To make sure continuous interviewing is a robust habit, make sure everyone on your team is well-versed in recruiting and interviewing.

Asking who, what, why, how, and when questions. Long discussion guides exist for a reason. They are easy to create, and they allow everyone to get their favorite questions answered. Unfortunately, they lead to overwhelmed interview participants and unreliable interview data. Ditch the discussion guide. Instead, generate a list of research questions (what you need to learn), and identify one or two story-based interview questions (what you’ll ask). Remember, a story-based interview question starts with, “Tell me about a specific time when…”

Interviewing only when you think you need it. It’s easy to think discovery is a linear process. If we interview to identify customer opportunities, why can’t we stop interviewing once we’ve chosen a target opportunity? Remember, it’s much easier to continue a weekly habit than to start and stop a periodic behavior. Continuous interviewing ensures that you stay close to your customers. More importantly, continuous interviewing will help to ensure that you can get fast answers to your daily questions.

Sharing what you learned by sending out pages of notes and/or sharing a recording. A product trio should share what they are learning with the rest of their team, their product peers, and with key stakeholders. However, when we share pages of notes that make sense only to us and/or a video of the full interview, we are expecting our colleagues to put as much effort into our discovery work as we do. This isn’t feasible. They have their own jobs to do. Instead, use your interview snapshots to share what you are learning with the rest of the organization.

Stopping to synthesize a set of interviews. If you are used to a project world, you probably conduct 6 to 12 interviews and then stop to synthesize what you are learning. This usually involves stickies on a whiteboard, maybe some affinity diagramming, and ends in a research report that synthesizes what you learned. This, however, assumes that your interviews had a start and a stop. In a continuous-interviewing world, we don’t start and stop. Instead, we interview every week. Rather than synthesizing a batch of interviews, synthesize as you go, using interview snapshots. The next chapter will also help you structure what you are learning to make it more actionable.