Interview Every Week
Weekly interviewing is foundational to a strong discovery practice. Interviewing helps us explore an ever-evolving opportunity space. Customer needs change. New products disrupt markets. Competitors change the landscape. As our products and services evolve, new needs, pain points, and desires arise. A digital product is never done, and the opportunity space is never finite or complete.
If interviewing is about discovering opportunities, it’s easy to think that, once you’ve chosen a target opportunity, you can pause interviewing. But this assumes that you chose the right target opportunity, that you’ll be able to address that opportunity, and that everything will go according to plan. If you need to change course and you’ve stopped interviewing, you’ll have to start from scratch. Your next steps will be delayed until you can ramp up interviewing again. We don’t want to think about interviewing as a step in a linear process. Instead, our goal is to interview continuously.
Raya Raycheva, a senior user researcher at Simply Business, an insurance company based in London, England, highlights the value of continuous interviewing:
“We recently had to pivot from one opportunity to another when we learned that the need we were exploring wasn’t that important to our customers. Fortunately, because we were continuously interviewing, we didn’t have to start from scratch. We could revisit our opportunity solution tree, choose a new opportunity, and start learning about it in our next set of interviews. We killed an opportunity on Tuesday, chose a new one on Wednesday, and used our already-scheduled interviews on Thursday to learn about the new opportunity.”
From a habit standpoint, it’s much easier to maintain a habit than to start and stop a habit. If you interview every week, you’ll be more likely to keep interviewing every week. Every week that you don’t interview increases the chances that you’ll stop interviewing altogether. To nurture your interviewing habit, interview at least one customer every week.