User interviews are the gold mine of product development. As someone who has worked on B2C and B2B products across multiple domains and at both startups and big tech companies, I have seen product teams use various methodologies, approaches and tools to learn about user needs. One thing all these product companies and teams have in common though is the acknowledgement that the best way to understand user needs is to talk to them directly.
Steve Blank calls this process “customer development” in his book – The Four Steps to the Epiphany and it essentially describes a process of building products that are grounded in an intimate understanding of user needs. This process starts with a focus on the user and involves talking to them directly to understand their needs, wants and pains. User interviews help product managers and teams understand the key entities around a problem they are trying to solve: the user, how their product can help the user and the market realities around the user. Here are four ways user interviews help product teams to build successful products:
1. Understanding the why behind a problem
2. Understanding the market realities around a problem
3. Understanding how to solve the problem
4. Understanding how to make good product judgment
1. Understanding the why behind a problem
User interviews help the product trifecta or triad (product managers, designers and engineers) to understand the why behind the problem they are solving. They provide insights to causatives, user reasoning, conditions, influencers, limitations etc which can’t be obtained from product usage analytics or any other quantitative sources.
This is even more critical for new product development where there isn’t any data on user behavior, feature requests or support tickets. There is no other way to know what users want, why they want it and how best to provide it to them without talking to them.
2. Understanding the market realities around a problem
User interviews also help the product team understand the current market realities around a problem space given how quickly the market changes. In my experience, I have seen product managers work with two-year old insights in complex problem areas which is likely to yield the wrong outcomes because the factors influencing the user are likely to have changed. Users might have been using an aggregation tool to simplify their workflow but are now using AI to automate the entire process.
3. Understanding how to solve the problem
Speaking to users not only helps you understand the problem space, it also helps you figure out the right way to solve it and even the right scope to begin with.
It is very easy to get caught up in the excitement of building a new product and lose sight of what is actually important to users. User interviews keep you grounded and tethered to reality. They help you understand what is actually important to users and what is not. They help you understand how users think about the problem, what their workflow is and how your product can fit into that.
User interviews also help you validate your assumptions. It is easy to make assumptions about what users want or how they will use a product but these assumptions can be wrong. The only way to know for sure is to talk to actual users.
4. Understanding how to make good product judgment
User interviews help you build empathy for your users. It is easy to get lost in your own world and forget that there are actual people out there who will be using your product. User interviews help you understand their world, their issues and their pains. This understanding is critical for building successful products.
This is super critical for early stage startups, employees and founders. If you don’t continually meet with users or customers, eventually all of your insights and knowledge about them becomes obsolete. There’s a saying “It isn’t the things you don’t know what to kill you, it’s the things that you know for sure that just ain’t so”.
