We missed you, Soch fam!
While we all await the release of The Legend of Maula Jatt because let’s admit it - the posters look enthralling with its brilliant cast, let us walk you through some great tips for conducting user interviews.
In this edition of Sochnama, we bring you:
Questions you should ask in User Interviews
Product/Market Fit - what it really means
Product Jobs in Pakistan
5 Questions you should ask in User Interviews
From our treasure trove, here comes the golden questions that could lead to better product discovery.
💡 When was the last time you used [product/service]?
Opening up with a question like this helps you shape conversations that tell you a story. Rather than asking questions like ‘what do you love about the product’, this is a question you can follow up on to understand behavioural patterns. Let’s take an example of Netflix: the next set of questions could help determine how a user’s surroundings influence their watch preferences:
Who were you with?
What was the occasion?
How did you guys decide on a series/movie?
💡 What do you think about the ‘x’ feature?
Keep the questions open-ended and look for visual/audial cues and nuances to understand what they feel about the feature as opposed to what they are saying. Their highs would indicate they find it to be a fairly important addition to the product, even if they are talking about something you should change. Their lows would give you an idea how less impactful it is in the bigger picture.
💡 What does your typical day look like with the product? How do you go about performing [product offering]?
Rather than giving out demonstrations and walkthroughs, it will always help if you dive deeper into the heads of your users to understand how they like to use your platform best. When they walk you through how they go about using your product, it lets you prioritize functionalities from the lens of the users.
💡 Let’s assume you are ‘y’, how would you go about performing ‘z’?
Role-playing is a very strong way of determining what one user thinks of the others, allowing you to create an ecosystem that serves these expectations well. These are particularly helpful in B2B enterprise platforms with multiple user roles and types, or B2B marketplace apps where suppliers want to understand the behaviours of their buyers, etc. The insight you gain from these tend to end up in a more sophisticated RBAC system design.
💡 If there is one thing you could change, what would that be?
Last but not the least, for your app’s power users, it always helps to get crisp, masaaledaar feedback on what’s not working out for them. After all, they are the ones who are helping you realize your product-market fit and needs to be paid special attention to. But don’t take their word for it. Maybe when they say ‘the search experience is too buggy’, they could either mean it’s really hard to get to it, or it takes aeons to load. Do not forget to probe through these questions to take the best bet to your engineering counterparts!
And that’s a wrap. Hope you had a great time reading - let us know which question did you like the most? Now, here I am assuming you liked them, because well, we are awesome. Never to ask such leading questions in a user interview, though. 😉
The Dilemma of Product-Market Fit
Here’s a great drill-down on the state of a Product-Market fit that we usually feel is a binary concept. Shreyas - former PM at the likes of Twitter and Google, goes on to resolve the dilemma.
More can be read from the Twitter thread here.
Product Jobs in Pakistan
Looking for a job? Check out these vacancies and fill out the Google form linked out from the page to apply OR feel free to forward them to someone you know.
Product Manager at Rush (Remote)
Product Manager at Taleemabad (Islamabad)
Product Owner at Yieldwerx (Lahore)
Product Manager at Ailaaj (Remote)
Junior Product Owner at Ailaaj (Remote)
What’s the Process?
A Product Soch member will screen your application. If they see you’re a good fit, they’ll reach out to have a chat & guide you on what to expect. In certain cases, you may be asked to do an assessment that will kept as a record item even for future opportunities. If all goes well, Product Soch will internally recommend you to the company’s HR and lobby to get you into the main interviews.
Thank you for sharing these great points.
Here is my one bit. As I was reading the below statement it did not feel right to ask this question at all, because as you rightly mentioned in the later paragraph to ask your users open-ended questions.
"... ‘what do you love about the product’, this is a question you can follow up on to understand behavioural patterns."
This could make user feel that you are trying to take way their freedom of thoughts as it may sound you are trying to limit them to only describe the good about your product, and this could lead you to miss an opportunity to discover something about your product that you didn’t expect.
Keep sharing great stuff.
Cheers!