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💡❗️Product discovery: how to maximize outcomes from user interviews?

This is a story about a common task to shape a new product using user interviews: we start with a typical script expected from a junior/middle researcher or someone who has asked GPT-4 to create a script - and improve it dramatically.

User interviews - how to maximize their outcomes?

⚒️ Product discovery: what methods / tools do I use?

Methods that I use very frequently:

  1. Marketing tests (testing an offer using ads).
  2. Surveys.
  3. User interviews. There are several subtypes here: to understand context, to list JTBDs and their priorities, and test the solution.
  4. Expert interviews.
  5. Data from product usage
  6. UX testing
  7. A/B testing. To be lean, first using the concept of “honeypot” or a “concierge MVP", then a fuller version.
  8. Watching actual usage: video recordings using Hotjar, customer support tickets reading / aggregating, etc.
  9. Eating our own cookies / Mystery shopping / Working in support etc.

🎯 How to select among them? From my experience, asking this question is an extremely valuable practice. For example, if one works on a fitness app, and one of the hypotheses is what sort of device to prioritize in product roadmap - mobile phone, a laptop, a TV, a tablet, what do people utilize for their home fitness? - then learning this over user interviews will mean months of data collection or else false conclusions because the sample size is small. When we had this question, we launched a survey, and we got answers from 200 people in 2 hours!

So asking oneself a question "what is the best research method for each hypothesis?” is extremely valuable for the business, time-wise, money-wise and decision quality-wise.

Tools that I use very frequently - and genuinely recommend: