Hi everyone,
I wanted to know how many interviews with customers you have on a weekly basis.
2 years ago, I interned at a company where the PM had an interview everyday. Back then, I thought it was a bit overkill because we’re talking 200-250 interviews a year with a high risk of redundancy, so I am really curious to know what people are doing around here.
To be fair: 0. But that wasn’t an option. We are a SaaS B2B tool in the restaurant industry. Clients come to us with feedback. I manage all incoming feedback in Harvestr. Most voted feedback gets build (not always the case, but in general). We beta test live on production with a group of 100 users and ask for feedback again. Then optimize. Launch to all customers, get more feedback and optimize again.
Clients are highly motivated to come with feedback. We hear from them that it’s nice that we listen to them. That probably encourages it.
That’s great. You still managed to find a way to gather feedback in a difficult industry. And yes, Harvestr is great.
I think this changes between B2B and B2C. If you’re a low volume B2B company, getting access to customers (buyers or users) can be incredibly difficult.
@AhmadBashir, This.
I’d recommend setting up a CAB (not just scoped to product) that follows the 80/20 rule for consistent customer interaction.
@MarcoSilva, Which 80/20 are you referring to here as it relates to the CAB?
Sorry for not specifying. The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. You can apply this to your CAB to ensure you focus on your most strategic customers and build a product to attract more like them.
Invite the 20% of your customer base that may make up 80% of your revenue. Obviously not a hard and fast rule, but you probably don’t want a CAB made up of the inverse.
Interesting, I’d have guessed the opposite. In B2B you have direct relationships with your buyers and users; in B2C I’ve always assumed that you have to email some random people and hope they don’t treat it as spam, or set up focus groups or whatever, to actually get time with users. I’ve never done B2C but I’ve always held that customer interviews must be way easier in B2B (and that’s one reason I’ve stayed in B2B). Is this wrong? Genuinely curious.
I do fewer interviews now that I am in management but when I was a PM at the company I’m at now, I would say I averaged 1-2 a week, mostly in person by going to NYC or SF for a few days at a time once a month or so and knocking out several per trip. Never had a hard time getting interviews set up through CSMs or just by networking within our customer base at events, etc.
Needs a 0/see results option. I have the feeling a lot of legacy companies are not encouraging these things. To many it’s all still just scrum/SAFe, story points, demo days, etc.
@Amy, I completely forgot the 0 
. What’s the better alternative to story points?
@Carlos, That’s not a simple question, but the better alternative is any process that is less overheard with equal or better benefits. Using story points as part of your process may very well be the best choice given the circumstances. Very dependent on the team, size of the company, stage of the business, company culture/background, etc.
In an ideal world, absolutely. But really depends on the industry you’re in, as well as B2C vs B2B
A section of the world of software has realized that speaking with the people using and paying for your product is actually important. Sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how few household name companies actually do it well.
@RohitKumar, Yes and no. It really depends the product. If you work on a one-feature-product that’s very simple, probably not. In my situation I would say yes because my product is quite complex and there are a lot of answers I am looking for. It’s also political. Investors love user centric companies so even if you have the answer to your question, it’s always ways good to conduct some interviews once in a while.
Doing a bunch of customer interviews is a luxury of massive tech companies, period. Even then, it’s limited to consumer facing stuff too. B2B SaaS, GovTech? Forget about it.
This is the same with “how many A/B do you do a week?” The answer is none because we don’t have the deployment infrastructure or lots of users to make it statistically significant.
Sorry to go on a rant here, but this entire industry’s expectations are being gatekept by PM influencers on Medium and Twitter, who themselves have questionable experience of being in the trenches.
@Nathan, Idk I’ve worked in a small B2B SaaS company and we were able to do interviews quite frequently. I’d meet with customer support often and find users who were having issues using the platform and might be interest in talking to us.
We also met with our sales guy and a few customers from time to time.
It really isn’t that hard to do and it’s actually more important in a smaller company in my opinion because you don’t have thousands of users to get quantitative data from.
@Donovan, Glad you had the opportunity to interview users on a regular basis, you’re pretty lucky! I think it depends on the business your B2B is in.
@Nathan, I know what you mean. The only reason I posted here is because I wanted to know if the daily user interview was a thing or not. I’m glad it’s not, and I hope it will never be. However, I work at a rather small B2B startup and I am still able ton conduct a few. The product itself helps us do that (collaboration platform/intranet/community software) since we have a community that gathers all admin users and can reach out to them, but it’s doable.
I wouldn’t say anything is being gatekept, not sure how that’s even possible, but I get what you’re saying. There’s 0 attention paid to the fact that some industries have so much inertia that they’ll always be the first and last to reject a new way of doing things. This is true. Talking to customers is still great, and would improve any product
Also definitely not a luxury of massive tech companies. SMBs stand to benefit the most from customer interviewing in my opinion. Tech giants are so entrenched and immobile, I would argue they don’t need to speak to their customers anymore, they’ve already achieved product-market fit to the ultimate degree.