Common user interview traps?
Ethan (Yuanming) Hu
0 replies
Talking to users can be critical for finding PMF/improving product/scaling.
A great video about how to (correctly) talk to users is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1iF1c8w5Lg
There are many pitfalls during this process. The top three traps that I intentionally avoid are:
1. Let the user design your product. A common pattern is the user says he wants "X" and you go ahead to build "X" without further thinking. This is dangerous. You should listen to users' problems, NOT solutions. It is your job, as the product manager manager, to come up with the solutions.
A classical example is the "faster horse" thing: before there were cars, people who traveled would always ask for a faster horse. This is not the correct solution for their problem (need to travel faster). The solutions can be cars/trains/planes, but the users would come up with the design of a car engine to actually solve the problem.
2. Talk too much during the interview. Let the user talk, and spend more time listening, taking notes, and thinking.
3. Assume users are telling you the "truth". The fact is most users are nice, so they will always say "Your product is good, but if you do X I believe your product will be useful to customer Y". Unfortunately in most cases they are just being nice to you. What they said could imply they are not really interested in your product.
What's your list of user interview traps? Sharing these with the community would absolutely help people here build better products :-)
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