Interviews provide a means to deeply understand an issue, problem, or even a proposed solution. Gaining insights, or learning anything valuable from an interview, requires skill and a plan.
Design thinking can be applied in the way that interviews are conducted. Whereas many researchers might conduct a structured interview using an interview guide, a better alternative is to think of the interview as a 30-minute dinner conversation.
This mindset is necessary if the interviewer is going to succeed in deeply understanding the tasks that an interviewee is trying to accomplish, personally or professionally, and why. The idea is to know when to let a conversation wander a little bit, when to focus it, when to probe more deeply and when to move on. This is especially critical when the nature of the investigation is more discovery versus traditional qualitative or quantitative market research. For customer or market discovery, you have to assume that “you don’t know, what you don’t know”. This assumption, by definition, demands a dinner conversation versus a traditional interview guide.
For me, the learning journey down the “dinner conversation” path started with Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” published in 1989. This was required reading for professionals early in their career at that time. The most critical habit that has forever stuck is “seek first to understand, then to be understood”. As Covey noted, most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to respond.
From there, my learning journey moved on to Outcome Driven Innovation and the concept of Jobs-to-be-Done made popular by Tony Ulwick of Strategyn. The JTBD framework stresses that the listening aspect of the interview needs to be so precise as to be able to clearly identify the metric, direction, outcome and context of a job that an interviewee is describing. Author and Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen popularized the JTBD concept in his famous “milk shake” examples from his books and talks.
When I left the corporate world later in my career, I hung out a shingle as a researcher and consultant to specifically help startups with their customer discovery and customer validation. These startups could be single entrepreneurs, small startup teams, or business innovators inside of corporations. During this time, I quickly became advocates of the new lean startup tools being put forward by Steve Blank (Customer Development), Eric Ries (agile/MVP) and Alex Osterwalder (Business Model Generation/Value Proposition Design).
Ultimately, all of the tools which I have used throughout my professional career all depended upon the deep listening skills first put forward by Stephen Covery. My advice to anyone who has a need to generate valuable insights necessary to validate or invalidate hypothesis critical to a new value proposition or business model is to become great at listening with intent to understand by developing your skills as a great dinner conversationalist!
