Analyse research interview results

Ayla Verschueren

1. Starting discovery
2. Research interviews
3. Interview analysis ←
4. Feedback database

The main benefit of starting customer research interviews takes care of itself: unless you fail to actually listen, you will inevitably learn what customers care about. Even if you do nothing else, this will add a dose of reality to your team conversations and product decisions. However, you can also do this more deliberately.

Review your notes

You have several options for capturing the content of research interviews, each with pros and cons. Use a combination of video recording, automatic transcription, and your own notes; ideally all three. Book calendar time immediately after the interview, to make review and analysis easier and faster.

As a product manager, you most need the customer‘s raw statements: don’t accept any kind of summary, however good. Summarising an interview means choosing what to include, and what to ignore, which introduces bias. And if you have to introduce bias, you might as well have your own.

Review your notes, to add your impressions, and indicate the most interesting content, before you forget. Also, the transcript might not reveal the interviewee’s emotional responses, and finding them by rewatching the video takes too long. Ideally, make these notes during the interview, if you can touch type, without looking at the keyboard.

Capture real product use

Analyse your notes to create a bullet-point summary, and to identify customer needs –  both problems to solve, and opportunities to delight. As much as possible, include direct quotes that support these points, as this raw qualitative data has the most impact, and makes the summary interesting.

Start the summary with one a bullet that describes who you spoke to. Include their organisation, role, and anything that links them to an existing segment or user persona.

Next, add a bullet about how they use the product. Focus on facts about what they do or don’t do. Add bullets for any unusual or surprising facts and quotes

Identify customer needs

Finally, add bullets that describe problems that the customer has to solve. Focus on problems that relate to your product strategy, problems that the product unsuccessfully attempts to address, and anything generally surprising or entertaining.

This analysis has the most value for prioritising product decisions. However, you get a secondary benefit when you share highlights with the team, ideally in group chat, where team members can ask follow-up questions.

Share highlights

Most team members will inevitably stereotype customers, imagining either themselves, or a specific person in your target market, such as the last customer or prospect they talked to, or one of their friends and family. Research interview highlights that include direct quotes can challenge their assumptions.

Ideally, you can share information that will surprise the product team. If you can do this weekly, as part of continuous discovery, you will have much better conversation with the team about customer needs and their solutions.

Curate a product feedback database

Over the course of many interviews, you can build a product feedback database that collates product opportunities. Eventually, each product opportunity will link back to one or more interviews, whose qualitative data provide evidence of customer needs.

This approach leads to a broad view of customer needs, with an indication of relative demand, and customer-specific information. It also tells you who to follow-up with, when you do further work on a specific opportunity.