This article provides a brief summary of a webinar on the topic of continuous interviewing hosted by Teresa Torres from Product Talk on on 4th December 2024.

Continuous interviewing is a part of the continuous discovery framework and is a commitment to weekly touch points with customers to conduct research in purist of a product outcome. Talking to customers is naturally a big part of this. Teresa has also published a book on the topic.

With continuous discovery there is an emphasis on being outcome first, with cross-functional products teams maintaining at least two research activities to discover opportunities. Opportunities are defined as a customer need, pain-point or desire where solutions provide both business and customer value.

During this process people make the mistake of using customer interviews as a way to validate solutions or confirm factual behaviours. This is not good practice for discovery. Showing customers a solution and asking what they think invites speculation. One also needs to avoid theoretical questions or scenarios as it invites customers to provide an idealised answer.

Teresa points out that the sale of gym memberships is largely based on people's false idealised notion of themselves.

Don't conduct interviews to ask questions that data can tell you.

Equally, asking theoretical questions triggers people to activate their system 1 thinking, which is reactionary, efficient and fast but also inaccurate, speculative, bias and prone to error. Instead we want to activate system 2 thinking, which forces our customers to concisely think through their response.

So how do we trigger system 2 thinking? Well avoid ...

• Direct questions leading to short answers.
• Leading questions creating false choices.
• Questions about the future giving unreliable responses.
• Questions that trigger speculation.

We want to use our interviews to understand the customers goals with as much context as possible to highlight opportunities for us to pursue.

Teresa advised the best way to trigger system 2 thinking is to ask questions grounded in specific instances of past behaviours, to force them to use their memory. For example, rather than asking ...

What is your experience watching Netflix?

ask ...

Tell me about your last experience watching Netflix?

instead of asking ...

What are your favourite types of Movies?

ask ...

What were the last 3 movies you watched?

You can then build a rich story by expanding questions from there. The interviewee is now replying on memory rather than speculating on a theoretical, which is forcing longer more thoughtful replies.

Follow up with ...

Tell me about the time before that?

Do you recall why you watched it?

Do you remember facing any challenges or inconvenience?

How did you decide to pick that movie?

Do you remember how you heard of it?

These questions lead to collecting a story rather than facts. The work of the interviewer is to help the interviewee excavate a story, gently and interactively, we want to get them back to the thinking and emotion of their past decision making.

Active listening can also present a challenge, as interviewees often flip-flop between specifics and generalisations.

Follow up links referenced
• Opportunity solution trees
• Assumption testing
• Interview snapshots
• The Mom test