Finding Interviewees as a Product Manager
Product decisions are made from multiple sources of information and interviews are one of the multiple sources.
As a Product Manager, finding interviewees is a step towards Customer Development for your product. There are different stages of customers — during pre product launch, we have the potential customers and during post product launch, we have the existing customers.
Let’s focus on the potential customers, building a product you already know or have an idea of the problem you are trying to solve and for whom. Those persons or groups are your potential customers.
And it’s great you interview some of these target groups while building your product to help gain more insight. Here are some of the forums that can help you find external interviewees:
LinkedIn: The search functionality is amazing, if you are building a product for eg. lawyers and you input that into the search section, you will find different lawyers at different levels who you could talk to about your product.
Forums: Reddit, Quora, Twitter etc. are platforms where you can find groups with interests relating to the product you are building. You can easily know what they think about what in these platforms.
Competitors: Building a product, you already know or have an idea of whom your competitors are, their users are great targets to talk to and find more insight.
After product launch, its wise to engage your potential and also existing customers so as to have an insight on what is not working or what to work on next (new feature). Here are some of the forums that can help you find internal interviewees:
Live chat: Chat bots like tawk.to should be embedded into your product platforms so as to get real time feedback from customers who visit your platform.
Blog: The comment section of your product blog is another avenue to get in touch with your customers.
Power Users: Users who effectively use your product and drive high engagement while at it are also eg. of customers to talk to in order to gain more insight about your product.
Lastly, product decisions are made from multiple sources of information and customer interviews are a crucial source but there are vulnerabilities associated.
