Almost every PM will say they are the voice of the customer or user. To properly speak up on behalf of the user, PMs must speak with customers (or their proxies) and look at behavioral metrics. In most PM roles, one of the early requests made of a PM is to interview customers.

If you just interview customers, than you keep the knowledge in your head or in your notes. But, if you document and share your information the entire team can learn, and you can provide evidence that you have done the leg work to speak up for users.

Persona Cards

One of the easiest and most straightforward ways to document your efforts is to create user persona cards after every interview. Some companies (like Amazon) have a standard format you should use. I recall vividly the first director I worked for at Amazon insisting I should speak with at least one customer a week! At the time I thought it was overkill, but for some products it is crucial.

User ‘Conversation’ Practice

When I work with startups, establishing a “user interview” or “user conversation” practice is fundamental. As a product leader, I must lead sharing of the information about users widely within the organization. While we call them interviews, it works better if it feels more like a conversation. After your first 5 or so, they are easy. You will feel comfortable doing them at any company after that.

When I was working as Head of Product for one company for the first 6 weeks of the year, I conducted about 10 interviews per week.

Not Just Current Users

Make sure you interview current and potential customers. Also, salespeople, customer success agents, and customers who stopped using the product (if you can). Make sure to cast a wide net so that you don’t get tunnel vision or just confirm your initial biases.

A note on salespeople, they are more helpful than you might expect. To sell, a salesperson must empathize and listen to customers every day. They are sometimes bigger advocates for customers than PMs. Understand they might be biased to ‘whales’ but they have invaluable insights nonetheless.

I love the site userinterviews.com for tips and tools if you have to build the practice completely from scratch.

Common Attributes

Your persona cards should be personalized to the product in question. Some common attributes to include are:

• goals

• quotes

• background

• title

• motivations

• frustrations (challenges and pain points)

• channels,

• frustrations,

• technology

• skills

• demographics

Questions/Convo Starters I Like

• Tell me how you perform X task/job

• What do you love about it

• What do you hate about it

• If I could wave a magic wand and give you anything you wanted to do X, what would it be.

That last question often uncovers some pretty interesting observations. It is a creative way to get the average person to think of moonshots.

Resources

There are tons of resources on user interviews and persona cards. A quick Google search will net you hundreds of helpful results.

1. User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them

This article goes through the basics of user interviews:

• Pre-Work

  • Set a goal

  • Prepare questions

    • Write dialog-provoking interview questions.

    • Avoid leading, closed, or vague questions.

    • Prepare more questions than you believe you will have time to ask.

  • Anticipate different responses

  • Construct follow-up questions based on goals

• Make User feel comfortable

• Create rapport

2. How to Create Persona Cards

UXpressia provides a template you can leverage

• Research

• Segment

• Decide on Layout

  • demographic info

  • background

  • goals

  • motivations

  • frustrations

3. Persona Interview 101

• Why build a persona card?

• Why interview rather than just survey

• Finding people

• Preparing for the Interview

4. Personas

• Nice Google Doc Template

• What is a persona?

• Key elements of personas

• How to guide

  • develop hypothesis

  • conduct interviews

  • backup with data

  • create persona

5. 12 Essential Questions To Ask When Building Buyer Personas

This article has a nice checklist of the finer details.

• Don’t just choose current customers

• Conversations more than interviews

• Don’t ask yes or no questions

• Listen

• Send a reminder

• Keep the call to 20-30 mins

• Remove all distractions

• Bonus: they list 12 questions to ask.

6. Quick Design Templates

• Canva

• Miro

• Mockplus