Eric Migicovsky breaks down three mistakes founders make in user interviews: pitching instead of listening, asking hypothetical questions instead of probing real behaviors, and talking too much. The point is to gather concrete facts about how users actually live and work.
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Three common errors that we make when we try to, when we try to conduct user interviews. The first problem, the first mistake that we pretty much all make is we talk about our idea. We're founders, we love to pitch our idea, we love to talk about the, the product that we're working on. But during a user interview, that is not the time to be pitching the product. The goal of a great user interview is to extract information from the person that you're talking to, to extract data that will help you improve the product or improve your marketing or improve your positioning. It is not to sell them on using your product. So at the core of a great user interview, you need to learn about their life. You need to talk about specifics around the problem area that you're trying to solve that the user may be going through. Second mistake that we pretty much all make is we talk about hypotheticals, we talk about what our product could be, we talk about features that we want to build. We ask questions like, we ask questions like if we built this feature, would you be interested in using it or would you be interested in paying for it? That is wrong. Instead, talk about specifics that have already occurred in the user's life. This will give you stronger and better information in which to make product and company changing decisions. You also want to talk in general about the user's life. You don't want to just talk about the specific problem or, sorry, the specific solution that you're presenting. Try to extract information about the user's, the path that led them to encounter that problem. Ask them questions about their life in kind of more broader and more broader ways to extract context around how they arrived at this, at this problem. Learn about their motivations, learn about why they got themselves into that problem in the first place. And the third trap that we pretty much all fall into is that we talk, we talk a lot. We're founders, we're always pitching investors, we're pitching employees, we're trying to hire, people, we're trying to partner. So we tend to spend a lot of our time talking. In a user interview, try to restrain your interested in talking and really listen, take notes and listen to what the user is saying. Because in that span of time, the 10, 20, 30 minutes that you spend with the user, you're trying to extract as much information as possible so that when you return to the office and when you return to your co founders, you're bringing hard data, real facts about users lives to the table.
