AMA: GitLab Director of Product Management, Jacqueline Porter on User Interviews

I follow the practice of using canvases to build new products. As a result, my roadmap has to have validated product solutions with customer feedback and insights attached. A case where I pivoted GTM as a result of customer pain points and feedback, was acknowledging we needed to slow down to focus on the quality of the solution and resolve outstanding UX issues instead of releasing new functionality. In practice, your roadmap should be validated at three levels with the customer: 1. Long term direction 2. Problem validation 3. Solution implementation

User interviews should provide a faster time to adoption, in that features should be increasing in Weekly active users or monthly active users upon product availability. User interviews should be used to feed priorities and weight of investments. Measuring adoption is a great way to show how effective your research is.

I have used all sorts of tools and have found that Dovetail is a nice product for taking notes, storing video calls and transcriptions, and tagging insights and takeaways. If that tool is not in your reach, create a consolidated repo of docs and store user insights. I would recommend defining your coding strategy and mapping the user research to those themes by using color coding and a code book.

My favorite way to distribute findings is with a short deck, and an appendix linking the research projects. I also really enjoy recording a brief overview to incorporate multimodal distribution. I have seen some traction on very strategic research hosting an AMA. Lastly, creating a list of actions that need to be taken is critical to make the insights from the research study something that can be implemented.

In qualitative research, there's this practice of converging, mapping, coding, and providing themes of your research participants' narratives or transcriptions. In that convergence exercise, you are aggregating these insights for high-signal findings and themes. As a result, there's typically going to be enough critical mass in a particular area for you to create a theme or a particular insight. If you're finding that you're getting a lot of conflicting information or you're not able to establish a theme, this may mean you need to look at your participants. Analyzing if their roles are mapping to the problem that you're looking for. Sometimes when you're getting that convergent insight, it's because you're not targeting the right audience. Ask yourself is this participant is from the right company, industry, or experience. Is the segment correct? Is the company size correct? Is the role or persona correct? And after you refine that, you might need to expand the number of participants per role, and then you may have different insights per kind of cohort. This difference in cohort insights is a natural part of research. You'll learn that different users and different personas are going to have different needs in your product. So if you're interviewing, let's say, an admin persona who's responsible for setting up a particular product versus an end-user persona who's going to be interacting with the product, they're going to have different expectations of what a product should do, and therefore your insights are not necessarily going to be the same.

The most essential part of really uncovering a diverse set of insights is to incorporate difficult participants. When we look at how to engage difficult participants I typically do the following: 1. re-asking questions in different ways, 2. repeating back how you understand them and if any details are missing, 3. ask them if they have any context on the problem they want to share or if they are not informed enough to be in the study, and 4. then remind them that an incentive that is provided for this study is, if there is one, is only provided if they give meaningful feedback. So those are all ways that I've been able to, like, steer a difficult participant into providing meaningful insights, period. Sometimes I find that observing and commenting on their resistance or their discomfort is a way to add some empathetic engagement in that conversation or moment.