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Jacqueline Porter

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

January 29, 2025 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. What tools or software do you prefer for conducting and analyzing user interviews?

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 1y

    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.

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  2. How do you communicate user interview findings effectively to stakeholders and team members?

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 1y

    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.

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  3. How do you handle conflicting user feedback obtained from interviews?

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 1y

    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 establis ...Read More

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  4. What's an example of a customer interview you did that had an impact on your roadmap or GTM strategy?

    Can you share a story about a specific interview (anonymizing the details) what did you ask? what did the user/customer say? how did you end up using that info?

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 1y

    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 di ...Read More

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  5. How do you measure the success or impact of your user interview process?

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 1y

    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.

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  6. How do you handle difficult or unresponsive participants during user interviews?

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 1y

    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: re-asking questions in different ways, repeating back how you understand them and if any details are missing, 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 then remind them that an incentive that is provided for this study ...Read More

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