The General Stakeholder Interview - Boxes and Arrows

Interviewing creates a shared experience, often a galvanizing one, for the product development team (which can include researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product management, and beyond).

Who should attend. My favorite is to bring three people to these interviews: the product manager, the product designer, and one of the engineers from the team (we normally rotate among those that want to attend). Usually, the designer drives (because they've usually been trained how to do this well), the product manager takes notes, and the develop

Product trios should interview together. Some teams prefer to let one role, usually the product manager or the designer, be the “voice of the customer.” However, our goal as a product trio is to collaborate in a way that leverages everyone’s expertise. If one person is the “voice of the customer,” that role will trump every other role.

Besides reading through any existing documentation (see Principle 56), we start each project by interviewing business stakeholders and potential end-users. During these interviews, which are about thirty minutes each, we ask open-ended questions to encourage interviewees to share their thoughts in greater detail.

product manager convince each of these stakeholders that she not only understands the issues, but that she is committed to coming up with solutions that not only work for the customer, but also work for the stakeholder as well.

To be as prepared as possible for the kickoff meeting, we first send over some questions. We ask about the roles of the project members, what they can tell us about their target audience, what they think about their competitors, where they think they need to do better, how they’re currently handling making updates, what they would love to have if t

When it comes to sharing work with stakeholders, product trios tend to make two common mistakes. First, they share too much information—entire interview recordings or pages and pages of notes without any synthesis—expecting stakeholders to do the discovery work with them. Or second, they share too little of what they are learning, only highlighting