Continuous interviewing is a process where Product Managers (PMs) can continuously learn from their users and uncover insights that can be applied towards product discovery. These interviews follow the same script most of the time because they are not organized around any specific hypothesis or research requests. However, PMs can shift the potential focus of the interview as needed to dig deeper into specific topics.
Continuous interviews are open to all GitLab team members. The PM should notify their team Slack channel about upcoming interviews. All the team members and stable counterparts within a group are encouraged to take part in the interviews from time to time, so they can have first-hand experience listening to customer problems.
Prior to starting the practice of continuous interviewing, the PM should develop their own interview script relevant to their product area. Product managers can consult with UX research or the examples in this project to create the script.
When speaking with the customer, the PM should refer to these interviewing tips to help make these conversations a successful experience for the user and the Product team.
With the customer's consent, the interviews are recorded and added to Dovetail where the notes and transcript are tagged for future reference.
Sometimes, another tool (e.g. Google spreadsheet) is used to build an opportunity solution tree.
To facilitate learning among team members, the PM shares the interview summary with the team after every interview. The format for this is up to them. Some recommended forms are:
The following is a non-exhaustive list of approaches to finding customers open to a call:
