How to do customer interviews

Hi Johnn,
So now I understand that you are wanting to interview customers in order to gather feedback, as opposed to interviewing customers on the front end to understand their problems. Good clarification.

In this scenario, you're not necessarily interviewing customers to discover THEIR problems, but more to discover YOUR problems. :) In other words, you have a problem if you've promised X and Y features and customers aren't able to effectively use those features.

Thinking outloud here...I'd say customers aren't really interested in solving your problems. They purchased your solution for a reason, and if you are not delivering on that reason, well now you've increased their pain by 1) not delivering on the promise AND 2) burdening them with your problems. (Note If your customer base is a beta group, then this advice might not apply so much if these customers have agreed to participate in a beta, but if they are what I might call 'real' customers, I wouldn't expect many customers to take time out of their day to solve your problems.)

Instead I'd work on developing a set of measures that will tell you whether customers are reaching their goals/mitigating their pain by using your app. If you find that customers are dropping out at some point in the app, start developing some hypotheses and do some A/B testing to see if you determine why. Study their behavior while they are in your app. No doubt this is the hard part. But its part of the game.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't talk to your customers. You should. But when you talk to them, you should be able to say to them "we know we have a problem with the X feature and today we have identified a way to solve it" instead of asking customers to be your product manager.

One more thing - I don't know your app or your target market, so take all of this with that disclaimer. :)

Good luck!

-Pmox2018

You set up the conversation by wanting to understand their world view, or their problems, or how they do their job. It's about how you can help them, not how they can help you.

I find that getting interviews is actually pretty easy if you say, "Hey Teacher, I want to understand a bit more about the difficulties you havee with lesson planning, can I have 30 minutes to learn a bit from you?" The alternative: "Hi Teacher, I'm building an app that will make lesson planning better and want to talk to you about it" is a much harder sell.