Segun Sobodu’s Post

The thing about product management is that it’s so broad. The tasks can range from design, customer discovery, analytics, scrum or kanban, project management, competitor analysis and research, managing dev teams, managing stakeholders, engineering competencies, growth hacking, partnerships design thinking, a multitude of tools tagging from Jira, linear, asana, Mixpanel, amplitude, hotjar etc and the list goes on. This can be a curse as you haven’t had enough time to master many of them, but it can also be a blessing as not every PM role does all of these things. The best advice I can give PMs in their career is to go deep, not wide. #products #productmanagers #productcareer

3 things you shouldn’t do in user interviews. Conducting user interviews often happens when we develop products. However, while everyone can conduct an interview, how can we conduct a GOOD interview that helps us better understand the users? Performing a fruitful interview is not just about communication skills. Without the right mindset and interview techniques, the time and cost invested in the interview may be wasted. So, how do we go about user interviews: 1. Avoid following the interview script rigidly. During an actual interview, if you simply stick to the interview script and fail to delve deeper with follow-up questions, you may miss out on clarifying important responses from the interviewee. The interview script is NOT perfect, it is just an imagined situation so stay flexible. 2. Don’t guide the interviewee to say what you want to hear Guiding people to say what you want them to say has no benefit on understanding the user, and it wastes the time of the interview. In the end, you may get a lot of support and positive feedback in the interview, but the reality is that people may not be interested in this thing, but they didn’t have the opportunity to express it. Here is my tip: Use open-ended questions rather than close-ended questions. ❌ “Do you think this thing is useful?” ✔ “How do you think this thing is in terms of usability?”. 3. Don’t be afraid of silence: Sometimes, when you ask a question, the interviewee may remain silent. Don’t be quick to fill in the silence with more words, as they may just be reflecting or thinking. If you want to confirm that they understood your question, you can ask, “Did you understand the question I just asked?” But do not turn it into a situation where you’re doing all the talking. How do you go about user interview?