Having a successful solution interview with your users or potential future customers is the key step for the product managers before you build the actual product solution or capabilities. By end of this article, you will get to know the five key guidelines to follow in-order to have a successful solution interview with your users.
What is solution interview?
As a product manager, your primary job is to build a useful product / feature that your user wants. You can’t risk your money and effort, by building something that nobody wants. This is where the solution interview takes place at the early stage of your user interview.
In a typical situation, after your initial problem enquiry with your users, you have to start discussing with your users about the probable solution, that you are planning to build. So that, you can collect valuable feedback from your users to improve the quality of your product.
You should follow the below guidelines for having better solution interview with your users.
The 5 guidelines for solution interview are as follows,
1. Simple & clean prototype
You should always focus on simple and clean prototype. Your demo product should not create any confusion to the users. You should always focus on building something simple even if it is a hard technical product. This will enable your users to easily connect with your product and features.
2. Realistic prototype
Never plan any graphic heavy prototype with lots of imagination. This may not be possible to achieve when you try to implement them in the actual product. This will create lots of gap between the prototype and your actual product. Pay extra attention to your prototype and stick with point #1 (Simple and clean prototype)
3. Shorter feedback loop
The main purpose of the solution interview is to collect the feedback from your users quickly. You should be able to make changes immediately based on the feedback from your users and plan to reach the users again. This might be very challenging if you depend on any other company or developers (external). So, you should always set the expectation clearly to those external parties and make them deliver your demo on time.
4. Re-usable prototype
When it comes to prototype, most of the people will be generating lots of artifacts using UX brainstorming tools. Those mock-ups will not be useful any more after the demo. So, you should think how much you can re-use post the demo. It is always a good practice to generate artifacts using HTML / CSS (For web products). This may not be applicable in all the product situations. But think about how much you can re-use post the demo.
5. Prototype with real data
Never show the demo with the dummy data created just for the demo. Always remember your prototype as your final product and have the real use-cased with real data. Then it would be easy for your users to connect with the product and the problem you are trying to solve.
Happy Prototyping!
Credit: Running Lean by Ash Maurya