Talking to people
One of the things interviewing teaches you is that everyone is secretly interesting. Boring-seeming people have weird hobbies. You catch a centimeter of a tattoo under someone’s sleeve, and discover a massively important part of their life’s history.
You keep it light and small-talky, of course, since you’ve got a job to do, but you still want to know these things for two reasons. First, it helps soften up the participant. Most people actually like it when you ask them to explain their tattoos or talk about random stuff in their Zoom background. And second, it gives you some information that interview questions might never know.
I think people are mostly thrown by the prospect of interviewing because they believe they have to do it in some sort of ultra-scientific way in order to maximize insight. And while yes, there’s a sheet of questions in front of you, and you want to make sure they are all asked by the end, I think the opposite is true.
You are, at the end of the day, two people talking to each other. You have done this before, I assure you. It’s not unlike small talk with someone new at a cocktail party, only this time you have a script you can rely on.
People like opening up about themselves. They are generally opinionated. Most of my interviews are friendly but firm, helpful with a desire to change. I operate from an intellectual & emotional position of humility & curiosity. I tell customers that I have a direct line to the CEO and the power to fundamentally change the business, which must be objectively true if the business is dedicated to following value-based design principles. I also tell them that I don’t care if they’re brutally critical. My feelings won’t be hurt. We’re here to find things to improve! In this preparation, the goal is to warm the customer up and empower them to speak their mind.
What happens after that is anybody’s guess. Sometimes people rant about our business model. Sometimes people have opinions on shipping more than they do the actual product. Sometimes people haven’t used our product yet. There are no wrong answers in interviewing. Everything tells you something.
The hardest interviews aren’t the ones that go down random paths with weird chatterbox types. The hardest interviews are the mumblers who give one- or two-word responses to everything, who don’t have the EQ necessary to read the room. Still, even those people can open up over time – you just need to provide the silence necessary to tease out their real responses.
We find all sorts of reasons to disqualify ourselves from interviewing others. We don’t have the time. We’ll “do it wrong.” We won’t get anything helpful for the business. This is all shame dressed up as ego. The faster you realize that interviews are just a form of casually talking to people, the easier it will be for you to sit down and do it.