Project Recap Interviews For Technical Deep Dives and Case Studies
April 06, 2023
The most common form of interviews you'll need to do for technical deep-dives, case studies, livestreams, webinars are project recaps. These tend to work best in a chronological format laying out the before/after.
If you're new to doing this, or doing the with someone who is, it's usually good to write out a template. If you're familiar with how product folks or salespeople conduct interviews, you'll notice this is related, but fairly different.
Both product interviews and sales interviews dive into pain points, since they are trying to understand the nature of what's wrong, while marketing interviews tend to focus on what's gone right.
A few general interview tips:
- Record the conversation. Listen intently by taking close notes.
- If something surprises you because it sounds odd/unusual/interesting, it probably is. Say that!
- People give much better explanations when they're confident the other person is interested in what they're saying and understands the details of the type of work they're describing. It's your job to show that by listening intently, and asking smart questions.
- If your interviewee is too high-level, too low-level, or talking about topics you're not interested in. "That's really interesting. I was hoping to [get more into other topic | get a bit more granular ]...."
- Ask 80%+ open-ended questions. Only ask closed-ended questions when you need to clarify a point or help focus your interviewee. ("It sounds like....")
Marketing has a slightly different interview format than other departments. Product (user research) tends to focus in on pain point
I wrote out a template you can use.