For customer conversations, pick a style that suits your needs

The kind of feedback you want to collect and the type of conversation you want to have will vary across your product design and development stages.  If you are in a very early stage of your design, where you are shaping the vision rather than building a product, you may want to collect your feedback via informal sessions. Once resources are allocated to design and build the product, we recommend that you collect your feedback in a more formal forum with customers and potential users.

Informal feedback is usually collected from friends and colleagues who share their reactions to your idea. They may or may not be potential users of the product you create. In such early stages, you may want to get the inputs of experts who know the product space. Their expertise and thoughts are useful, even though such experts may not be potential users of your product. Finally, Customers who care about the final product will provide feedback about the suitability of your product to their needs. With such customers you need to conduce multiple sessions. You do not have to limit yourself to one type of conversations style. You can pick a combination of them depending on the changing conditions of your project.

Before doing any validation of the prototype you should think about the number of people you can dedicate to the activity and the kind of feedback you want to gather.  If you plan to have formal feedback sessions with customers, we recommend that you have at least one dedicated product manager to court customers and manage them.

Types of Engagements

We identified four types of engagements. You can choose the one that best fits your budget, time, skill and product development phase. The types of engagements are

1. Asynchronous Engagement
2. Unstructured Engagement
3. Structured Engagement
4. Cumulative Engagement

Let's look at all there engagement types one by one.

1. Asynchronous Engagement

Duration: One video lasting from 7 minutes to 10 minutes. You will get this feedback by sharing a video. 

When to use it? Conveying the story to a large audience with a video is a very effective way of getting informal feedback. Video is an effective and inexpensive technique to have a product conversation and showcase your product to an unlimited audience. Video conveys much more than a written email accompanied by a static presentation as you can show many details and convey more information. Video can convey a story and the emotion attached to it. Unlike a presentation, a video can show real world objects and convey high fidelity content.

Interviewees: Use this approach when you already know the audience and the audience already knows the context of the video. The interviewees could be people within the team working from distributed locations, customers with who you are already working and acquaintances from whom you want a quick validation.

You do not need a professional production. Just hold a video camera in your hand and point the camera at the prototype on a screen and tell the story as you would to an audience in a room. You do not need to write an elaborate video script for the story. The total time you spend on recording a story in video format and sharing should not exceed 30 minutes.

Making a video and listening to your own story narrated is a good way to experience the story yourself. If you are not convinced by your own story, you will get an opportunity to refine it. Based on our experience and feedback from colleagues we found out that seven minutes or less is the optimum duration for a video distributed to a large audience.

A well made video can replace a one hour meeting and can save several hours of time for you and your colleagues. There are several technologies available for sharing your video privately with a select group of people. YouTube is free and easy. Vimeo is another service that is very good for such sharing. Vimeo charges a fee for password protected videos.

We'll cover the remaining types of conversations in future posts.