Michael Margolis: observation

Transcript context

…Yeah. This is awesome. So this is like our magic hack for banging all this stuff together. Everything is coming together in this watch party. So in this watch party, we have... Again, I'm conducting the interview. I'm off on Zoom, one-on-one conducting these interviews. In the watch party, Vanessa Cho, Kate Aronowitz, my amazing design partners, often are facilitating the group there. And so what they're having the team do is take notes and go through these debrief sessions in between each interview. And so we have a very particular way that we structure all of that, and it's very important that the team is all in there and watching and doing this together. So I'm in Zoom, I have it set up so it's livestreaming to them. So they're not in my Zoom. It's not like 20 of us with a bunch of heads watching the person. It's really important to me that it's just me and the customer that I'm talking to directly. So they're all livestreaming it. They're taking notes, so they're in a Google Doc, or Notion or Doc or whatever you want, collaboratively doing that. And so people are assigned roles, so take turns taking notes, because it's pretty intense. We have people manually taking notes and not using AI to take notes. The reason for this is, what we've found is we want people to lean in to this experience. We want you to focus and engage and pay a lot of attention, and if you know somebody else is taking notes, it tends to maybe make you lean out a little bit, or maybe you check your Slack or you're looking at email or something. And so it's about keeping you really engaged and working. So it's a working watch party. So we take turns, we've assigned roles so people know, "Okay, interview two, Lenny and Margolis are going to be taking notes. That's fine." And then there's also a Slack channel, usually, in the background, because there's a lot of other chatter, like, "Wait, what did they say? They're talking about this. They mentioned that product. Has anybody heard of that?" So that's really important kind of going in the background. Vanessa or Kate also monitors that, so that's the way that somebody can pass me notes to ask specific other questions. I can't do the interview and track the notes and Slack. My brain can't handle that. So they're in there, and then I have a chat window open just with Kate or Vanessa, and so they'll pop me questions as they come up. We usually ask teams to be pretty judicious about that, because if I get a question like that, it could go a certain way, as you know, right? You ask a question, you don't know where it's going to go. And so if it's really important or you see something where clearly I've misunderstood something, clarify it. So they're taking notes. This debrief is in a spreadsheet that I've set up so that there are key things that we wanted to learn, and so those are specified in that spreadsheet for each study that I'm doing. I'm like, "These were the key things." spreadsheet that I've set up so that there are key things that we wanted to learn, and so those are specified in that spreadsheet for each study that I'm doing. I'm like, "These were the key things." Those are not the questions that I'm asking in the interview, but they're the things, again, these key questions that we wanted to learn, which is different from what I'm asking. And so we're just capturing in that half hour, the decider, whoever owns the product or the founder is leading that because they're the decider. And they're leading, getting input from everybody and filling in and answering those questions. So then you can imagine you have... That first column is that set of questions, so those are the rows of the questions, and then each participant is another column. So we're doing participant one, we're capturing it after the second one. So we end up with the detailed notes. We have the recording of my interview. Those are the thickest, deepest levels of this. Then we're distilling it down into this debrief sheet for each one, and so then you have a spreadsheet that's like the high level steps. You can look across it at the end of the day. At the very last thing, at the end of the day, after the final debrief, we do a big takeaways form. So I create a Google Form, and it just is basically like, "How many interviews did you watch?" just to check, and then, "What's your first big takeaway, second, third? How would you adjust your definition of the bullseye customer here? What do you think are the next steps or what are your big questions, open questions and concerns?" And so each person then takes 5, 10 minutes independently, separately, individually, quietly, and just everybody mutes their video and fills that out. And it's a way to grab a snapshot from the whole team of like, "What did we really learn? This was the important things that we had set out to do. What did we learn?" And it captures that. So then again, that fills out a big spreadsheet and we then review that. The decider kind of goes through it and talks about, "What are the key patterns? What are the things that we've learned here as a team?" And there's this remarkable amount, usually, of consensus, of alignment about, "What is this? What do we need to do next? " What I love seeing is that, quite frankly, one of the most common things across all of these businesses, all these sites, all these studies, is that one of the things that people say we need to do next is more research. Even though these are all teams who've said, "We talk to our customers all the time," we go through this and they're always like, "Oh, yeah, this looks really different than what we were doing. We didn't know this stuff." One of the other things I want to mention is we do this thing before the watch party where we get everybody predict what they think they're going to learn. Oh, I love that.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.