February 23, 2023

Interviewing Potential Customers

Team Biome started out this week with one goal on the mind: talk to homeowners. And I happily report, it was a mission success. Thanks to Kaylea’s message to her runners group and the support of the Biome staff, we’ve completed 8 interviews and have the contacts for 12 more Bangalore residents.

It has felt good to put into practice something we were trained on – how to interview – and to realize best practices sometimes look a little easier on a projected slide than they do in the middle of a call. I remember sitting in Thirdwave staring at a question that assumed something about the behavior of the customer; however, everytime I thought about rewording it, I just came up with a yes/no question that didn’t lead to a conversational flow. Even then, we’ve found that the effort put into questions is not entirely necessary. About half of our interviewees have not needed much, if any, prompting at all to fill our thirty minute slot with their relationship, understanding, and feelings about Bangalore’s water.

I recall how our first interviewee had to wait in several moments of silence as Jody and I stared back and forth between each other and our computer screens, a slight sense of panic in our eyes, as we realized the questions on our document would now be redundant to ask based on what he shared. While silence is natural, we gave it so generously that on an occasion or two, our interviewee had to confirm that we were still on the call.

But that’s how we’ve learned. We’ve changed how we lead the interview and take notes. I continue to fiddle with the format of our questions document daily. After some interviews, we have a better understanding of the vocabulary more popular for residents, in comparison to our more technical terms. For example, “pit” instead of “recharge well.” We’ve even seen that certain words are not on most resident’s radar, such as the “shallow aquifer.”

Now, the new challenge begins: synthesizing what we’ve learned, identifying themes and potential problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, testing, failing and reiterating. I’m quite excited to see it all happen. Everyone we have interviewed has eagerly received us and seemed more than willing to talk to us again if we need follow-up. With such a connection to our hoped for customer, I think there is a real opportunity that we can design something quite solid. We will find out in the weeks to come; stay tuned!