Once you've identified your interview candidates, how do you engage with them? The approach can vary greatly based on numerous factors. Without delving into all the unique cases, I will outline my typical recruitment strategy.

As stated earlier, I prefer to converse with current paying customers. I often target a specific customer type. For instance, I might focus on those with an Enterprise plan, those who have used a certain feature of the product, or a particular persona.

The easiest and fastest way

I've found that one of the most effective ways to engage customers is through micro surveys in your product, specifically targeting customers with whom I'm interested in speaking.

This method is quite straightforward. I simply customize a micro survey and activate it. It's the quickest means of getting a large number of customers to participate.

Moreover, these tend to yield the highest quality interviews. Typically, those who sign up within the first few hours or days that I launch the micro survey are frequent users of the product. This suggests that they actively use your product and are interested in its improvement.

Furthermore, it facilitates their recollection of their most recent usage, enabling them to provide detailed descriptions of their experiences and reasons for using it.

The micro survey should inquire whether they'd be willing to provide feedback on a potential change to your product. If they agree, the micro survey can direct them to a calendar invite tool where they can schedule a time to speak with you.

The calendar tool should then handle scheduling and sending reminders about your meeting.

Another super valuable approach to recruiting

Another group I recommend recruiting includes individuals who have expressed interest in the feature you're considering developing.

When you speak with them, it will be useful to understand their workflow in detail. As they have indicated interest in this feature, you can also explore when and why they would use it, as well as how they are currently addressing the issue this feature would solve, how often they run into this issue, and what kind of impact it has on them.

This approach is valuable not only for the insights you gain, but also in demonstrating to the customer that their feedback is heard and valued, and their previous requests are taken seriously.

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