We’d also love to hear that all three functions—product, design, and engineering—participate in interviewing. Especially engineers—they are closest to the enabling technologies. Magic happens when engineers are directly exposed to user/customer problems, because they are the ones who will know what’s just now possible to solve those problems.
We don’t want to hear that user research is “owned” by a separate team. (It’s great if there is a strong research capability we can tap into, and the product team should be doing its own research on the opportunities it’s pursuing.)
We want to see energy when we ask this question. We want to see eyes light up, people get more animated, talk faster, get excited. We want to see that this vision exists, it’s alive in the culture, and that people care deeply about it.
• are small, cross-functional, and durable • address product risks early with collaborative product discovery, and regularly “kill their darlings” en route to ideas that work • are accountable to delivering results rather than output
