As I’ve stepped up from the normal role into a-bit-of management role in my current company, my main objective here is to support developer with the technical issue which aimed to make their life better with less issue on their work. However, I’ve got a feeling that the issue which management level have told me so far didn’t answer much on what the developer needs, so I decided to held an interview with all developers in any level to gather some insight and find what is their needs.
Setup the interview questions
In order to held an interview, there should be some set of questions prepared to lead the interview to the correct direction. To make it more official, I bring the template that I got from the Skooldio’s UX Bootcamp course so that I can share it with my manager and vote for the most related question.
Apart from asking about the general question, I also aimed to point out about the Elementor issue since we just switched from our own custom theme to use this popular page builder couple years ago. It’s normal that adapting new technology will cause a chaos to all team members, what we need to do is to get their feedback and develop a solution to help them.
Schedule the 1-1 interview
There are 11 developers that I have to schedule a meeting with them. I decided not to make the session longer than 30 mins to avoid interrupting their work. I have create a time slot spreadsheet and allow them to put their comfortable time in it.
Showtime!
As we are all working from home, we have to use Zoom as a main communication method. I use blank A4 paper with pen because it’s the most comfortable way to take note for me (before I bought iPad) and I preferred not to type it in while interview because it will interrupt the interview and make me nervous with the question too.
While interviewing, other than memorize the answer from an interviewee it’s good to observe facial expression from them to understand the true feeling from an answer which is important when we want to prioritize all answers we got from interviewee.
Cluster then summarize
After the interview process is finished, what I’ve to do is grouping all answers and feedback by put it into 3 big topics that we’ve been aiming while thinking about the interview question. Anyway, as expected, we also got the answers that were out of the topic that we are trying to scope down but this is also useful so this is the final result after grouping.
There are a lot of answer groups than what we have planned but all of them are very interesting insight information that we can’t find while discussing in a group so it’s best to add it in.
The next step after categorize is to prioritize and merge some of the comments together so that we can specify an action to that group. This is very helpful because I can present this to the upper level employee and make them understand the problem behind the surface with the action plan to oppose with all issues that has been raised with this interview.
Key takeaways and interesting thing from this activity
- Sometime the insight came from the general question, so it is best to make the interviewee feel comfortable with the session
- It’s ok when the session goes beyond expected timeframe. If the conversation flow is good, then let it go.
- An old school memo (paper+pen) still be the trustworthy method for me
- When having a conversation with a quiet type person, you will feel that you have to talk a lot until you find a topic that they can go along. In opposite, you will have to be quiet and catch up the interesting phrase from the talkative one 🙂
- I’ve one day that 5 people scheduled with me and I think it’s a bit overwhelming and feel like it’s easier to get distract by an exhausted mind
- The very important thing with the interview is to gain a trust from interviewee so that they can share their real feeling
That’s what I’ve got from this huge session, I’m glad that all of the developers were participate and share their thought with me. After the session finish I already present everything to many people that was in the management level in a company and this make them understand and getting to know some of the insights information that they haven’t heard before from any of the feedback form that they provide to us.
For me, this is a good chance to practice the researcher skill that I got from taking a course, and I really appreciate that my manager and my teammate also support me to do this crazy activity. Thinking of a work activity is hard, but it’s harder to make it came true. I’m so glad everything went well and benefit to the company.