Four ways to reduce your bias in interviews

As discussed in the last post, we have a lot of assumptions on how the world works and how others think. The best way to challenge them is through external input (see here). However, we tend to mainly see and hear things, that confirm our own believs. The problem of a confirmation bias. This makes it hard to see evidence of our assumptions being wrong.

How to get unbiased input?

Let’s assume you want to ask your customers how to build a better product. But you want to hear their truth, not your believs expressed in their words. How do you have to ask them? Because them giving the right kind of answers is your responsibility.

Here are four tips on how to ask better questions. They are a follow up on the recent “Five steps to asking better questions” article, but with a focus on bias-reduction:

1. Understand problems instead of solutions

2. Go for the story, not just the abstract

3. Play dumb

4. Replay what you heard

Let’s look into them a bit more

Understand problems instead of solutions

Many people developing products are in love with their own solution. They have strong assumptions on why their creation is amazing. These are hard to challenge. Especially since your customers likely don’t feel as strongly about them. To reduce bias, just don’t talk about solutions. Try to understand the problem.

Let’s take an example of some solution based question:

• “How important is sustainability to you when deciding for a product?

• “What features do you like / miss?”

• “Why did you decide to buy this product?”

All these questions have a solution in mind. And the solution is based on your assumptions. Or even worse, your customers assumptions. You will only get:

• Their opinion on how important sustainability is

• Opinions on your features or the features they came up with themselves. But customers usually don’t know the best solution to their own problems

• The story they tell themselves and others on why they bought the product. Not the metric when they decided for the product.

Go for the story, not just the abstract

People don’t act like they say they will. Thus it’s best to go for past decisions made. You want to know what they did, not what they say they will do. But you can’t just ask them, why they did something. It will be filtered by your bias and by their bias. You have to go for the whole story.

Let’s say, your customer bought a book. If you ask them, why they did it, they will tell you something about the book itself. And they will most probably leave out the most important part: The context.

One questions I like a lot is: “What did you do, just before you bought the book?”

Here are two possible answers, that radically change the purpose the book was serving.

1. I was browsing a bookstore at a trainstation, because my train was late.

2. I read an article about a topic online and wanted to find additional information.

Play dumb

You can’t assume and pretend ignorance at the same time. Playing dumb reduces your own opportunity to bring in bias into the discussion. A “play dumb” follow-up for the questions above might be:

“So you just walked into the store and took the first book and bought it?”

Thats most probably not what happened and you know that. But it’s a way better questions then:

“What made you choose this book? The cover?”

Go for the story and pretend, that you don’t know how things are done. This opens the field for unexpted new insights.

Replay what you’ve heard

If something seems odd to you, take what you heard and replay it. Exaggerate it and ask, if that’s what happened. Most people love to correct a wrong story.

“So you walked into the bookstore, saw a bright orange cover and just bought the book right away? Is that how you usually buy books?

Rarely will they tell you, that they buy books because of the color. But they will tell you, what else crossed their mind. And then you can go deeper into the story, play dumb again and try to really get the problem they wanted to solve.

Reducing bias needs practice. But you can practice this everywhere. 

“May I ask you, what made you buy this box of tomatoes?” and “Can you remember, when you decided to work in this bookstore?” are perfectly reasonable opening questions.