Product in Practice: Learning to Interview Continuously

Product Talk's community manager, Welena Villasoto, shows how a non-PM can run a weekly continuous interviewing practice. She practiced story-based interviewing with Teresa Torres first, moving from talking too much to genuinely listening. When sign-ups for CDH community interviews dried up, she and Teresa rewrote the recruitment message to ask for opportunity solution tree stories and offered flexible scheduling, which restored participation. The piece matters because it shows continuous discovery skills are transferable across roles and that the process is messy but improvable through deliberate practice and iteration.

01Key takeaways

• Practice interviewing deliberately, with mock sessions and feedback, before talking to real participants.
• Listen to learn rather than listening only to craft your next response.
• Anchor interviewees to specific moments and concrete activities instead of general behaviors.
• When recruitment dries up, examine your message; overly rigid scheduling can deter volunteers.
• Treat discovery as messy and iterative, and expect to revise questions and outreach as you go.

02Key sections

Introduction and the challenge

Welena takes on weekly interviews with CDH members to understand and serve the community. Her previous interview style focused on talking rather than listening, which she had to unlearn.

Building skills through mock interviews

Teresa has Welena run practice interviews after studying course videos and preparing questions. Feedback centers on anchoring to specific moments, moving from general behaviors to concrete activities, and giving space to the interviewee.

Recruitment setbacks and fixes

Early sign-ups faded after a month or two, partly because the recruitment message's rigid schedules deterred volunteers. Changing the ask to OST stories and allowing flexible DM-based scheduling brought participants back.

Results and outcomes

The revised approach increased interest and produced new opportunities and a dedicated opportunity solution tree. Welena's interviewing confidence grew noticeably over the period.

Key learnings

Welena emphasizes that practice builds confidence, bad interviews happen and should be learned from, patterns should be sought while honoring individual stories, and questions and recruitment messages should be iterated.

03From the post

“It’s no secret that Product Talk is built on the foundation of continuous discovery. Yes, all of the content we create—whether it’s this blog, the Product Talk Academy courses, the community, or the Continuous Discovery Habits book—focuses on the various facets of continuous discovery. But it’”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.