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Hi Tracy, thanks for watching the talk! I have similarly found that survey response rates are not great. Both here at Doma, as well as at Netflix. I think that's honestly typical. My suspicion is that most folks feel like their voice doesn't really matter. We ended up doing 1:1 interviews with individuals on each team (sometimes multiple). We got those names by pressuring their management to identify willing participants. We then sat down with them, recorded the talk, and went through a set of questions. Very similar to a user research interview, actually. We would include requests like "Show me the tools you use" or "Can you walk me through a recent bug you had to identify" and try to capture as much context as we could. Here're some materials we crafted that could be useful for getting you started. After we had the interviews, we read through the transcripts and notes, and created summaries. We then crafted our purpose, mission, and roadmap (using the interview context as well as business context). When we got into the socialization stage, where we shared out who we are, what we're focused on, and we will be delivering. We made sure to do three things that I think reinforced the relationship (to make it clear that we heard them): 1. We talked about stuff that matters to them (we referenced concerns they raised) 2. We used their words (we quoted them in our slides) 3. We asked in the meeting for approval (thumbs up / thumbs down on if we were addressing pain for them) The first two points reinforced that we heard them, we listen to their concerns and we are focused on problems that affect them. The last one is a way to establish a sense of collective buy-in. If most folks gave a thumbs down, it'd be a great opportunity to take that back and tune your plans (better to find out now than later when they complain to each other or their boss about their development experience!). Once you start delivering on the roadmap and start eliminating pain, you will build credibility and trust. The next time around, you'll find folks are much more engaged.

Thanks for this, super helpful! my team has done a lot of customer interviews, but I think afterwards goes into execution mode and doesn't keep up the relationship super well beyond the big bang release at the end. Thanks for sharing the materials!

@Michael Galloway I love your summary. We follow a similar process for interviewing developers. We had to take a slightly different format because our client’s want to know what features they can implement in Backstage to help their developers. So we had to adjust our approach to zero in on problems that Backstage can solve. I spoke about it at one of the Backstage Sessions for those who’re interested