Product management for engineers: running user interviews that yield evidence

This chapter, part of a ten-part series on product management for engineers, focuses on discovery and how to talk to users without steering their answers. It opens with a scenario in which a backend engineer is asked to build a recurring-report feature based on a secondhand summary of a single user interview that reads more like a sales pitch than a transcript. The core lesson is that leading questions embed the interviewer's assumptions and push users toward agreement, which produces unreliable data. Instead, the chapter recommends open, contextual questions that reveal actual workflows, tools, and pain points. The chapter also lists setup prerequisites, such as recording tools, a consent template, and access to representative users.