Customer Interviewing for the Introverted PM

The product management community talks a lot about the importance of customer interviews. What it rarely acknowledges is that a significant portion of product managers find the process genuinely draining. Not because they lack curiosity or do not care about users, but because the social mechanics of interviewing - the rapport building, the open-ended conversations, the emotional labour of active listening for extended periods - run against their natural wiring.

At the third Gathering of The Product Consortium, Pieter Strouven, a freelance digital product manager, delivered a talk that resonated deeply with a room that was, by his estimate, at least half introverts. His premise was simple: introversion is not a weakness in customer research. It is a different operating system that requires different techniques.