Be careful you don't make the "worst mistake" you can make with Blueprinting.
There’s almost no way to do damage with a good Blueprinting interview. Almost. But imagine this: Your customer says, “Yes, you guys did a really good interview with us last year. But then we never heard from you again.” If you’re in a concentrated industry (with relatively few customers), this failure to properly engage customers can be a fatal flaw.
It doesn’t take much time to keep the engagement going.. a thank-you call or email… sending a PDF of the Discovery interview notes… scheduling the quantitative Preference interview, etc. When you download your Debriefing Checklist at www.blueprintingcenter.com > BlueTools > Conduct Discovery Interviews/Tours, be sure to look on page 2. You’ll see a nice list of follow-up ideas here.
One very natural follow-up step is to send your customer a copy of your sticky notes. Some interview teams wonder about this: Couldn’t these notes get in the hands of our competitors? Yes, but…
- These sticky notes are your customer’s ideas after all, not yours.
- It’s unlikely your competitor will make a big course change based on these notes.
- Much more valuable are your notes from all customer interviews—especially from quantitative Preference interviews—and you will keep these away from competitors.
In your Discovery Noteboard, you’ll see that you can print a clean PDF of the sticky notes. Just do this after you’ve finished your debriefing. You may see that there is too much text to fit in some of the sticky notes. That’s OK: If you scroll down the PDF, you’ll see the full text below.
For more on this topic, view e-Learning module 18: Debriefing after Interviews at www.blueprintingcenter.com > e-Learning.
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