Workshops are an art, User Interviews are a science

If I had to name my crown skill, it would be this: taking information from a dozen different places and making sense of it. Workshops, user interviews, Reddit threads, internal website discussions, help desk tickets, user analytics. Each of these is a little window into what people actually want and what is actually breaking. None of them tells the whole story on its own. The real work, the part I genuinely enjoy, is sitting with all of it and finding the shape underneath.

Two of those sources are also things I run myself, so let me walk you through how I think about them.

Workshops are an art

I can walk into a room full of stakeholders who, at the very start, are holding completely disjointed pieces of information. Everyone is carrying their own priority, their own version of the truth, their own thing they care about most. My job is to facilitate the discussion, ask the right questions, and keep everyone on track. And by the end, something has changed. The information is structured. A plan exists. A decision gets made.

The single most important thing I do is figure out what the actual problem is. Why are we even in this room? What is the real reason this conversation is happening? It is surprisingly easy to spend an hour solving the wrong thing because nobody stopped to name the right one. Once I understand the true objective, everything downstream gets easier. The outcome almost delivers itself.

But stepping back to find the real goal is only half of it. While I am solving for that goal, I am also watching the room. I make sure the people who actually have the knowledge get heard, not just the loudest voice. I make sure people leave aligned rather than quietly disagreeing. And honestly, I care that people walk out feeling good about the time they spent. A workshop that lands the decision but leaves everyone frustrated is not a win in my book.

User interviews are a craft

User interviews taught me something different, and it took real discipline to learn: do not lead the witness.

It is so tempting to nudge people toward the answer you are hoping for. To hint at the idea you already have in your head. I trained myself out of that. I stay consistent with my questions, and I never signal what I would love to hear or what we expect. I aim to be warm, positive, and encouraging, while staying receptive and, in the best possible way, clueless. The user is the expert in that conversation, not me.

The structure matters too. Once I have a session script and a set of questions, I ask them of every single user and I follow the script. That consistency is what makes the answers comparable later. But following the script is not the same as being rigid. If someone says something new, something I did not expect, I stay curious and dive deeper right there. The best insights almost always live in those unscripted moments.

What both of them come down to

Whether I am in a workshop with stakeholders or one on one with a user, it always comes back to the same thing. Listen. In that room, I am the one learning, not them. The moment I forget that and start talking more than I am taking in, the quality of what I get drops.

So I keep my ears open and my mind open with it. Stay curious, stay receptive, and let the people in front of me tell me what is actually true. That is where all the good information comes from, and making sense of it is the part I would not trade for anything.