E23: Dharmesh Ba - The Art of the User Interview

"And he gave a very (interesting) thought experiment. He said, go to your Facebook, remove all your school friends, remove all your relatives, remove all your college friends, work friends. And, if you're able to get 10 people after removing all of this, then probably you're lucky. Okay. I think that had a very profound impact to say that, you know… It was true, right? You know, because all the people that I knew, we're all from the same college, same school, same town, blah, blah, right? You know, you would never have like a Swiggy delivery executive as a part of your Facebook friend list, right? You would never have someone who is a farmer as a part of your WhatsApp contact list, right? Which means that, you know, our worldviews are generally also limited, right? So research allows you to break away from that and meet other people and gives you an opportunity to learn about their stories."

Welcome to the Story Rules podcast with me, Ravishankar Iyer, where we learn from some of the best storytellers in the world, find their story, and unearth the secrets of their craft.

Today we speak with Dharmesh Ba, a behavioural researcher who writes the popular India Notes newsletter and is the founder of 1990 Research Labs.

I came across Dharmesh through leading India-based VC Sajith Pai – who dubbed him as ‘Indus Valley's chief anthropologist’ (though Dharmesh prefers the term ‘ethnographer’).

In simpler terms, Dharmesh is an expert on the art and craft of understanding user behavior and motivations, through detailed personal interviews - so that we can design better products and services.

Why is this important? I remember an interview from Oct-2019 of Kalyan Krishnamurthy, the CEO of Flipkart, where he stated the importance of this task. His key point: The e-commerce puzzle had been solved for the top-tier users in the country – the top 8 cities. But for the vast middle and bottom tiers, product managers would need to completely reimagine every aspect of the product from the ground up. They can only do that by a comprehensive understanding of user behaviour in their context and environment.

Dharmesh and his team are among the ones at the forefront of this initiative – to understand user behaviour. Their clients include leading corporates and non-profits which are building products and services for these hundreds of millions of aspiring Indians… and Dharmesh and team are doing the critical and under-appreciated task of deeply understanding their world.

They do this through in-depth, well-researched and structured conversations with the users. There’s a lot of science and craft that Dharmesh uses to ensure that the interviewee trusts him and is willing to share the true reasons for their choices. We will learn about them in this podcast conversation.

And while we will learn about interviewing techniques, analysis approaches, and presentation tips, the overarching message I could glean after speaking with Dharmesh was – be curious, empathetic, and respectful.

It’s a must-listen conversation for anyone keen on conducting detailed user interviews, analysing the responses, and coming up with clear recommendations – for product design, research, employee well-being – multiple use cases.

Let’s dive in.

Show Notes:
Dharmesh on LinkedIn and Twitter
Link Tree with most popular links and work by Dharmesh
India Notes Newsletter