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Title

InnerSource Customer Interview Questions

Patlet

An organization has decided to create an InnerSource program but are unsure which issues they should address first. Using a customer interview will help evaluate pain points across the organization, to prioritize the areas where InnerSource will have the biggest positive impact.

Problem

InnerSource can address a number of areas that impact collaboration. The problem is:

  • Determining what organizational pain points to address first. People want every pain point that InnerSource can address, solved fast.
  • Evaluating team needs can be ambiguous if the conversation is not structured around an InnerSource framework.

Context

Organizations know what problems InnerSource can help address and that their organization will benefit, but don’t know what to do first. Introducing the idea of InnerSource to teams across an engineering organization can result in many excited team leaders who want the final results, but organizations still need solid buy-in and a way to communicate the amount of time and effort a solution will take. People like the idea, but people starting an InnerSource program need a way to find advocates, engage users, understand their needs, and show them how InnerSource will directly impact their teams.

Forces

Constraints:

People are busy and want a fast solution. They like an idea, but don’t understand how they will have to participate in the solution.

There are limited resources and some solutions may already exist, but they are only known about by a small group of people.

People do not understand how they are directly affected by InnerSource or how to get involved.

Solutions

Create a customer interview to evaluate team needs and convey to your user what InnerSource can address by using questions specifically structured around the InnerSource framework. Some questions on this list may seem redundant, but they help users to look at problems from different perspectives.

InnerSource Customer Interview Questions

  • Documentation
    • What are your challenges related to documentation?
    • How do you find documentation created by another team?
  • Collaboration/Communication
    • What are your challenges related to cross team collaboration?
    • What would make your daily collaboration with other teams easier?
  • Bottlenecks
    • What creates the most bottlenecks on your team?
    • What are some bottlenecks that aren’t on your team but cause you problems?
  • Project Governance
    • What happens when your team has conflicting equally important priorities? (These may be equally important, time critical PRs from two other teams)
    • How are decisions on your team made?
  • Contribution
    • What are the biggest barriers to entry for other internal teams to contribute to your project?
  • Transparency
    • What current processes or challenges limit your project transparency?
  • Processes
    • What new processes would make your team more successful? This is any process you may want if there were no limitations. What processes or structures do you wish were in place?
    • Are there any current processes in place that hinder performance?
  • Who else should we be talking to?

Resulting Context

After reaching out to team leaders and finding out what their needs are, showing how they will be impacted by an InnerSource program, and conveying how sharing their struggles with help contribute to the effort, you will have greater buy-in to InnerSource. People will see it as action instead of concept and you will have data that will help create a plan. You will be able to create a report of the most common pain points across the organization that can be shared with leadership to show user needs and clear goals for next steps.

Working through these questions helps build trust and establish relationships with users. It helps contextualize InnerSource and how it applies to their individual teams. Building these relationships helps evaluate users and their teams for InnerSource readiness. Discussing these questions helps frame the benefits of InnerSource in a way that users can understand without making it a sales pitch.

By using this pattern you will gain information that will help you to describe your goals and guiding principles, build a plan, and identify good first project to start with.

Known Instances

Status

Initial

Author(s)

Katie Schueths (Indeed)