Focus Groups

Stakeholder technique · See it on the map

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A guided discussion where a small group's interaction, not just each answer, is what gets studied.

When to use it

When you want to see how people react to an idea, product, or requirement in conversation with each other, surfacing disagreement and unstated assumptions that a one-on-one interview wouldn't produce.

When to avoid it

Don't use a focus group when you need a working session that produces a decision or artifact — that's a workshop, a different technique. And don't use one when you need each person's honest individual view without social pressure — that's an interview. A focus group's biggest risk is a dominant participant steering the room toward a consensus that doesn't actually exist once people are asked alone; if that risk is high for this group, run interviews instead.

Steps

1. Recruit a small, relevant group — enough to generate real interaction, small enough that everyone gets airtime.
2. Prepare an open-ended discussion guide rather than a closed questionnaire.
3. Have a moderator run the session whose job is to draw out quieter participants and interrupt anyone dominating the discussion.
4. Record or take detailed notes on both what is said and where the group agrees or splits.
5. Afterward, check any apparent consensus against what individuals said one-on-one, if that's available, before treating it as settled.

What it produces

• Qualitative findings on how the group reacts to and discusses the topic.
• Identified points of agreement and disagreement within the group.

Common pitfalls

• Letting one confident participant dominate, producing an apparent consensus that vanishes the moment quieter participants are asked individually.
• Recruiting a group that's really a set of individual interviews conducted in the same room, losing the interaction that makes the technique worth running.
• Treating a single focus group's findings as representative of the whole stakeholder population, rather than as one data point to weigh against others.

Worked example

A team redesigning a benefits enrollment form runs a focus group of eight employees. Discussion converges quickly on the group liking a single-page layout, led by one particularly vocal participant. The moderator notices two others nodding along but not speaking, and follows up with them individually afterward — both admit they preferred the multi-page version but didn't want to disagree in the room. The team runs the single-page design past a short individual survey before committing, rather than treating the group session alone as the answer.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §5.2.2.2

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.