Start customer research interviews

Amy Hirschi

1. Starting discovery
2. Research interviews ←
3. Interview analysis
4. Feedback database

As a product manager, you can collect product feedback from many sources. However, the gold standard for product discovery remains talking to customers. This sounds straightforward, but can prove difficult to achieve in practice, especially if you want to conduct regular customer research interviews, as part of continuous discovery.

Recruit interview participants

Unless you have a research team to do it for you, you must first face the difficult task of recruitment. You need to invite customers to participate in interviews without spamming them, or otherwise breaking data protection law.

Don’t worry about customer segments yet. First, solve the problem of continuously recruiting people to interview, before you start screening them. Of course, if recruitment doesn’t work, you need to find out who you don’t reach.

Create a booking page

First, write a research interview invitation email. Clarify what kind of conversation you want, what you can offer, and how to book the interview. You can use an existing template or an LLM, but you do need to make some choices.

Next, set up a calendar booking page with a Google Calendar appointment schedule, Calendly, or similar. Incorporate the email content on the booking page, so you can link directly to it.

Prepare generic questions

Preparing questions can wait until you have an interview in your calendar, so you can focus on solving the recruitment problem first. For your first interviews, start with basic questions, and talk as little as possible, so you can discover which topics your customers care about.

Easy warm-up questions get people talking:

1. What’s your role, and how does it relate to [problem domain]?
2. How did you get into that kind of work?

Questions about how and why they use your product will build context:

3. How long have you been using [product]?
4. What were you using before that?
5. Why did your team switch to [product]?
6. How do you use [product] yourself?

Finally, open-ended questions prompt for opinions about the product:

7. What about using [product] works well for you?
8. What don’t you like?
9. What would make [product] work better for you?

These question will fill a 30-minute interview, if you get the interviewee talking. In a longer interview, or if you want to focus on a current research topic, you can start to replace these questions with questions about more specific problems and product capabilities.

Conduct the interview

Before starting the interview, create a script that includes:

1. Introduction – establish permission, and set expectations
2. Questions (above)
3. Wrap-up – show your appreciation, and set expectations for what happens next.

Ask a colleague to observe your first few interviews and give you feedback. This will help you avoid common traps, such as talking to much, asking leading questions, and making the interview awkward for everyone.

During the interview, keep the interviewee talking if they give you short answers:

1. wait a little after each answer, because they might still be thinking
2. sometimes wait even longer, because they’ll want to fill the silence
3. follow-up a short answer with, ‘can you tell me more about that?’
4. if the interviewee shares an opinion, ask ‘why’s that?’

You’ll finish the interview with a recording, an automatic transcript, the notes you made during the interview, or all of the above. This will give you plenty to think about, especially if you continue with weekly interviews.