Planning and conducting interviews with potential customers as product-oriented market research.

1. Customer Interviews
Uncovering Product or Feature Ideas
Andreas Kwiatkowski
www.how.fm

2. Recommended reading
I will summarize for you today
a@kwiat.org

3. Approach

4. General tips: Improve the interview for both sides
• be curious and support the respondent by maintaining eye contact,
nodding, and lean-forward body language
• ask the shortest open-ended question you can, without directing them
to possible answers you are looking for
• After you ask a question, be silent. After an answer, continue to be
silent.
Usually the person will continue.
• User their language (even if wrong) and don’t lecture.
Appreciate and encourage any response.

5. Opening

6. Introduction: Set the stage
• Welcome
• Thank you for taking the time to speak with me
• I’m x from y
• I’m here for the interview.
• We’re doing market research for our startup and what I want to learn today is …
• We’ll spend about z minutes together
• We’ve collected a bunch of questions to ask to start off
• Do you have any questions for us right now? Do you need something else before we start? e.g. to drink
• Optional: sign release

7. All activities: Scout and prioritize
• Maybe introduce yourself and tell us about what your job is here? What do you love most about
your job?
• How long have you worked here?
• Describe a typical workday. What do you do when you first sit down at your station? What do you
do next?
• What is / are the most frequent (daily) activity / important (critical) / difficult / error-prone / time-
consuming / annoying?
• What is your process for X? What key steps can you recall?
• How do you feel about the process for … What is the biggest pain / frustration associated with it?
• What's important to you right now? What is your organization looking for from you this year?

8. Understanding

9. Selected activity: Understand one problem deeply
• Teacher/expert: Can you show me how you …? Can I just observe how you …?
• Let’s say that I’ve just arrived here from another decade, how would you explain to me …?
If you had to ask your daughter to operate your system, how would you explain it to her?
• Role-playing: “Riiing … your phone rings and …”
• How would you do this task differently if you had a magic wand to make it magically
different? How do you think it will be different five years from now?
• How has your process changed (improved, worsened) in the past five years?
• What do you think is the real problem at the bottom of this issue? Why do you think …?
What do you think …?

10. Tools or workarounds: If and how people solve the problem today
• How do you solve that problem today?
• What solutions have you already tried and how successful were they?
• What are all the different apps/sites you use on a daily basis? Which are most
frustrating to use? Why?
• What software/service have you been looking for?
• What task would you like to handoff to an assistant / software but can’t yet? Why?
• If we came back in three years to have this conversation again, what would
hopefully be different?

11. Helping

12. Solution value
• How would you feel if you could wave a magic wand and have it
resolved?
• Beyond that, why is this important to you right now?
• How much do you think this is costing you? What do you think it’s worth
to fix this?
• How is this affecting other aspects of your business? (sales, costs,
productivity, morale, etc.)

13. Solution ideation and demo
• If you could build your ideal experience, what would it be like? What ideas would you
suggest for x?
• Here’s a whole bunch of early ideas that I was asked to show you. We’re still in the
exploration stage, more than happy to drop things.
• Show provocative concepts at varying levels of fidelity (storyboard, wireframe, mock-
up, demo), maybe prepare and leverage a casual card sort (prioritize services etc.)
• What do you think? Thinking about value to you, can you say something about what
you'd like to see more or less of? What aspects do you like/concern you?
• What would you need us to add/remove to make this useful for you? Would you
still buy the product if we leave out feature …?

14. Pre-selling
• What if I could provide such a solution for you?
• Could this be in line with one of your biggest priorities for this year? In what ways does
this capture what you're trying to accomplish?
• Who in your organization really owns this problem? How will the funding for this be
determined?
• In thinking about choosing a partner to work with on this, what's most important to
you?
• Can you walk me through your decision-making process? Who will make the final
decision about choosing a firm to work with? What if two providers are evenly matched
in terms of ability, experience, and price? How do you work with new vendors?

15. Superpowers

16. Following up: Learn and understand more
• Clarify: Why do you say that? Could you explain further? Is this always the
case? When you refer to ‘that,’ you are talking about …? Why do you call it …?
What’s the difference between …?
• Dig deeper: Tell me more! What else? Anything else?
• Sequence: Could you share all things you do before / during / after?
• Severity: How would you rank these problems? Why is that important to you?
How often does that happen? If...happened, what else would result?
• Frequency: I’d be interested to hear …? Is this always the case? Can you tell
me about a time …? What was the last …?

17. Strategic priorities
• What are your most significant opportunities for revenue growth/cost
reduction over the next several years?
• What do you think is the single most important action we can take to
make our organization more successful?
• How will your own performance be evaluated at the end of the year?
• What kinds of organizational resistance will there be to this change?

18. Countering questions: Chances for further probing
• Is that important to you?
• When was the last time …?
• What would you expect it to be?
• If too many come up, defer those until the end of the interview.

19.
Gently interrupting: Transitional phrases to regain control
• Great / Interesting
• Now I’d like to move on to a totally different topic. / I’d like to shift
directions now….
• Let’s / I want to go back to something else you said before …. / Earlier,
you told us that…
• If you still must interrupt, apologize and remind that you value her/his
limited time.

20. Closing

21. Wrap-up: Formally end the interview
• Did we miss anything?
• Is there anything you want to tell us?
• Is there anything you want to ask us?
• Then thank you and let’s stay in touch — is there a way to reach you via email?
• Close with hard cues (thanking, handing the incentive, packing up stuff,
standing up)
• Physicians/therapists are familiar with the “doorknob phenomenon,” where
crucial information is revealed just as the patient is about to depart.

22. Customer Interviews
Uncovering Product or Feature Ideas
Andreas Kwiatkowski
www.how.fm