Almost everywhere you look, we are told - go talk to your customers, potential, real or somewhere in between. It’s sound advice, based on well established principles of customer centricity and building the right products and services for the right people.
It also gets us all out of our own heads and assumptions and ideals and in front of real people. In my experience, interviews can produce some of the richest market-research data available — particularly when you need to understand why people behave as they do.
But in reality, this method is not without its problems. For starters, it’s time consuming. For a typical 30 minute interview:
- You have to find the person and go back and forth to set up the time
- You have to prepare your objectives and then the questions
- You run the interview, and hope for some insights,
- And then afterwards you have to analyse and study the data.
And all of that gains you 1 respondent. So the dissonance is real, and many teams opt to send out mass surveys which have their own issues, but importantly, don’t generate the insights a 1-2-1 discussion does.
So if I’m going to argue for interviewing real people, it’s only fair to show you how to make it worth your time. Here are my lessons learned:
Less is more
Whilst it’s tempting to use AI and the best practice methods to come up with the best interview questions ever - remember that in an interview you are constrained by time and energy. Time is obvious, with only a limited amount of time to get through the interview, it’s actually useful to have a limit to practice asking the questions against when you rehearse them or first try them out. But the forgotten component is the human side - there’s only so much mental energy your respondent has to devote to comprehending and then in the moment answering your questions. You can’t overload them, because the objective of the exercise is to get to a point in the interview where they are relaxed, open and getting to the kinds of insights that will meet your research objectives.
Avoid the trap of asking leading questions
At the end of the interview, you want to have the best data available, to inform your decisions about what to do next. And the most common way subjectivity is accidentally infused into the interview is by asking leading questions.
Leading questions contain or imply the answer the interviewer hopes to hear. They may smuggle an assumption into the question, describe the product’s intended benefit before asking for a reaction, or make one response feel more acceptable than another. We ask them all the time in our normal lives when we speak to others, so it’s no surprise that we can easily fall into this trap within an interview.
You get what you put out in the question. If you are subjective and lead the respondent, you will get the answer you were looking for, but not, crucially the answer you need. A good portion of insights from interviews, the ones that we think about for days afterwards, come from the unexpected. Things we were not expecting to hear, but were actually thought provoking and moved the needle in unexpected ways.
And because we’re human, leading questions are a bit of a self-protection mechanism. It’s much easier to seek validation than it is to hear things that make us uncomfortable. If you’re unsure about a question leading the respondent, picture yourself being asked that question, and ask yourself Could I answer this honestly—even if my answer disappointed the interviewer?
The 18th Minute
OK, nothing magical happens after 18 minutes, though I wish it did. Time and time again, I noticed the greatest insights came after the respondent was relaxed and engaged and for me this happened around this time.
At this point the interview often begins to feel less like an interview and more like a real conversation. By then, the participant has had time to understand why you are there and, ideally, recognise that you are genuinely interested in their experience — not testing them, waiting to correct them or preparing to launch into a sales pitch. Their answers often become less polished, more specific and sometimes more candid.
This is the point at which the interviewer needs to loosen their grip on the script. Follow the energy in the conversation. Ask, “What makes you say that?”, “Can you tell me about the last time that happened?” or simply leave a little more silence.
Your objective is no longer to complete every prepared question. It is to understand what matters to this person, in their language, and why.
And the key to getting to the why is to be curious and non-judgemental. Create the right conditions and listen carefully.
Bring negative feedback into the room
After a few interviews, you will accumulate some criticism or negative feedback about what you’re building and why. Take your time to reflect, sit with it and then be brave. At your next interview, after first exploring their experience in their own words, you might say: “Someone else described finding this part confusing. Does that resonate with your experience at all, or was it different for you?”
This matters because a single criticism can be easy to dismiss as one person’s preference. Carefully testing it in later interviews helps you understand whether it is isolated, shared by a particular customer segment, caused by unclear expectations or evidence of a genuine barrier.
The goal is not to make the next participant agree with the criticism or to collect votes for and against it. It is to understand the conditions under which the criticism is true—and what may be causing it.
Sometimes the feedback points to a product problem. Sometimes it reveals a positioning problem, a mismatch between what you promised and what the customer expected, or a customer you were never intending to serve. You will decide what to do about it later. During the interview, your job is to remain curious long enough to understand it properly.
Take positive feedback with curiosity
If there’s one thing that has changed substantially in my technique over the years is the way I respond and deal with positive feedback. The reflexive action is to be pleased, and show that I am happy and then build on that positivity. But that misses several opportunities and gives the participant validation that could bias their future responses.
I now ask more meaningful follow up questions that reveal more about what they are positive about or what they like.
Useful follow-up questions might include:
“What specifically appeals to you?” “What would this help you do?” “Can you tell me about the last time you experienced that problem?” “What do you currently do instead?” “What would make you decide not to use it?” “How important would solving this be compared with your other priorities?”
You will learn far more from the reason behind their positivity than from the positivity itself. Their answer may confirm the benefit you intended, reveal an entirely different source of value, or show that they like the idea without experiencing a sufficiently important problem to act.
Plan for 30mins, leave an hour free
Many of my best 30-minute interviews ran closer to an hour. By the half-hour mark, the conversation had often moved beyond the prepared questions into a genuine dialogue about the problem.
Leave room in your own calendar for that possibility, but never assume the participant is free to continue. As the agreed finish approaches, acknowledge it:
“We have about three minutes left. There are a couple of things I would love to explore further, but I want to respect your time. Would you prefer to finish here, or are you comfortable continuing for another 10 or 15 minutes?”
An engaged participant may be happy to continue, but the choice should remain theirs. And participants who feel heard and see that their contribution matters may also be open to staying involved—as future research participants, prototype testers, early users or advocates. Do not treat that as the objective of the interview. Treat it as a relationship you may have earned.
These were the respondents when asked at the end if I could chat to them another time almost always said yes. You’ve done right by them at that point, they feel as though their time is worthwhile and it’s meaningful to have their opinions heard. Be grateful. Keep them informed. Over time, you may build a group of customers around people like them.
As I proofread this article I realised how many of these takeaways are also doing something else along the way. They are illustrating the interviewer’s values and what they stand for. The best products are built by people who are willing to learn. From themselves, from others. To create something of value requires a deep understanding of where that value lies and what it means to people and why. You’re not special because you built something. Increasingly the barrier to building anything has all but evaporated. But AI is unlikely to change the way customers measure what matters to them. So it’s more important than ever to be curious, listen and learn and let that inform what you do next. Because the quality of an interview is not measured by how many notes you collected, or how good you feel afterwards about yourself or your company. It’s measured by what changed because of the conversation.