Amey-Thakur Customer interviews
People are terrible at predicting their behavior and excellent at being polite. Interviews extract truth only when they ask about the past, chase specifics, and never pitch: the mom-test discipline.
Method
- Ask about the past, never the hypothetical. "Walk me through the last time you handled X" beats "would you use a tool that does X" every time: the second question harvests compliments. Chase the specifics: when, what did you do next, what did it cost, who else was involved, what did you try before (the workaround hunt: see product-discovery step 3).
- Never pitch in a learning interview. The moment you describe your solution, every answer becomes a kindness. Keep solution demos in separate usability/feedback sessions with their own rules; a learning interview about the problem space mentions your product last or never.
- Recruit for the segment, screen hard. Define who has the problem (role, context, recent behavior: "managed a team budget in the last 90 days"), screen with behavioral questions, and pay fairly. Five to eight interviews per segment surfaces the pattern; friends, fans, and whoever answers fastest produce warm noise (see product-discovery's evidence grades). In B2B, interview buyer, user, and admin separately: they disagree in load-bearing ways.
- Run it as listening with a spine. A discussion guide of topics (not a script), open questions, then silence: let them fill it. Follow surprise: "say more about that" outperforms your next planned question. Capture verbatim quotes (record with consent); your paraphrase already contains your bias.
- Synthesize across interviews, tagged to evidence. Within 24 hours per interview: key quotes, observed behaviors, pains with frequency/severity. Across the set: cluster into themes with counts ("6 of 8 rebuilt the report manually each month"), separating observations from interpretations (see research-synthesis for the general method). Themes feed the opportunity map (see product-discovery) and experiment designs (see ab-test-design for what quals cannot answer).
- Close the loop into decisions. Each round ends with: what we believed, what we heard, what changes (a killed assumption, a re-ranked opportunity, a new experiment): recorded (see decision-journals). Interviews that end in a slide deck nobody acts on teach the org that talking to users is decoration.
Boundaries
- Interviews establish existence and texture of problems, not market size or preference shares; pair with behavioral data and experiments for magnitudes (see product-metrics, ab-test-design).
- What people say they do and what logs show diverge; when they conflict, logs win on frequency, interviews win on why.
- Usability testing (can they operate the interface) is a different protocol with tasks and think-aloud; do not mix it into discovery interviews and call both "research" (see accessibility-review and design-critique for adjacent lenses).