🚀 How to run user interviews?

3 tactics for running user interviews

🔨 Narrow down and go deep

• Define the next decision you need to make. (Which feature should I build first?)

• Prioritize 1-2 learning goals—don’t try to learn everything at once. (Which feature attracts customers with the highest willingness to spend?)

• Target 1-2 customer segments who are most important to serve—segment by psychographics (how they think/behave) first, then demographics (who they are/where they are based).

• Conduct 5 focused conversations per customer segment.

🔍 Zoom out, zoom in, zoom out

• Start broad—understand the user’s world, habits, mental models and context outside your focus area. (Tell me about how you run your business)

• Narrow in on your learning goals. (Which apps do you use most? How has it changed over time?)

• End with 1-2 high-level questions to uncover pain points. (If you had a magic wand to fix one thing about X, what would it be?)

• In crowded spaces, go broader.

✍️ Tag, track, & translate user insights

• Log qualitative data immediately—tag key moments for hypothesis confirmation and note direct quotes, emotions, and workarounds.

• Ask “Why” repeatedly to uncover deeper user motivations and trends across interviews. (Why does the customer do X?)

• Organize insights visually, so you can prioritize the biggest clusters of pain points and define next steps.

2 traps to avoid

🚨 Letting bias creep into your research

• Cut leading questions. Start with “Tell me about” instead of “Do you”. Avoid using adjectives and ‘yes or no’ questions.

• Don’t hint at what you want to hear—avoid mentioning your product idea upfront and encourage open, honest responses instead.

• Focus on recent, specific behaviors and not hypotheticals like, “Would you use this?”

🚨 Taking customer requests at face value

• Don’t jump to building what customers explicitly ask for. 

• Dig deeper to understand why they made that request.

1 tool to leverage

📖 Best practice for doing qualitative research

• Ask 1 short question at a time. Avoid stacking questions. 

• Rephrase important questions 2-3 ways to uncover deeper insights. (How do you solve this problem? → What’s the most frustrating part?)

• Use tools like Miro to group and analyze qualitative data.