Product Research Methods Using Customer Interviews

"Talk to customers" is classic startup advice. But not enough folks teach you how to talk to users in a way that gets you actual insights. Since launching Decagon and raising $100M over 3 rounds, we’ve learned a lot, especially about GTM. Here's how we've adapted our customer conversations to go beyond surface-level excitement and uncover real signals of value. We benchmark around dollars when discussing product features. Why? Because it’s easy to run a customer interview where the customer seems thrilled about a new idea we have. But excitement alone doesn’t tell you if a piece of feedback is truly valuable. The only way to find out is to ask the hard questions: → Is this something your team would invest in right now? → How much would you pay for it? → What’s the ROI you’d expect? Questions like these don’t allow for generic answers—they'll give you real clarity into a customer's willingness to pay. For example: say you float a product idea past a potential user. They're stoked by it. Then you ask how much they'd pay for said product—and the answer is $50 per person for a 3-person team. Is that worth building? It might be, depending on the outcome you're shooting for. But if your goal is to build an enterprise-grade product, that buying intent (or lack thereof) isn't going to cut it. If you'd stopped the interview at the surface-level excitement, you might have sent yourself on a journey building a product that isn't viable. By assessing true willingness to pay you can prioritize building what users find valuable versus what might sound good in theory. Get to the dollars as quickly as you can. It’s an approach that has helped us align our roadmap with what customers truly need and ensure we’re building a product that has a measurable impact.

Last week, I coached a product team through a user interview debrief. They were excited! Users had shown enthusiasm for a new feature! 🎉 But when I asked, “What problem does this solve for them?” the room went quiet. 🫣 This happens more often than we’d like to admit. 🧠 The Trap: Mistaking Enthusiasm for Validation When users say, “That sounds great!” we often interpret it as validation. But here's the catch: - Users want to be polite. - They might not fully understand their own needs. - As product teams, we may hear what we want. This is why relying solely on user enthusiasm can lead us astray. 🔍 The Solution: Semi-Structured Interviews We need to dig deeper to understand our users truly. Semi-structured interviews strike the right balance between guidance and flexibility. Key practices include: - Start with hypotheses: Identify what you believe to be true. - Ask open-ended questions: Encourage users to share experiences, not just opinions. - Listen actively: Pay attention to what’s said—and what’s not. - Probe for underlying needs: Seek to understand the 'why' behind their behaviours. This approach helps uncover genuine insights, leading to solutions that truly resonate. 🌟 Imagine the Impact By adopting this method: - Teams build products that solve real problems. - User satisfaction increases. - Resources are invested wisely, reducing wasted effort. It's not just about building features—it's about delivering value. 🦾 Take Action Next time you're planning user interviews: - Prepare a set of hypotheses. - Design questions that explore user experiences. - Remain open to unexpected insights. Remember, the goal is to understand your users, not just confirm your assumptions deeply.

Let's face it: most user interviews are a waste of time and resources. Teams conduct hours of interviews yet still build features nobody uses. Stakeholders sit through research readouts but continue to make decisions based on their gut instincts. Researchers themselves often struggle to extract actionable insights from their conversation transcripts. Here's why traditional user interviews so often fail to deliver value: 1. They're built on a faulty premise The conventional interview assumes users can accurately report their own behaviors, preferences, and needs. People are notoriously bad at understanding their own decision-making processes and predicting their future actions. 2. They collect opinions, not evidence "What do you think about this feature?" "Would you use this?" "How important is this to you?" These standard interview questions generate opinions, not evidence. Opinions (even from your target users) are not reliable predictors of actual behavior. 3. They're plagued by cognitive biases From social desirability bias to overweighting recent experiences to confirmation bias, interviews are a minefield of cognitive distortions. 4. They're often conducted too late Many teams turn to user interviews after the core product decisions have already been made. They become performative exercises to validate existing plans rather than tools for genuine discovery. 5. They're frequently disconnected from business metrics Even when interviews yield interesting insights, they often fail to connect directly to the metrics that drive business decisions, making it easy for stakeholders to dismiss the findings. 👉 Here's how to transform them from opinion-collection exercises into powerful insight generators: 1. Focus on behaviors, not preferences Instead of asking what users want, focus on what they actually do. Have users demonstrate their current workflows, complete tasks while thinking aloud, and walk through their existing solutions. 2. Use concrete artifacts and scenarios Abstract questions yield abstract answers. Ground your interviews in specific artifacts. Have users react to tangible options rather than imagining hypothetical features. 3. Triangulate across methods Pair qualitative insights with behavioral data, & other sources of evidence. When you find contradictions, dig deeper to understand why users' stated preferences don't match their actual behaviors. 4. Apply framework-based synthesis Move beyond simply highlighting interesting quotes. Apply structured frameworks to your analysis. 5. Directly connect findings to decisions For each research insight, explicitly identify what product decisions it should influence and how success will be measured. This makes it much harder for stakeholders to ignore your recommendations. What's your experience with user interviews? Have you found ways to make them more effective? Or have you discovered other methods that deliver deeper user insights?

This month the Journal of Management dedicated a special issue to the Lean Startup. I have been teaching Lean Launchpad (ENGR 245) at Stanford University School of Engineering for the last eight years. Lean Launchpad class was started by Steve Blank at Stanford University in 2012. Today there are several classes at Stanford based on the Lean Launchpad methodology and many schools around the world teaching it. We focus on teaching customer discovery ("getting out of the building" to talk to customers and trying to understand what the customers say). We teach students a framework to test the business model of a startup while creating all of the pressures and demands of the real world in an early stage startup. We come as close as possible to simulating a startup in just ten weeks. Every year we will get at least one venture backed company (many times more) ouf of eight teams to become a significant company. Some companies include: Zūm, Afresh, Blue River Technology , Nova Credit,FreeWill, Pocus, XP Health, Sybill , and many others. Some of my key learnings so far (there are many more!): * Being a "customer savant" is critical in understanding what customers need. You can be a customer savant because you are the customer or know the customer intimately. You can also do this by interviewing many customers (100+ interviews seems to be a magic number), spending time with the customer (one of our asks is "spend a day with the customer") and creating a set of increasing complexity experiments to extract info from customers. The more time/effort you spend becoming a "customer savant" the higher chance of addressing a real problem/opportunity. * Performing interviews but not truly listening and letting go of your biases does not work. You are constantly fighting confirmation biases. It is hard and painful to let go of old ideas but it is part of the journey. We celebrate changes and pivots - they mean change forward. * Fight the urge to build and focus on fast prototyping. If you build before being a "customer savant", you will likely throw away what you build. However, if you can prototype quickly (eg, Figma demos) you will get a lot of signal from the customer at a low cost. This means you can move much faster. * Everything can be learned. Students just need encouragement to do uncomfortable things. By the end of the class, an MBA student will learn how to prototype and an engineering student is comfortable reaching out to strangers and asking for something. My mentor Katheryn Gould recommended me as a mentor for Lean Launchpad back in 2015 and Steve Blank not only took me on but encouraged me to become an instructor. Thank you Steve for taking a chance on me. You have given me the gift of teaching every year to an amazing set of students and working with talented folks like you, Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein, George John, Sarah Smith and Radhika Malpani. https://lnkd.in/gwBKzS3d

Your Series A startup has product-market fit. Your customers love your product. So why aren't your marketing channels delivering? After hundreds of mindset interviews with tech customers, I've discovered something counterintuitive: Most founders are running their customer research like a product survey when they should be running it like a documentary. Product surveys ask 'Do you like our solution?' Documentary-style mindset interviews ask 'What was happening in your life when you first realised you needed this?' The problem: Surveys capture a moment in time. Documentaries reveal the entire journey, including all the places your marketing should be, but isn't. Here’s what I mean: 1. The Real Customer Timeline When founders think 'awareness → consideration → purchase,' customers think 'frustration → research → false starts → eventual discovery' 2. The Hidden Decision Points Your customers encountered 5 to 6 touchpoints before finding you. But you're only investing in channels from touchpoint 4 to touchpoint 6. 3. The Context Gap Your product solves the right problem. But your marketing speaks to where customers end up, not where they begin their journey. This is why Series A companies drain runway on channels that seem perfect on paper: they're reaching the right audience at the wrong moment. Here’s the high-level framework you can use to run documentary-style interviews: 1. Start with Struggle: "Tell me about the day this became a priority" 2. Track the Search: "Where did you look for answers? What led you there?" 3. Map the Moments: "What made you reject earlier solutions?" 4. Find the Switch: "What finally convinced you to try something new?" Want sustainable channel growth? Start by understanding the documentary of your customer's life, not just their product feedback. ♻️ Found this helpful? Repost to share with your network.   ⚡ Want more content like this? Hit follow Maya Moufarek.

Customer interviews make or break products—but most of us are doing them completely wrong. Some obsess over customer problems. Others seek validation of their ideas. Which camp are you in? 👀 When you're pioneering a new space at the intersection of precision medicine and AI, there's no playbook to follow. You're writing the rules as you go. Early in our journey, I proudly showcased our multimodal data platform connecting clinical data, DNA, RNA, images and outcomes—only to face polite nods and zero urgency. Our sophisticated data integration wasn't what customers were actively seeking. In fact, many didn't even know they needed it. The breakthrough came when we stopped talking about our technology and started obsessing over their fundamental challenges. So what problems did drug developers actually face? They weren't looking for fancy technology—they were hoping to build disease models to identify patient subgroups that would respond to their therapies. But our true AHA moment started by asking this key question: "How are you solving this challenge today?" My latest blog post highlights a key mistake I’ve made and introduces a framework for radically improving your customer interviews: 1. Map Current Reality 2. Identify Friction Points 3. Quantify Value Gap 4. Test Specific Use Cases Our business transformed when I stopped talking and started listening—really listening—to the day-to-day challenges facing drug development teams. What we discovered fundamentally changed our approach... If you're pioneering something new in your industry, which customer discovery methods have worked for you? ♻️ Repost if this framework could be helpful to others. #PrecisionMedicine #CustomerDiscovery #ProductDevelopment #StartupLessons

One of the fun parts of starting a new job is getting to ask “Why” a thousand times a day.* Why is this our strategy? Why is this our target customer? Why choose this problem? Why do we believe this market is big enough? Why do we believe our solution is differentiated? Lean Startup Canvas is a handy tool to remind ourselves of the kinds of questions to ask. If there are questions about revenue model, market size, or similar “what needs to be true for this to be big enough, and how confident are we that those assumptions can become true one day”, I like to model out all of those assumptions, and then see which we need to de-risk.* If there are questions about what customer we want to target, what Jobs To Be Done we want them to hire us for, what would make us a differentiated solution, I like to turn to generative research. This starts with recruiting 6-10 people who 1) have no prior relationship with me or anyone at the company, 2) are likely to represent the kind of customer we would focus on. Then, we should interview them with open ended questions that stay within the context of our focus area. And don’t sleep on the power of ethnographic research, diary studies, card sorting exercises, etc. Let them take us to where they want to go, what’s on their mind, what feelings do they have. What we’re hunting for are flare ups of emotion that can reveal a worthy pain point. These are subtle — an edge to their voice that lasts half a sentence, a big sigh or rolling of the eyes, a shaking of the head. We’re fully present during these interviews, because these moments are easy to miss. When we see those moments, we pounce. “Can you say more about that?” “How does that make you feel?” “How do you deal with that today?” These are the nuggets of gold that can lead us to a problem worthy of Product Market Fit, if we can validate that the problem is 1) wide spread enough, 2) solvable in a differentiated way, and 3) can be monetized sufficiently. What we absolutely must not do is pretend we’re doing generative research but actually we’re user testing solutions we already have in mind. Evaluative user testing is a great and under-utilized tool, but it’s not the same thing. If we go looking for proof that we are right, we’re pretty likely to find it because human brains are great at confirmation bias. Don’t: “What if I presented you with this solution, that could do x, y, z. Would you use it?” Do: “You mentioned [problem hypothesis]. Tell me about the last time [problem hypothesis] happened. What was it like? What did you do? How did it make you feel?” We’ll get to the solution design soon enough, but until we have confidence and clarity about what problem we want to solve, any solutions we do build are hard to evaluate.* —————— *If you’re interested in reading the footnotes as well as my work-in-progress thoughts (today: “good and cheap” > “great and expensive”), sign up for my free newsletter: https://lnkd.in/g44P3_rB

One year ago our churn was over 15%/mo. I was focused on Founder Brand, one-to-many selling, and building a community. Jonathan Shuster, DM’d me and said there was one OBVIOUS thing I was ignoring completely: Actually talking to my customers. (This seems so idiotic in hindsight I’m embarrassed to be even write this) I finally linked up with Jonathan this summer. He helped me put together a low-lift churn study and set up a regular cadence of customer interviews. While it hasn’t come close to solving the churn problem, it has helped churn, and made me feel much better about the direction we’re going with RB2B. Here’s Jonathan’s 5-step guide on who to interview and what to say: 1. Find your BEST customers. - Dig into intercom, stripe, baremetrics, or whatever else you have to find your longest-standing, high LTV customers. - Pull 35-50 people out of that segment to ask for an interview - Send them a one-to-one email asking them if they’d talk to you (the CEO) about the product for 15min - Line up 5 interviews. More than 5 and you will start hearing the same thing over and over again. - See my copy below (image) 2. Find a few of your your churned customers who you THOUGHT should be high-LTV. - Enrich your customer list by revenue, industry, employee count, web traffic, and whatever else you use to determine ICP fit - Find 35-50 churned customers that match your ICP - Send them an email that says “I am the founder of RB2B and I really, really, really want to understand why you churned. Would you be willing to hop on a 10 min call to discuss?” - Line up 5 interviews (you only need 5) 3. Ask your best customers five questions like these (modify them for your product) - Why did you choose us versus the other solutions out there? What's the rest of your stack look like? - If we were to disappear tomorrow and you couldn't have us, what would you do? - When you find a good lead/visitor, how do you know it's a good match? - What do you do when you find a good lead? How do you route it? - What do you do when you find a bad lead? 4. Ask your churned customers the following q’s (modified for your biz): - How'd you choose to evaluate us? Where'd you hear about us? - Do you use anyone else to solve this problem now? - Be brutally honest, what didn't work? - How do you figure out what is a good vs bad lead - What would make it so you could use us again? 5. Determine your product roadmap based on what you’re not doing that people want, and your marketing message based on what you ARE doing that people love. TAKEAWAY Most founders will read this, nod along, and never actually do it. They'll tell themselves they're too busy building, or that they already 'know' their customers. Don't be that founder. Block off 2 hours this week, send those emails, and have those conversations. Your solutions to churn are hiding in plain sight. You just need to ask.

Everyone loves your idea? Bad news: You're doing customer research wrong. Really wrong... Why Most Founders Ask the Wrong Questions Stop asking "Would you use this?" Here's the brutal truth about customer interviews: 1. The Wrong Questions: ❌ "Would you buy this?" ❌ "How much would you pay?" ❌ "Do you like this feature?" = All useless 2. What Actually Works: ✓ "Tell me about the last time..." ✓ "Walk me through your process..." ✓ "What does success look like?" ✓ "How do you solve this today?" 3. The Golden Rule: Past behavior > Future intentions 4. Real vs. Fake Insights: Real: "I spent $500 last week on..." Fake: "I would definitely pay for..." 5. Signs You're Doing It Wrong: Getting only positive feedback Hearing "great idea" often No specific stories Everyone "would buy" The Framework That Works: 1. Past problems 2. Current solutions 3. Success metrics 4. Time/money spent Remember: "People lie about the future. They tell the truth about the past." Drop a 🎯 if you're ready to fix your customer interviews! #StartupAdvice #CustomerDiscovery ------------------------- Want more modern fundraising tactics? Follow me for weekly insights 🚀 https://lnkd.in/dvj3pkNC

CUSTOMERS LIE ABOUT THE FUTURE. HERE'S THE REAL PREDICTOR OF SUCCESS. The graveyard of failed startups is full of products that customers said they "definitely would use." “That sounds cool" is not the same as "I will pay money for this." Most customer research is just elaborate validation seeking. Founders ask leading questions, get polite answers, and mistake politeness for product-market fit. HERE'S WHAT ACTUALLY PREDICTS SUCCESS: First Round figured out that people lie about future behavior but tell the truth about past behavior. So instead of asking "Would you buy a meal delivery service?" ask "What did you order for dinner last Tuesday? How much did you spend? What was annoying about that experience?" THE PATTERN THAT EMERGES:  Companies that succeed solve problems people are already spending money to solve badly. Slack didn't ask "Would you use a better chat tool?" They found teams drowning in email chains and asked about those painful experiences. Turns out people were already paying for email systems they hated. THE CONVERSATION THAT ACTUALLY WORKS: "Walk me through the last time this problem happened. What did you do first? How long did that take? What was frustrating about it? How much did your current solution cost in time or money?" Then listen for the pain points, not the polite agreement. THE SIGNAL YOU'RE LOOKING FOR:  People are cobbling together expensive, time-consuming workarounds because no good solution exists. THE VALIDATION THAT COUNTS:  When someone gives you their email address or credit card information before you've even built anything. Stop asking people what they want or if they like what you have. Start observing what they're already doing and paying for. Real customer development isn't about confirming your idea is brilliant. It's about discovering which problems hurt enough that people will actually change their habits. What problems are your potential customers already paying to solve badly? *** I’m Jennifer Kamara, founder of Kamara Life Design. Enjoy this? Repost to share with your network, and follow me for actionable strategies to design businesses and lives with meaning. Want to go from good to world-class? Join our community of subscribers today: https://lnkd.in/d6TT6fX5