This guide serves as a blueprint for setting up and running verbal experiments and interview techniques from the Experiment Library, offering a step-by-step process for planning, conducting, and analyzing effective interviews. Whether you’re exploring a new idea or improving an existing concept, this guide will help you turn customer conversations into actionable insights.
As a precondition for this guide, it is recommended that you follow a systematical approach to test business ideas:
- You have prepared a complete Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas.
- You have already extracted underlying assumptions, ranked them using Assumption Mapping and refined the top 3 to a business hypothesis.
- You have an idea for your experiment sequence to test your hypothesis and have already designed the specific verbal experiment where you seek guidance in setting up and running the experiment.
Step 1: Preparing for Interviews
Adequate preparation is essential for conducting interviews that are both focused and productive. To maximize the value of your interviews, take the time to understand the context and objectives behind them thoroughly.
1. Ensure to follow your legal and compliance requirements
Industries like healthcare and finance often have more stringent requirements due to sensitive personal data and regulatory oversight. You want to make sure that your activities follow those constraints. Bigger organisations usually have dedicated legal and compliance departments who can help you follow the constraints and ensure that your data and insights collected from the interviews are accepted organisation-wide and can be transformed into viable actions.
You may lack legal support if you are testing business ideas outside a corporate innovation environment. Here is a deep dive into conducting customer interviews following jurisdiction, data protection laws, industry regulations, and ethical guidelines.
2. Have a ranked Value Proposition Canvas in place
Before you start customer interviews, ensure you have an up-to-date Value Proposition Canvas with prioritized jobs, pains, and gains. You will need the ranked jobs, pains, and gains later on to learn if your assumptions have been valid or not.
The Value Proposition Canvas helps you to:
- Identify the jobs, pains, and gains most important to your customers.
- Rank these factors based on their importance, frequency, or intensity.
- Identify gaps that the interviews need to address.
“By structuring your interviews around a ranked Value Proposition Canvas, you can ensure the conversation remains relevant and targeted, focusing on the themes that need validation.”
2. Interview Techniques
Use different interview techniques to test your business idea and increase your confidence. Below, you can find examples from the Experiment Library:
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Customer Interviews
Exploration
Explore customer jobs, pains, and gains through one-on-one interviews to refine your value proposition. Ideal for gathering qualitative insights and uncovering unmet customer needs.
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Partner & Supplier Interviews
Exploration
Engage with potential partners and suppliers to validate assumptions about collaboration, feasibility, and value creation. This experiment helps identify risks and opportunities in partnerships critical to business success.
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Internal Expert & Stakeholder Opinion
Exploration
Expert Stakeholder Interviews focus on obtaining “buy-in” from influential individuals within your organization. This experiment helps align strategic objectives and identifies potential barriers to success.
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A Day in the Life
Exploration
Immerse yourself in your customers’ world to uncover their true needs, pains, and behaviors. “A Day in the Life” enables real-world observation of your customer segment to identify unmet needs and refine your value proposition.
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Discovery Survey
Exploration
The Discovery Survey is an open-ended questionnaire designed to gather customer insights about jobs, pains, and gains. It’s ideal for exploring customer preferences and problems, but not for predicting their future actions.
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3D Print
Discussion Prototype
Use tangible, small-scale models to test customer reactions and validate assumptions about product design, functionality, and desirability. Ideal for physical product testing.
3. Create a Script
A well-structured script keeps the conversation on track while allowing flexibility for deeper exploration. However, the interview shouldn’t feel robotic — use the script as a guide, not a strict rulebook. A good script includes:
- An introduction and explanation of the purpose of the interview.
- A focus on storytelling: Ask participants to share real-life examples of challenges or experiences.
- Specific ranking questions to prioritize their jobs, pains, and gains from your Value Proposition Canvas.
Sample Script Outline
- Introduction & Context:
Set the stage for the interview and assure the participant of its purpose.
Example: “Hello, I’m researching [problem/idea]. This is purely exploratory, and I’m not here to sell anything.” - Have Them Tell a Story:
Encourage participants to describe real-life scenarios.
Example: “Can you tell me about the last time you faced [specific challenge]?” - Ranking Jobs, Pains, and Gains:
Ask participants to rank their top three jobs, pains, and gains.
Example: “Which of these challenges impacts you the most?” - Thanks & Wrap-Up:
Example: “What’s one question I didn’t ask but should have?”
Step 2: Finding and Screening Interviewees
Finding and screening the right interviewees is crucial for gathering insights that reflect your target audience’s needs. Without proper screening, you risk wasting time interviewing participants who don’t align with your target customer profile.
Here’s a more detailed guide to help you screen candidates effectively.
Set Expectations with Participants
Once screened, set clear expectations with participants:
By carefully identifying and screening participants, you ensure that every interview is relevant, focused, and productive. This process saves time and helps you gather insights that align with your target customer’s needs, leading to better decisions and outcomes.
Step 3: Conducting Interviews
Conducting interviews effectively is both an art and a science. To uncover the most valuable insights, you must ask the right questions, maintain a professional and curious demeanour, and ensure the process is systematic. This step delves into the structure, roles, and best practices for successful customer interviews.
1. Roles and Responsibilities
Customer interviews demand a lot of focus. It is challenging to ask questions, listen attentively, observe body language, and take notes simultaneously. Conducting interviews in pairs allows the interviewer and scribe to focus on specific roles, ensuring no important detail is missed.
Scribe:
- Takes detailed notes, including direct quotes. Paraphrasing can lead to losing the interviewee’s intent.
- Observes and records non-verbal cues like body language, tone, and facial expressions.
- Avoids interrupting the interview to clarify points unless absolutely necessary.
Observer:
- Observes the interview quality.
- Takes notes on interview do’s and don’ts to improve interview practices continuously using The Observer Template.
- Avoids interrupting the interview unless absolutely necessary.
Interviewer:
- Leads the discussion using a pre-prepared script to stay focused on key topics.
- Probes deeper by asking follow-up “why” questions.
- Wraps up the interview, thanking the participant for their time and contributions.
Interviewee:
Shares their experiences, challenges, and perspectives openly and honestly. It’s the interviewer’s job to ensure they feel comfortable enough to do so.
2. Most Important Interview Best Practices
With those roles in mind, follow these best practices for an interviewer to ensure highly qualitative interviews that produce reliable data:
You will find a more exhaustive list of Do’s and Don’ts in the article “Customer Interviews best practices“.
3. Managing the Interview Flow
Build Rapport:
Start by making the participant feel comfortable. Use a warm introduction to set the tone.
Example: “Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I’m here to learn about your experiences, and there are no right or wrong answers.”
Encourage Storytelling:
Ask participants to describe specific instances instead of general opinions.
Example: “Can you walk me through the last time you faced this issue? What happened, and how did you try to solve it?”
Probe Deeper:
Follow up with “why” questions to uncover the root causes of challenges.
Example: “Why was that solution insufficient to solve the problem?”
Be Patient:
Pause after asking questions to give participants time to think. Resist the urge to fill silence—it often leads to more thoughtful responses.
4. Wrapping Up the Interview
Thank the participant for their time and feedback. Share the following steps (e.g., follow-up interviews, recommendation of others, synthesizing feedback). Always ask:
5. Debriefing After the Interview
Don’t fall into the trap and schedule the interviews back-to-back, without any time in between. Instead, immediately after each interview, take 15 minutes to debrief:
1. Scribe debriefing on the interview content:
2. Observer debriefing on the interview method:
This ensures learnings are consolidated while fresh and helps refine your approach for future interviews.
“Following these detailed steps, adhering to the do’s and don’ts, and keeping interviews customer-focused, you’ll gather rich insights that directly inform your innovation journey.”
Step 4: Synthesizing and Analyzing Feedback
Synthesizing and analyzing feedback is as important as conducting the interview itself. This step transforms raw data into actionable insights. Organizing, clustering, and prioritizing the collected information ensures that your findings directly inform your business strategy and product development.
1. Synthesizing Feedback
After every interview, consolidate your notes, observations, and recorded data. The goal is to identify patterns, themes, and recurring pain points that reflect your customer’s reality.
Affinity Sorting: A Proven Method to Organize Insights
Affinity sorting is an effective and collaborative way to synthesize qualitative data. This technique helps you identify clusters of related feedback and themes.
- Preparation:
Set aside 30–60 minutes for this activity. If working in person, ensure you have a large wall space and plenty of sticky notes. Use digital tools like Miro or MURAL for virtual sticky notes if working remotely. - Write down one quote or insight per sticky note:
Add the participant’s name or initials on each sticky note. This helps trace insights back to specific interviewees. - Stick all the notes on the wall or a virtual board.
- Look for related insights and group them into clusters.
Examples of common themes might be “Time inefficiencies”, “Frustrations with user experience”, “Desired outcomes”, or “Unmet needs”. - Assign a label to each cluster that represents the underlying theme.
- As a team, review the clusters and identify and discuss high-priority themes.
2. Ranking Analysis
Ranking analysis helps you evaluate how well the insights from interviewees align with your initial assumptions about customer jobs, pains, and gains. It provides a quantitative lens on qualitative feedback and helps you prioritize which jobs, pains, or gains to address first.
- Analyze Trends:
After synthesizing all interview data, look for patterns in the participants’ rankings rank of their top three jobs, pains, or gains based on importance, intensity, or frequency.
Example: If 8 out of 10 interviewees rank “difficulty finding support” as their top pain, it becomes a clear priority. - Validate Against Your Customer Profile:
Compare the ranked insights with your initial assumptions in the Customer Profile. Aim for 80%+ alignment to validate your assumptions. For instance, if 8 out of 10 interviewees rank “Job 1” as #1, you’re likely on track. If the alignment is below 80%, revisit your assumptions and refine your profile. - Note Variations:
Pay attention to outliers. While patterns are key, unique responses can sometimes highlight niche opportunities.
4. Updating the Value Proposition Canvas
Once feedback is synthesized and ranked, revisit your Value Proposition Canvas to reflect the new insights.
- Customer Jobs:
- Adjust the jobs section based on recurring themes from the interviews.
- Example: If many customers describe time inefficiencies, you might add a job like “Optimize daily operations.”
- Customer Pains:
- Incorporate the pain points that were most frequently mentioned and ranked highest.
- Example: “Long wait times for customer support” might be a top pain to address.
- Customer Gains:
- Reflect desired outcomes that align with customer priorities.
- Example: “Immediate resolution of support requests” could be a desired gain.
Add data to your Customer Profile.
Show the numbers of people who agreed/disagreed on specific jobs, pains, and gains, and add customer rankings.
Example:
- “Long wait times for customer support (11/15)” would indicate that 11 out of 15 interviewees came up with that topic.
- “#1” would indicate the top prioritized job/pain/gain by customers
5. Keep your interview raw data
Keep your interview raw data, such as interview notes and observer templates.
Sometimes, when moving forward to real-world experiments, it may happen that people’s behaviour in the real world differs from what they said they would do in a lab setting, such as a customer interview.
If it turns out that an idea might not work, at least it represents a huge learning opportunity. By sourcing through the raw data from early-stage experiments, now equipped with different insights from the real world, you might be able to discover early warning signs that you may have overlooked initially.
The earlier you can identify warning signs, the less time and energy you waste on ideas that do not work.
“Updating your Value Proposition Canvas after Customer Interviews ensures that it remains a living document, accurately reflecting your customers’ current needs and priorities.”
Scaling and Automating Customer Interviews
If you plan to adopt interview techniques into your operational capabilities and innovation processes – what I highly recommend – scaling and automating customer interviews becomes a topic relatively fast, especially for organisations aiming to improve their operational efficiency. Here are your options:
1. External Solution
This is the most common solution. Customer Interviews, Market Analysis and similar activities are outsourced to a specialized company.
Every organisation that wants to grow its business models sustainably needs the capabilities described in this article. They are a central part of the ability of an organisation to adapt and renew its business models to changing market environments and trends. Therefore, I usually do not recommend this option, apart from some exceptions, e.g. you lack those capabilities and are at the risk of being disrupted and running out of time.
2. Internal Solution
With this option, you can keep the capabilities and activities in-house. You have direct contact with your customers and own the raw data. This is a long-term investment into your business’s health and resilience.
Scaling the needed capabilities might still be challenging, but scaling and automating the research activities to improve efficiency is becoming increasingly attractive. Incorporating AI-powered tools into your business research can significantly enhance the efficiency of transcriptions, affinity sorting, and data analysis.
I recommend starting to scale and automate business research activities once you have sufficient business research capabilities at the level of competent practitioners. Here are three tools that automate these processes:
- Otter.ai:
Otter.ai offers real-time transcription services with features like speaker identification and keyword summaries. It integrates seamlessly with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, making it ideal for capturing and transcribing interviews. - Insight7:
Designed to analyze interviews at scale, Insight7 utilizes AI to extract insights, sentiments, and trends from qualitative data. It supports various data sources, including video, audio, and text, and provides features like sentiment analysis and theme extraction, facilitating efficient affinity sorting and analysis. - Sonix:
Sonix provides automated transcriptions in over 49 languages, with time codes and speaker identification. It also offers automated translation, subtitles, summaries, and an interactive web editor for real-time edits, streamlining the transcription and analysis process.
Integrating these tools into your research workflow can streamline the transcription and analysis phases, allowing for more efficient synthesis of interview data.
Conclusion
Customer interviews are a powerful tool for driving innovation when executed with purpose and precision. They offer a unique opportunity to step into your customers’ world, uncovering the jobs they’re trying to accomplish, the pains they face, and the gains they desire. By starting with a ranked and complete Value Proposition Canvas, setting clear objectives, and following a structured process, you ensure your interviews are meaningful, efficient, and actionable.
The insights you gather from these conversations form the foundation of customer-centric innovation, helping you validate assumptions, refine your offerings, and reduce the risk of building solutions that miss the mark. Remember, it’s not just about collecting data—it’s about turning that data into a deep understanding that guides your strategy and decisions.
Start planning your customer interviews today, embrace curiosity, and let your customers’ voices shape your path to success.