Customer Interviews

A customer interview is a structured conversation designed to learn how people actually experience a problem, not to pitch your solution. The interviewer asks open-ended questions about past behavior and specific situations: “Tell me about the last time you tried to…” rather than “Would you use a feature that…?”

The distinction matters because people are terrible at predicting their own future behavior but reliable narrators of what they’ve already done. The moment you start describing your idea, you’ve turned the interview into a sales call and the data becomes speculative.

A common mistake is asking leading questions and mistaking polite enthusiasm for validation. Rob Fitzpatrick calls this “The Mom Test”. If even your mom couldn’t give you a falsely positive answer, the question is good.

Insights from interviews can feed directly into Assumption Mapping by surfacing which beliefs about your customers are grounded in evidence and which are wishful thinking.

The patterns you find across interviews inform Opportunity Solution Trees, turning raw customer problems into structured opportunities. Combined with product experiments, interviews give you the qualitative “why” behind the quantitative “what.”

Resources

• Rob Fitzpatrick, “The Mom Test” (Robfitz Ltd, 2013) — how to talk to customers without getting lied to
• Teresa Torres, “Continuous Discovery Habits” (Product Talk LLC, 2021) — weekly interview habits for product teams
• Giff Constable, “Talking to Humans” (Giff Constable, 2014) — a practical primer on running effective customer conversations
• Assumption Mapping — identifying which assumptions to test through interviews
• Opportunity Solution Trees — structuring what you learn from interviews into actionable opportunities