Customer Interviews

What are customer interviews?

Customer interviews are conversations with customers or users with the intent to learn more about their goals, needs, and context. Our complete guide to customer interviews covers how to recruit participants, what to ask, and how to synthesize what you learn.

How do customer interviews work in product discovery?

The purpose of a customer interview is to discover opportunities—unmet customer needs, pain points, and desires. These are opportunities to intervene positively in customers' lives.

Customer interviews help teams gain the context needed to make better decisions about what to build. The key to designing a good solution is to first start with a deep and rich understanding of the problem you're trying to solve. For product teams, that means developing a deep understanding of customers' needs, when they arise, where they arise, and what customers are willing to do to meet those needs.

A weekly cadence of customer interviews provides teams with a persistent feedback loop and current understanding of their customers' experiences. This helps teams make better daily decisions.

The most effective approach is story-based interviewing—collecting specific stories about past behavior rather than asking customers to predict future behavior or evaluate solutions. Instead of "Tell me about your experience with Netflix," ask "Tell me about the last time you watched Netflix." Specific stories give you reports of actual behavior and context; general or future-focused questions trigger cognitive biases and produce unreliable answers. Customer interviews are distinct from other research activities like usability tests, prototype tests, or sales conversations, which serve different purposes.

Learn more:
- Customer Interviews: How to Recruit, What to Ask, and How to Synthesize What You Learn

Go Deeper with a Course:

Learn how to conduct effective customer interviews with hands-on practice and detailed, personalized feedback from our AI Interview Coach in our Story-Based Customer Interviews course.

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Last Updated: October 11, 2026