Interview Notes
What are interview notes?
Interview notes are the written records captured during customer interviews that document what was discussed and learned. Rather than trying to capture verbatim transcripts, effective interview notes focus on capturing structure—key themes, gaps, inconsistencies, and follow-up questions.
The goal of note-taking during interviews isn't to create a complete record (that's what recordings are for), but to help you synthesize in real-time so you can ask better follow-up questions and stay present with the participant. Notes should capture enough to reflect back what you heard and identify areas that need clarification.
Teams often share pages and pages of interview notes with stakeholders to communicate their discovery learning. However, this approach assumes stakeholders have time to dive deep into each interview—and they often don't.
Why are interview notes alone insufficient for stakeholder communication?
While interview notes are valuable for the team conducting discovery, they're not always the most effective way to share learnings with the broader organization:
Volume becomes overwhelming. When teams share lengthy interview notes from multiple interviews, stakeholders can't realistically absorb and retain all that information. They may lack the time or context to know what's most important.
Synthesis is the team's job. Stakeholders need synthesized insights, not raw data. The product team's role is to do the work of analyzing interviews and distilling what matters most, not to push that work onto stakeholders by handing them unprocessed notes.
Context gets lost. Raw interview notes don't always make clear how the learning connects to product decisions, outcomes, or strategic priorities.
How should teams use interview notes effectively?
Interview notes work best as an internal tool for the product team rather than as an external communication artifact:
Within the team, interview notes serve as reference material during discovery activities. Engineers, designers, and product managers can review notes together as part of brainstorming sessions, opportunity mapping, or solution exploration. This shared review helps build common understanding.
For synthesis, interview notes provide the raw material teams need to create more digestible artifacts like interview snapshots—one-page visual summaries that highlight key insights, opportunities, and relevant quotes from an interview.
For reference, detailed notes ensure the team can revisit specific details when making product decisions, verifying assumptions, or exploring opportunities further.
Rather than sharing raw interview notes widely, teams should synthesize their learnings into formats designed for stakeholder consumption, like interview snapshots or opportunity solution trees that connect insights directly to product strategy.
Learn more:
- Customer Interviews: How to Recruit, What to Ask, and How to Synthesize What You Learn
- How to Take Notes During Customer Research Interviews
- The Interview Snapshot: How to Synthesize and Share What You Learned from a Single Customer Interview
Related terms:
- Interview Snapshot
- Customer Interview
- Opportunity Solution Tree
Last Updated: October 25, 2025