Customer Interviews

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

A customer interview is a conversation with a customer or user with the intent to learn more about your customer or user’s goals, needs, and context. Customer interviewing is one of the most valuable activities a product team can do. It’s simply the easiest, most sustainable way of

Customer Interview Analysis: Where AI Helps and Hurts

It's easy to get overwhelmed by continuous customer interviews. When you conduct a customer interview every week, the data starts to pile up. You collect hours of transcripts. If you aren't disciplined to synthesize each interview as you go, you can quickly fall behind. I have

Q&A Session: Building AI Evals for the Interview Coach

I am falling deeper into the AI rabbit hole every day. Now, that’s not to say that I believe all the hype about AI. What I mean is that I’m excited to see what’s just now possible with AI (some may even say I’ve become a

How I Designed & Implemented Evals for Product Talk’s Interview Coach

What does generative AI make just now possible? This is a question that I’ve been obsessed with over the past few months. While I’ve been primarily working alone, I don’t want to go on this journey in isolation. I believe there’s so much benefit to working

Building My First AI Product: 6 Lessons from My 90-Day Deep Dive

Back in March, I was still struggling with how fast everything was moving with AI: RAG, MCP, agents, tools, evals, prompt engineering. It was a lot. Don't get me wrong. I was using ChatGPT and Claude in the web browser every day. But I was struggling to keep

Behind the Scenes: Building the Product Talk Interview Coach

I’ve been diving deep into how generative AI can help us build new skills. I’m firmly in the “AI should augment (not replace) humans at work” camp. I’m concerned about the short-term impact on entry-level employees. I’m concerned about brain rot in the rest

Ask the Community: Tracking Opportunities Not Related to Your Outcome

When you conduct story-based interviews every week, you quickly begin to collect a range of opportunities. And while some of these opportunities might be related to your current outcome, that’s not always the case. It can be hard to know what to do when this happens. You might

Customer Recruiting for Continuous Discovery: Get Easy Access to Customers Week Over Week

In all of our Product Talk Academy courses, we ask students, “What’s your biggest hurdle to adopting continuous discovery?” Overwhelmingly, the #1 response is: access to customers. This doesn’t surprise me. In Continuous Discovery Habits, I wrote that the only way to make continuous discovery sustainable is to

Tools of the Trade: How HiveMQ Automates Customer Interview Recruiting with Orbital

If you want to make continuous interviewing part of your discovery, you have to automate the recruiting process. It sounds simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. While many product teams want to talk to customers every week, they struggle to make this a reality. Whether they face

Ask Teresa: For Customer Interviews, Who Counts as a Customer?

Whenever I introduce the topic of customer interviews (the foundational element of continuous discovery), I get a lot of questions about who counts as a customer. Everyone thinks their company context is unique—whether they’re B2B or B2B2C or some other combination of letters and numbers. And while yes,

Ask Teresa: What Do You Do with Atypical Customer Stories?

When we interview customers, our goal is to learn as much as we can about their context. This will help us understand their specific needs, pain points, and desires (otherwise known as opportunities) which will inform our product decisions. But what happens when you hear a story that stands out

Story-Based Customer Interviews Uncover Much-Needed Context

Customer interviews are one of the most impactful activities a product team can do. But only if we use the right methods. An early customer interviewing mistake is to spend your interview time exploring your solution ideas. You might present a prototype and ask, “What do you think?” Or even,

The Interview Snapshot: How to Synthesize and Share What You Learned from a Single Customer Interview

When you start interviewing customers every week, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by how much you are learning. When we use our customer interviews to collect specific stories about past behavior, every conversation can uncover dozens of unmet customer needs, pain points, and desires (AKA opportunities). I recommend teams

Tools of the Trade: Finding People to Interview Before You Have Customers

The foundation of continuous discovery is weekly touchpoints with customers. These touchpoints will allow you to collect stories that help you identify opportunities and build out your opportunity solution tree. It sounds simple, but what happens if your product is so new that you don’t have any customers yet?

Product in Practice: Making Customer Interviewing a Habit in an Early-Stage Startup

Founders have all sorts of reasons for starting companies. Sometimes it’s because they’ve personally experienced a pain point and want to address it. Sometimes they’re dissatisfied with what’s available on the market and think they can do better. And sometimes it’s because they have an

Product in Practice: Learning to Interview Continuously

It’s no secret that Product Talk is built on the foundation of continuous discovery. Yes, all of the content we create—whether it’s this blog, the Product Talk Academy courses, the community, or the Continuous Discovery Habits book—focuses on the various facets of continuous discovery. But it’

Tools of the Trade: Recruiting Customer Interview Participants

When it comes to continuous discovery, there’s no such thing as “the perfect tool.” Instead of seeking the best tool out there, it’s much more effective to look for the best tool for your team. Teresa often says, “The best tool is the one that your team will

Sourcing Opportunities: Unlocking the Power of Opportunity Mapping

The opportunity solution tree is a visual representation of your continuous discovery work. It helps you keep track of your high-level outcomes, the unmet needs, desires, and pain points (or what I collectively refer to as “opportunities”) you’re hearing about from customers, the solutions you’re considering, and

Ask Teresa: What Should You Do With Insights That Don’t Come from Customer Interviews?

Regular touch points with customers are a pillar of continuous discovery. If you’re not regularly talking directly with your customers, you increase your risk of building a product that no one wants or needs. However, even when product trios commit to weekly interviews with customers, their companies may have

Product in Practice: Automating Customer Interview Recruiting at Zonar Systems

Not having enough time is one of the main reasons people say they can’t interview customers every week. And this is not just an empty excuse—most product people’s calendars are packed. So the idea of trying to carve out time to recruit and schedule interviews might feel

Ask Teresa: My Sales Team Won’t Let Me Talk To Customers. What Now?

The product trio leads discovery. But this doesn’t mean that other teams aren’t involved. Being thoughtful about product discovery means staying on good terms with others throughout your company. You might need to get buy-in or support from leadership, you may need to collaborate with user research

Ask Teresa: What Are the Best Customer Interview Questions?

We recently launched the Ask Teresa series on Product Talk, where I tackle common questions and challenges that I hear from people as they begin to adopt continuous discovery. Find all the posts in this series here. If you’re serious about continuous discovery, one of the most important steps

Ask Teresa: How Do You Select Customers for Customer Interviews?

Welcome to the next installment of Ask Teresa, the column where I address common questions about continuous discovery. If you’d like to see the other posts in this series, you can find them here. Creating frequent touch points with customers is one of the core tenets of continuous discovery.

Why Product Trios Should Interview Customers Together

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Continuous Discovery Habits. I’d love your feedback in the comments. After reading, are you ready to interview as a trio? Still have doubts? Please let me know your thoughts. Product research needs to be timely, actionable, and believable for a

The Results Are In! Feedback from the First Continuous Interviewing Cohort

Hi there, Product Talk readers! I’m Melissa Suzuno. I’ve been helping Teresa with Product Talk content behind the scenes for the past few years. You may have noticed my handiwork if you’re a fan of the Oxford comma or em dash. If you’ve been reading Product