Customer interviews

I used to think I was good at customer interviews. I had a script, I booked 45-minute slots, I asked questions, I took notes. At the end I’d walk away with a list of things customers said they wanted. Job done, right? 🙄 Then I read Teresa Torres’ “Continuous Discovery Habits” and realised I’d been running feedback sessions, not discovery interviews. There’s a big difference.

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The goal is not to collect opinions

Most teams use customer interviews to validate ideas they already have. “We’re thinking of building X - would you use it?” This feels like research. It isn’t. Customers are terrible at predicting their own future behaviour, and they’ll almost always say yes to avoid disappointing you. Torres is clear on this: the goal of a customer interview is not to ask customers what they want. It’s to understand their world - their habits, their struggles, the workarounds they’ve invented, the moments where things break down. Solutions are your job. Stories are theirs.

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The weekly cadence

One of Torres’ most practical pieces of advice: talk to customers every single week. Not every quarter. Not “when we’re starting a new initiative”. Every week. This sounds like a lot until you realise it’s just one or two interviews. The point isn’t volume - it’s rhythm. When discovery becomes a habit, you stop making decisions in a vacuum. You always have a recent conversation to draw on. Lesson learned: the teams that do this well treat it like a recurring calendar event that doesn’t move. The teams that struggle treat it like a project task that gets deprioritised when things get busy - which is always.

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How to run the interview

Torres recommends a specific structure, and it’s different from what most people expect. Start with a story, not a question list Open with something like: “Tell me about the last time you tried to [do the thing your product helps with].” Then stop talking. You want a specific, recent story - not a general opinion. The magic word is specific. “Tell me about a time” beats “what do you usually do” every time. General questions get general answers. Specific questions get stories - and stories are where the real insights live. Follow the story, not the script Once they’re telling a story, your job is to go deeper. “What happened next?” “What did you do when that didn’t work?” “How did that make you feel?” You’re not leading them anywhere - you’re excavating. This is where most interviewers fail. They wait for the customer to finish their sentence, then ask the next question on their list. Torres calls this “interview ping-pong” and it kills the depth you’re looking for. Listen for the gaps The most valuable moments in a customer interview are often what customers don’t say. They’ll describe a workaround without realising it’s a workaround. They’ll mention in passing that they export everything to a spreadsheet. They’ll laugh awkwardly and say “yeah we just kind of gave up on that feature.” 😅 Those moments are your opportunities. Write them down.

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What to do with what you learn

After each interview, Torres suggests capturing three things:

• Facts - what actually happened, what tools they used, what the sequence of events was
• Assumptions - what you inferred but they didn’t explicitly say
• Opportunities - pain points, unmet needs, or desires worth exploring further

The opportunities go on your Opportunity-Solution Tree. The facts keep you honest. The assumptions remind you what still needs validating.

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Who should be in the room

Torres is a strong advocate for the whole product trio - PM, designer, and engineer - attending interviews together. Not because three people are better at asking questions, but because each person hears something different. Engineers notice technical constraints the customer doesn’t know they’re working around. Designers notice usability friction. PMs notice the business context. Shared exposure to customers builds shared empathy - and that’s what makes a team make better decisions together. If you can only do one thing differently after reading this: stop sending your researcher to interviews alone and then reading a summary three weeks later. Be in the room.

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A note on recruiting

The biggest excuse for not doing weekly interviews is “we can’t find customers to talk to.” Torres has a simple fix: ask at the end of every interview if they know anyone else who’d be willing to chat. One warm intro a week compounds fast. You don’t need a research ops team. You need a calendar invite and the habit of asking.