User Interview Template - ProductFTW #82
With Questions & Template
Last week, Jessica wrote about one of the biggest mistakes teams make during user interviews: treating them as validation exercises rather than discovery conversations.
We don’t want to just pitch problems. The follow-up questions are obvious:
- “What questions should I actually ask?”
- “How should I structure interviews?”
- “What does a good discovery conversation look like?”
Good questions, let’s dig in with this quick user interview template and guide that product teams can use to run better discovery conversations and uncover real customer pain before building features.
What’s Inside
The guide includes:
- a simple interview structure
- workflow questions
- pain point questions
- workaround questions
- impact questions
- examples of what NOT to ask
- common interview mistakes
The framework is designed to help teams better understand:
- how users actually work
- where workflows break down
- what frustrations repeat consistently
- what problems are painful enough to solve
One of the Most Useful Interview Shifts
Most weak interviews focus on hypothetical behavior.
Strong interviews focus on real past behavior.
Instead of asking:
“Would you use this?”
Ask:
“Walk me through the last time you had to do this.”
That one change alone tends to produce dramatically better discovery conversations.
Read the Full Guide
If you’re doing:
- product discovery
- customer research
- roadmap planning
- UX research
- early-stage product validation
This guide should help you run more useful user interviews and uncover more actionable insights.
Read the full User Interview Template + Guide here:
More ProductFTW Resources
About ProductFTW
ProductFTW is a weekly newsletter about product management, with a focus on real-life experiences in startups. We want to help product leaders be successful by giving realistic approaches that aren’t for giant tech companies. We know you don’t have a full-time product designer on each team. We know your software probably hasn’t been used by millions of people worldwide–yet. We’re here to bridge the content gap from building your product and team to scaling it.