How to prepare for customer interviews
Get set up for effective product discovery research
Last updated: May 2025
Explore the preparation process for customer interviews. Get an overview of why interviews matter to product discovery and common challenges product managers face. Plus, learn how to set discovery goals, write interview scripts, and choose software to manage your customer research. |
Calendar invites sent. Nice work. Recruiting customers to interview is often one of the hardest parts of the product discovery process. Now, it is time to prepare — you want to make these conversations count.
But even experienced product managers can feel unsure before a customer interview. How do you turn a conversation into real insights?
You already know how to identify valuable ideas that will deliver on goals. Running customer interviews is not so different. It is about being curious, staying focused, and listening closely. You do not need to be a research expert to do it well — just clear on what you want to learn.
Seamlessly manage user interviews. Try Aha! Discovery.
This guide will help you prepare to lead thoughtful interviews, from defining research goals to structuring your script (and moving beyond it). If you would rather skip ahead, go for it:
The basics: What is a customer interview?
A customer interview is a structured conversation with existing or potential buyers and users of your product. The goal is to uncover deeper insights into their needs, behaviors, and experiences. Customer interviews focus on open-ended discussion — allowing for more exploratory questions than other research methods.
Customer interviews are a key part of the product discovery process, which kicks off early in product development. These conversations are opportunities for product teams to:
Identify customers' unmet needs or pain points
Explore assumptions about user behavior
Generate ideas for new features or enhancements
Inform potential changes to your roadmap
The specific intent can vary based on the type of interview. Most customer interviews fall into one of these four categories:
Discovery interviews: Explore opportunities to innovate new or existing products.
Feedback interviews: Learn about the problems customers experience when using your product.
Usability interviews: Review the steps and workflows users follow to complete actions in your product.
Validation interviews: Confirm the direction of complex new functionality as you define it.
Our point of view is that product managers should lead customer interviews — as you are the one responsible for figuring out what to build. But at some large organizations, UX researchers or even customer success teammates help manage this research. This approach works well, too, as long as you can still be involved in planning the research goals and interview questions.
So, what is the point? Why should you interview customers?
In short, an interview is the most authentic way to gather customer insights. Sure, you can run feedback surveys and look at product usage to identify trends. But these methods have limits — the output is more controlled, aggregated, and surface level. They tell you what is happening, but not why.
This is the unique value of interviews. You are not just collecting data — you are hearing the unfiltered reality of how people experience your product.
Interviews often surface needs that customers struggle to articulate or that you did not know to ask about. Follow-up questions can also expose richer context behind what your customers say — so you do not have to guess what they really need. These nuances are what make these conversations so worth the effort.
You can upload recordings and extract insights from customer interviews in Aha! Discovery.
The challenges: Why is planning customer interviews so hard to do?
The value of product discovery is clear. And yet it is still a hurdle for many product teams to interview customers on a regular basis. There are a few common reasons why:
Lack of experience: Interviewing is a skill — one that does not always come naturally to product managers. You have to know which questions will yield honest answers, get comfortable asking them, and dig deeper for the truth.
Trouble getting started: The first steps can seem overwhelming. It takes effort to recruit participants and schedule interviews, then prepare to do the actual research. (And most product managers are short on bandwidth as it is.)
Becoming stuck in routines: Even if you do interviews on occasion, many teams fall into habits (like reusing generic scripts with the same group of customers over and over). This approach is unlikely to surface anything you do not already know.
Unclear outcomes: User interviews often lead to meaningful insights, but this is not a guarantee. It might take a few rounds of conversations, plus a few tweaks to your script, before real findings start to emerge. For some, this uncertainty feels unproductive — deterring them from making the effort.
It is true that customer interviews are not easy to do well. But there are ways to make this work feel more efficient and impactful. And you guessed it: This starts with how you prepare.
Related:
The prep work: Customer interview strategies, scripts, and setup
Let's acknowledge the obvious. The most essential piece of preparation is finding customers to interview. You need enough of them, and it needs to be a diverse group.
This comes with its own challenges, which we have written about — you can learn more in our guide to building a customer research database. But for this guide, let's assume you already have willing participants lined up. The advice in this section will help you prepare for your first round of interviews.
How to define goals and assumptions for customer interviews
Your research needs a clear purpose. Otherwise, conversations drift and time is wasted. Before you talk to anyone, get specific about what you are trying to learn and why it matters now.
After all, discovery work is not truly objective. Product managers are not wandering aimlessly into interviews hoping for any random insight to materialize — you have a vision and a roadmap to build. You need to explore whether the direction you have in mind is the right one.
You have two things to accomplish here:
1. Set your customer research goals
Start with a hypothesis. You probably have one already, even if you have not said it out loud. Write it down. Clear objectives will keep your interviews focused and help you gauge when you have learned enough to move forward.
A good research goal is specific, actionable, and tied to a real product decision you need to make. Most importantly, it should define what you want to learn — not what you are trying to prove. This is about putting your hunch to the test.
Let's look at a few examples of research goals:
❌ Bad research goal: See if customers like using our reporting dashboards
✅ Better research goal: Understand how customers currently navigate their data and what slows them down
❌ Bad research goal: Ask users if they want sharing features in our app
✅ Better research goal: Learn how users want to connect with each other
❌ Bad research goal: Confirm people are interested in our new premium plan
✅ Better research goal: Explore what added value customers would expect from a premium plan
2. Acknowledge your research assumptions
Alongside your goals, it is just as important to name what you already believe. You might have a good idea of the biggest problems your customers face, or even how to solve them.
These assumptions are natural — but if you ignore them, they may quietly steer your questions or skew how you interpret what you hear.
Ask yourself:
What do we think we know?
What outcomes do we hope for?
What might surprise us?
What would make us change the product direction?
Capture these assumptions alongside your goals. That way, you will be able to tell the difference between what you believe and what customers are actually telling you when you start talking to them.
How to write a customer interview script
A thoughtful interview script is key. It helps you stay focused on questions that matter to your research goals. But keep a careful balance — you want to structure the session without turning the conversation into a checklist.
Plan a basic flow
Start by outlining a general path for the discussion, how long you want to spend on each segment, and broad ideas of what to cover. Keeping it simple will help you stay flexible. For example:
Intro (5 min.): Introduce yourself and what you are working on. Explain why their perspective matters.
Current experience (5-10 min.): Understand how the customer solves the problem today.
Exploration, feedback, or testing (15 min.): Share concepts, wireframes, or existing product features with the customer. Observe how they engage. Note where they pause, what they ignore, and what excites them.
Follow-up (5-10 min.): Dig deeper into what you have learned so far with further questions.
Wrap-up (5 min.): Summarize what you heard and ask what you might have missed. Share your thanks and any next steps.
Draft the script and choose interview questions
Scripting an introduction to the interview is easy enough. But it is tricky to know what to ask. You want to uncover insights that will support your research goals — all while staying curious about new ideas that emerge and discreet about your own opinions.
Avoid questions that start with phrases like "would you use … " or "do you like … " This encourages people to speculate or answer positively out of politeness. Participants may even respond with a vague "maybe" or "sure" just so you move on.
Instead, anchor in reality. Choose questions about behavior, experiences, and expectations. This will reveal how your customers act, think, and feel, which is what you really need to know to make better product decisions.
The same goes for the rest of your script. Transparency from you sets the tone for a more honest and open interview. Here are a few ideas to help you set up your script in this way:
👎 Instead of saying ... | 👍 Say this instead |
"We are excited to show you something great we’ve been working on." | "We are here to learn — I want to know what is and isn't working for you." |
"Would a feature like this help solve your problem?" | "Walk me through how you handle this today. What have you tried?" |
"How often do you use this feature?" | "Tell me about the last time you used this feature." |
"What is wrong with this design?" | "What would you expect to happen here? What is confusing or missing?" |
Test it out
You do not need to talk to customers to start practicing. Try out your interview script with a teammate or run it through an AI tool to catch awkward wording or leading questions. This can also help build your confidence for the real thing.
Remember: Do not get hung up on sticking to the script. It can be more valuable to explore the unexpected ideas that come up in customer conversations — even if they stray from your original plan.
Related:
How to choose software for managing customer interviews
Product discovery is not a project you complete. It is a continuous process to bring the voice of the customer into your biggest product decisions. As you prepare to do user interviews, consider how you will manage this ongoing research.
Some product teams try to take notes and summarize key themes in ad hoc presentations. Others attempt to shoehorn discovery work into existing CRM tools. But these options do not really cut it. To do discovery right, you need tools that can help you:
Schedule interviews and track who you talk to
Keep your research goals visible and interview scripts handy
Capture notes and transcripts in a consistent format
Connect your research to your roadmap
That is a lot — certainly more than a few docs and slides can handle. And it is why we built our own product discovery tool for this work.
Use software built for product discovery
If you want customer interviews to be a repeatable practice that drives real product innovation (and not just a one-off scramble for feedback), you need software to support the process. We built Aha! Discovery for product teams that want to get better at this — ourselves included. It gives you one place to manage research plans, run interviews, analyze the results, and link what you learn directly to what you build next. Try it for yourself.
Manage research participants and customer interview outreach in Aha! Discovery.
From planning a solid research strategy to writing your script, this upfront prep work will put you in a good place to get started. And you will feel ready to take on the next step: actually running effective user interviews. (We wrote a guide on this, too. Be sure to read that next.)
FAQs about customer interviews
These terms often refer to the same thing. But customer interviews can include a broader range of participants — including both buyers and users of your product (who are not always the same). And in some cases, user interviews refer specifically to conversations with active product users (or potential ones) and may have a narrower usability focus.
Start with a clear objective — what do you want to learn? Your customer interview script should help you explore that goal. Outline a set of open-ended questions that explore the broader context and your customers' motivations before narrowing in on specific behaviors. Leave room for curiosity and do not be afraid to deviate from what you have written. Remember that the script should guide the conversation, not control it.
Customer interviews are a primary input for product discovery. They are how you understand real customer problems that exist and uncover new ones to solve. By talking to customers directly, you can reveal product insights that will not surface in survey feedback or usage data. That makes interviews critical for helping product folks know what to build — and why — during the product discovery process.
This is important because product discovery starts early in product development. The more you can learn in discovery interviews, the better you can shape your roadmap to deliver what customers value most.
Aha! software is built to make this transition from discovery to delivery more seamless. For example, you can run customer interviews in Aha! Discovery — then link your findings directly to your product plans in Aha! Roadmaps.
