PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
How to Prioritize Questions During Interviews
Learn how to prioritize questions during customer interviews
While doing customer interviews it is important to be good at prioritizing time. You probably have a lot of questions that you would like to ask, but as a founder, you have limited time and most interviewees also have some limit to how much time they are willing to spend with you.
During the first few interviews, you should try to cover most of the relevant topics, while at a later stage you should focus more time on the areas where there are weaknesses in your understanding of the problem. Make sure that you don’t acquire a too-focused approach too early, you would like to make sure that you have gotten all the important insight on a topic before you move on.
It is difficult to find the right number of interviews to conduct and decide how many people to ask the same question to. My advice is that you keep interviewing and asking the same questions until the learning outcome gets so small that you are better off spending your time on other matters.
Make sure that you spend the most time on the questions that are important for you to reach the goals you set for the interview. Don’t let an opportunity to learn something new run away just because it wasn’t a part of your goals, though. Oftentimes the learning outcome will have a curve somewhat similar to the one displayed in Figure 2. Most founders should stop interviewing people when they reach the plateau of the curve below.
