“You've got 30 minutes with one customer and a list of assumptions to test - what do you actually ask them?”
Discovery interview coming up - what questions actually surface the real problem?
Recommended AI Agent Skills
Guides a PM through preparing discovery interview questions tied to a stated research goal, avoiding confirmation-biased questions.
User ResearchInterview PrepProduct Management
Maintains a weekly customer-touchpoint cadence and builds an Opportunity Solution Tree connecting business outcomes to real customer problems.
Product DiscoveryOpportunity Solution TreeCadence
Applies Steve Blank's Customer Development methodology to validate hypotheses before building anything.
Customer DevelopmentValidationLean Startup
Action framework
- Write your research goal as one sentence before drafting any question - anything that doesn't trace back to it gets cut.
- Ask about past behavior, not future intentions - "Tell me about the last time you..." beats "Would you use a feature that...".
- Avoid questions that can be answered with a nod - "Is pricing a problem?" gets a polite yes; "Walk me through your last renewal decision" gets a real answer.
- Never pitch the solution mid-interview - if the customer asks what you're building, deflect back to their problem until the interview ends.
- After each answer, ask one follow-up "why" or "what happened next" before moving on - the first answer is rarely the real one.
Before
"Would you use a feature that let you export this to Excel?"
After
"Walk me through the last time you needed this data outside the app - what did you do, and what took the longest?"