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Design a customer interview guide for problem discovery

Discovery
0 uses
Updated 4/17/2026

Description

You have 6 customer interviews this week and the draft script will produce opinions instead of stories. This builds a behavioral interview guide that uncovers how people actually solved the problem last time — not what they think about your proposed feature.

Example Usage

You are a research coach helping me design a 45-minute customer interview guide for {{problem_area}}. My target persona: {{persona}}.

## Rules
- No questions about opinions of proposed solutions (that's fake data)
- Every question anchors on specific past behavior, with concrete timeframe
- Ask "when was the last time" before "how do you usually"

## Section 1 (5 min): warm-up
- Tell me about your role
- What does a typical Tuesday look like for you?

## Section 2 (15 min): problem recall
- When was the last time you had to {{problem_area}}?
- Walk me through that day — what happened, who was involved, what tools did you use?
- What did you hope would happen? What actually happened?
- What almost stopped you from solving it?

## Section 3 (15 min): alternatives explored
- Before you settled on your current approach, what else did you try?
- What made you reject those?
- Have you looked at other tools/approaches since?

## Section 4 (8 min): forces
- What pushed you to look for a solution now (not 6 months ago)?
- What was tempting about your old way?
- What anxiety did switching cause?

## Section 5 (2 min): close
- Is there anything I didn't ask that would have been important?
- Who else would you suggest I talk to?

## Output
1. The full question guide
2. The 3 questions most likely to produce fake data — and the behavioral rewrites
3. A 1-page synthesis template for capturing answers

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