Start with the assumption that could change your decision
Do not begin by writing twenty interview questions. Start with one belief your team is using to make a product or service decision.
For example: “Operations managers struggle to coordinate schedule changes because information arrives too late.”
Then ask what would change your mind. Maybe the problem is rare. Maybe another role handles it. Maybe the information is available but people do not trust it. Maybe the real difficulty is not timing at all.
That turns a broad research topic into an uncertainty worth investigating.
Use simulated conversations to find what your team is missing
Explore the assumption with a modeled customer in the context you care about. Ask about recent situations, responsibilities, current workarounds, consequences and other people involved.
Do not treat the answers as evidence that the assumption is true. Look instead for preparation signals: questions you had not considered, ambiguous terms, another stakeholder perspective that may matter, or assumptions hidden inside your wording.
If the conversation keeps pulling you toward confirming your idea, rewrite the research question so a real participant can disagree with it.
Turn the uncertainty into a recruitment brief
Once the assumption is clearer, decide who needs to be in the real research.
Recruitment field · What to define
- Relevant responsibility: What must the participant actually do, own or influence?
- Relevant experience: What situation should they have encountered recently enough to discuss concretely?
- Business context: Which industry, company size, region or operating environment matters?
- Reason for inclusion: What uncertainty can this participant help resolve?
Recruit for experience and responsibility, not just job titles. The same title can describe different work in different organizations.
If another role could materially change the story, add it as a recruitment hypothesis rather than assuming your original participant profile is complete.
Rewrite questions so the customer can surprise you
A strong interview question helps you learn what happened rather than inviting agreement.
Instead of asking:
“Would faster alerts help you avoid delays?”
Ask:
“Tell me about the last time a delay became difficult to manage.”
Then follow the story. What happened first? Who noticed? What did they do? What information was missing? Who else became involved?
Keep questions open enough for the participant to tell you that your assumed problem is minor, different or nonexistent. The guide should keep the research goal visible while leaving room for unexpected evidence.
Example: from product assumption to interview plan
Illustrative example, not a customer result.
A B2B software team believes maintenance planners in multi-site industrial companies need a better way to coordinate urgent work with planned maintenance.
Before recruiting, the team explores the assumption with an AI-simulated maintenance-planning perspective in the intended company context.
The conversation raises possibilities: perhaps urgent work is not the main disruption, operations has more influence over priorities, or the real difficulty occurs when information passes between sites.
The team does not record these as findings. It sharpens the fieldwork.
The recruitment brief calls for people who have recently coordinated planned and urgent maintenance, with responsibility for scheduling or prioritization. It may also include an operations role if that dependency appears consequential.
The guide starts with recent examples: “Walk me through the last time urgent work disrupted the plan.” Follow-up questions investigate decisions, handoffs, workarounds and consequences without introducing the proposed software solution.
Separate research questions from interview questions
Your research question is what the team needs to learn. Your interview questions are prompts that help a participant describe relevant experience.
Research question: How are urgent maintenance priorities actually decided across maintenance and operations?
Interview question: “Tell me about the last time two maintenance needs competed for the same people or equipment.”
Keeping those levels separate reduces the temptation to ask participants to answer your internal hypothesis directly.
Finish with a disconfirming-evidence check
Before the first interview, ask:
What could we hear that would make us change our current belief?
If there is no plausible answer, the guide is probably built to confirm rather than investigate.
Write down two or three observations that would weaken the assumption. Make sure the recruitment brief and guide give real participants room to reveal them.
Virtual Customer can help expose possible blind spots before fieldwork. Real interviews provide evidence about what actual customers experience, believe and report doing. If your decision depends on observed behavior, complement interviews with observation, product data or another appropriate method.
Start with one assumption
Choose one product assumption behind a live decision. Explore it with a relevant modeled customer, identify what remains uncertain, then turn that uncertainty into participant criteria and a short set of open-ended questions for your next real customer interviews.