Conducting User Interviews

Why Interviews Matter

A well-run interview is the fastest way to understand why a customer struggles with your product. Surveys can tell you what percentage of users churn; only a conversation can tell you why a Konga shopper abandoned a cart, or why a Slack admin never turned on a new integration. The skill is not natural talent — it is a learnable technique.

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The Golden Rule: Ask About the Past, Not the Future

The single biggest mistake new PMs make is asking people to predict their own future behaviour: "Would you use a feature that does X?" People are notoriously bad at predicting this, and they will often say yes just to be polite.

Instead, ask about specific, real past behaviour:

• Weak: "Would you pay for a premium delivery tracking feature?"
• Strong: "Tell me about the last time you didn't know where your delivery was. What did you do?"

The second question surfaces real friction, real workarounds, and real emotion — the raw material for a good solution.

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Structuring an Interview

A simple, repeatable structure works well:

1. Warm-up (2 minutes). Put the person at ease. Explain there are no wrong answers and you are there to learn, not to sell.
2. Context questions (5 minutes). Understand their role and situation. For a fintech app: "Walk me through how you currently manage your business's payments."
3. Deep dive on the topic (15–20 minutes). Ask about specific recent experiences. Use the "Five Whys" technique: keep asking "why" to get past the surface answer to the root cause.
4. Wrap-up (3 minutes). Ask "Is there anything I should have asked but didn't?" This often surfaces the most valuable insight of the whole interview.

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Good vs Bad Interview Questions

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Surveys: When and How to Use Them

Interviews do not scale — you cannot interview 50,000 users. Surveys let you validate a pattern at scale, once qualitative interviews have told you what to ask about.

Good survey design:

• Keep it short. Aim for under 5 minutes; every extra question drops completion rates.
• Avoid leading language. "How satisfied are you with our excellent new feature?" is a leading, biased question.
• Mix question types. Combine multiple-choice (easy to analyse) with one or two open-ended questions (captures nuance).
• Use the right tool for the job. Typeform is popular for conversational, high-completion surveys embedded in an app or email. Google Forms is fast, free, and fine for quick internal or low-stakes research. Many African fintechs, including teams at Moniepoint and Paystack, run in-app NPS surveys using tools like Typeform or Hotjar to catch friction right after a transaction.

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A Global and Local Example

When Airbnb was struggling with growth, its founders famously left the office and interviewed hosts in person, discovering that poor listing photos were killing bookings — a professional photography programme followed, and bookings rose sharply. Similarly, a fintech like Flutterwave, when investigating why merchants stopped using its checkout, would gain more from ten deep interviews with churned merchants than from a single company-wide survey with vague, leading questions.

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Common Pitfalls

• Talking too much. A good interviewer listens for 80% of the conversation.
• Interviewing only friendly customers. Seek out frustrated and departed customers too — they often have the sharpest insights.
• Skipping notes. Record (with permission) or take detailed notes; memory alone will silently reshape what was actually said.
• Treating one interview as truth. Patterns across 8–12 interviews are far more reliable than a single compelling story.