Customer Discovery Interview Template

A customer discovery interview is a structured conversation to learn how a customer experiences a problem before you build or pitch a solution. The goal is truth, not validation. The best discovery interviews feel like the interviewer is genuinely curious and never once mentions their product.

When to use it

Run discovery interviews before committing to a new product, feature, or market. Use them when you are unsure who the customer really is, what they value, or whether the problem is painful enough to pay for. Aim for several conversations, not one, so patterns emerge.

Who attends

One interviewer leads and one note-taker captures verbatim quotes. Keep the customer or prospect outnumbered by no more than one, so they feel heard rather than interrogated. Founders and product leads should sit in directly early on.

How to run it

Open by making it clear you are learning, not selling. Anchor every question in the past and the specific: ask what they actually did last time, not what they would hypothetically do. Follow emotion and effort, because that is where real problems live. Resist the urge to pitch or to fix the problem in the room. Close by asking what you failed to ask and who else you should meet.

Questions to ask

• Walk me through the last time you ran into this problem. What happened?
• What did you do about it? What did you try before that?
• How much time or money did that cost you, roughly?
• What is the hardest part of doing this today?
• What would have to be true for you to change how you handle this?
• Who else is affected by this, and who would weigh in on a fix?
• Is there anything I should have asked but did not?

Common mistakes

• Pitching your idea, which trains the customer to be polite instead of honest.
• Asking hypothetical questions like would you buy this instead of digging into past behavior.
• Leading the witness with questions that signal the answer you want.
• Running one interview and treating it as proof rather than a single data point.

Capture every interview, tag the patterns, and turn quotes into decisions. Run it in OrgTP.