Template: Discovery research interview questions for B2B or SaaS customers

Questions to kick off your B2B or SaaS research

Sep 22

Customer interviews are a good way to know your customers. You will understand how they use your product and their pain points. Beyond gathering data to inform your roadmap, interviewing customers can help to build relationships and empathy.

With these questions, you can identify gaps, opportunities and potential future use cases. Michael Margolis (UX Research Partner at Google Ventures) recommends checklists for easier research.

The below checklist is a basic set you can use every time. Every business and its product is different. We encourage you could build on these or adjust as you see fit. We use this checklist every time we talk to our B2B customers. It’s a good start to understanding your customers.

Keeping the questions consistent is useful. The more consistent the questions, the more likely you’ll have data you can collect over time and compare. Get others in your organisation to use the same set and collect the data in the same place.

There’s a link to the Notion template at the end so you can start using it today.

Share

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Background and context

What is your role?
Tell us more about the business and strategy
What are some of the business goals or team goals?
How long have you been there?
How big is your team and what do they do?
What are your responsibilities?
How are the responsibilities shared (if at all)?
What tools do you use right now?
What are your challenges?
What does your day look like?

Drivers and use cases

How do you do this task currently?
Why do you need to do this task?
What do you do before and after this task?
How often are you doing this task?
How long is it taking you or how much of your day do you spend on this?
What are some pain points around this task presently?

Metrics

How do you measure success?
What else do you need to know and when?
Who else needs to know these things?
How do updates or metrics get shared presently?

Competitors

What have you tried?
Where have you looked?
What worked well?
What was missing or didn’t work well?

Closeout and follow up

Should we be talking to someone else inside the organisation?
How should we keep you updated?
Can we follow up with more questions?
Was there anything we missed?
Do you have any questions?

Additional tips we use to help us make these calls more worthwhile:

Include Sales or Success in the calls or debrief them after the interview.
Look up your CRM (Customer relationship management software) or customer support ticket data beforehand so you know about outstanding issues or avoid asking redundant questions.

Share