How to run user interviews like a pro – a founder's guide on how to extract deep insights

In the early days of building a startup, founders tend to focus heavily on engineering and marketing their product. While these areas are undoubtedly important, there’s one essential aspect that unfortunately often gets pushed to the side — research through direct conversations with existing or potential users.

Talking to your users may look like a simple task on the surface, but there’s a lot of nuance to interviewing a user in a way that doesn’t corrupt the information you’re given and extracts as much as possible in the short timeframe you have with them.

This guide will take you through speaking to users, from preparing for these conversations to transforming insights into action. We’ll explore the best practices for asking the right questions, avoiding common pitfalls, and using user insights to drive product decisions that fuel growth.

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1. Asking the right questions

User conversations are only as good as the questions you ask. Thoughtfully framing your questions determines whether you extract shallow feedback or uncover meaningful insights that can drive growth.

Open-Ended vs. Leading Questions

One of the biggest mistakes founders make when speaking to users is asking leading questions. Leading questions suggest a particular answer or bias the user’s response. For example:

• Leading question: “Would you find it helpful if we added X feature?”.
• Open-ended question: “How do you currently solve [problem]?”

Open-ended questions encourage users to speak freely and share their true thoughts. Here are some effective open-ended questions to consider:

• “Tell me about your experience with our product. What stood out to you?”
• “What problems are you trying to solve with our product?”
• “What does your workflow look like when fixing that problem?”
• “Can you walk me through how you use our product on a typical day?”

Finally, remember to focus your questions on what users do rather than what they say they’d like. People are not experts in solutions. They’re experts in their problems. Even if a question is open-ended, it’s not useful if it requires people to dream up solutions to their problems. This brings us to the next point.

Focusing on problems, not solutions

Users are often quick to suggest solutions. However, their solutions may not be the best way to address their underlying problem. Your job as a founder is to dig deeper into the problem itself. When a user proposes a feature or change, instead of taking it at face value, follow up with questions like:

• “Why do you need that?”
• “What problem would that solve for you?”
• “How are you solving this problem today without this feature?”

Understanding the root problem allows you to create a complete solution and make sure it integrates well with the rest of the system, rather than building a feature that may only be a surface-level fix (the infamous “hotfix”).

For further reading on this topic and more, I recommend “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick.

Example: extracting feedback from a churned user

Imagine you’re speaking to a user who churned after using your product for three months. Instead of asking, “Why did you stop using the product?” (which may yield a vague response), you ask:

• “Can you walk me through your experience with the product from the moment you signed up?”
• “What did you expect the product to help you achieve?”
• “At what point did you feel like the product was no longer meeting your needs?”

These questions encourage the user to reflect on their experience and give detailed feedback that can inform future improvements.

2. Active listening techniques

Great user interviews require more than just asking the right questions — you need to actively listen to what users are saying (and not saying). Active listening helps uncover deeper insights by keeping interviewees engaged and pushing them to provide deeper insights.

Listen more. Talk less. Sell nothing.

During user conversations, founders often feel the urge to explain their product or respond defensively to negative feedback. However, the goal is to listen, not to sell or to justify your past design decisions. Try to follow the 80/20 rule — let users do 80% of the talking, and only use 20% of the conversation for clarification or follow-up questions.

Reading between the lines

Users don’t always say exactly what they mean, and sometimes, the most valuable insights come from what’s left unsaid. Pay attention to non-verbal cues like hesitation, changes in tone, or long pauses. If a user is struggling to articulate something, ask them to clarify or expand on their point.

There’s not much else to say here other than “Keep your eyes open and use your best judgment”. It’s more art than science and more experience than method.

Dig deep — asking probing questions

Effective user conversations involve probing beyond surface-level answers. Sometimes users might be reluctant to open up. In such cases, a pause might be enough to cause them to want to fill the void and continue talking. Other times, a simple “Yes, go on…” together with a gesture that hints that they should continue is enough. When that doesn’t work, use follow-up questions like:

• “ You said that… (help them recall). Can you tell me more about that?”
• “What did you mean when you said…?”
• “Why did you…?”

These follow-up questions encourage users to reflect more deeply and share insights that they might not have initially mentioned.

Note-taking during interviews

Don’t take notes while talking to users because it dilutes your attention and disengages the interviewee. Instead, either have someone else take on the note-taker role or record the meeting and extract notes yourself after the call. There are recording call recording tools that use AI to analyze what was said and extract the key points. However, keep in mind these transcription tools are not a replacement for UX specialists. I recommend reviewing the AI-generated notes and listening to the call again to make sure the maximum value is extracted.

A great tool for running user interviews and taking notes is Lookback. The app lets you add timestamped notes to your interview recording, adding essential context to your note, and making it easy to share with your team.

3. Common Pitfalls to Avoid

While speaking to users can be incredibly valuable, there are also common pitfalls that can derail your efforts. Here are some mistakes to watch out for — and how to avoid them.

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias occurs when founders subconsciously steer conversations to confirm what they already believe about their product. This can happen when you ask leading questions or ignore feedback that contradicts your assumptions.

To avoid confirmation bias:

• Actively seek out users who have had negative experiences with your product. This helps you maintain a balanced view of how well your product performs.
• Challenge your assumptions and be open to feedback that doesn’t align with your expectations.
• Encourage users to critique the product by asking, “What would you change or improve?”

Being aware of your own bias requires practice. Biases are by definition unconscious, making them hard to spot. It takes a high degree of self-awareness and honesty to bring them to light. Listening to recordings of your conversations or having someone else do it can help identify them.

Over-generalizing feedback

It’s tempting to let one or two user conversations dictate product decisions, but over-generalizing from a small sample can lead to misguided priorities. A few vocal users don’t represent the entire user base, and building features based on isolated feedback may lead to wasted resources and effort.

To avoid over-generalizing:

• Look for patterns. Collect feedback from multiple users before making decisions. If you hear the same issues from different user segments, that’s a sign the problem is more widespread.
• Balance qualitative and quantitative data. Combine user interviews with data from surveys or product analytics to validate insights at scale. If multiple users are saying they want a particular feature, use a large-scale survey to validate the need for it.

Getting defensive

Founders are deeply connected to their product, so it’s natural to feel defensive when users provide negative feedback. It’s like telling someone their baby is ugly. However, reacting defensively can shut down valuable insights and make users less willing to share honest opinions.

To avoid defensiveness:

• Adopt a growth mindset. Treat feedback as an opportunity to improve your product rather than as criticism.
• Thank users for their honesty. Acknowledge that their feedback is helping you create a better product.
• Stay curious. Focus on understanding why users feel the way they do instead of defending your product’s current state

Losing control of the conversation

Sometimes users who are passionate about a subject might unintentionally take over the conversation and start brainstorming solutions. While you generally don’t want to stop a user from talking, remember the goal of any interview is to understand a problem or determine if a feature solves a problem, not to let the interviewee run wild with ideas. In such cases, the interviewer needs to be assertive, intervene, and steer the conversation in the right direction.

Be polite and gentle, but firm. Saying something like this could help: “That’s an interesting idea. I wrote it down in my notes, but I’d like to know more about something you mentioned earlier. You said that … What did you mean?”

Focusing on opinion, not action

User interviews generate the most value when the discussion focuses on what the user does rather than what they say. Opinions are more important in branding and things that have to do with perception rather than problem-solving. Instead of users talking about what they think about a solution (yours or a competitor’s), focus the conversation on what they do. Ask your interviewee to walk you through what they do, in detail. If possible, allow them to show you how they fix a problem. To maximize your understanding of what they’re doing, ask users to think aloud — i.e. narrate what goes on in their minds as they’re doing the task.

4. Turning insights into action

Gathering user feedback is only valuable if it leads to actionable steps that improve your product. Once you’ve conducted user interviews, it’s time to organize, analyze, and apply the insights to your product development strategy.

Look for patterns

After conducting a series of user conversations, review your notes and look for recurring themes. For each interview, extract insights and group them into categories (e.g., usability issues, feature requests, or onboarding challenges) to identify which areas of the product need the most attention.

For example:

• Do multiple users struggle with the same feature?
• Are you hearing the same frustration about the onboarding process?
• Are users asking for similar features or improvements?

Prioritize based on impact

Not every piece of feedback should result in a change. Instead, prioritize feedback based on its potential impact on user satisfaction, retention, or growth and the effort it takes to implement it. There are many prioritization frameworks out there, but for startups, a simple effort-impact scale is all that’s needed.

When deciding on impact scores, consider factors like:

• Frequency: How often do users mention this issue?
• Severity: How much does the issue impact the user experience?
• Alignment with your product vision: Does the feedback align with your long-term goals and strategy?

For example, if several users mention difficulty with a core feature, fixing it should take priority over adding new features that only a small group of users requested.

Workflow template in Notion

I created a Notion template that includes trackers for user interviews and what I call “UX bugs” — i.e. design and usability issues identified during interviews.

The template uses 3 databases: user interviews, UX bugs, and user personas. Let’s take a closer look at each one.

User Research. This is where track everything about interviews — interviewer, interviewee, date, duration, and status.

UX bugs are aggregating the issues recorded across all interviews. We can group issues by severity, product area, interviewed person, or status. Notion makes this very easy.

User personas. This is optional. It’s a place to store all information about the user personas (problems, frustrations, needs, etc). This tracker is linked to User interviews and helps mark what type of user the interview was with.

The workflow

For each interview add the link to the recording, extract timestamped notes with key conclusions and learnings, and add items to the “UX issues” table. This will add items to the UX bugs table and link them to the interview, adding essential context to the ticket.

Testing and iterating based on feedback

Periodically review the “UX bugs” tracker and prioritize high-impact items by adding them to your roadmap. High-effort items can be turned into a project and low-effort ones can be batched together to form an improvement project.

Don’t rush to ship solutions in production. Turn insights into hypotheses that you can test. Iterate on solutions and test them early before fully implementing changes. For example:

• If users struggle with onboarding, test different onboarding flows to see which one improves activation rates. This can easily be prototyped in Figma and tested with a tool like maze.co.
• If users request a new feature, create a prototype and gather additional feedback before fully developing it.

By testing your assumptions early and often, you can avoid spending time and resources on changes that don’t resonate with users.

Conclusion: prioritizing user conversations drives growth

Speaking to users is one of the most effective ways for founders to extract the insights needed to drive product growth. By asking the right questions, actively listening, and avoiding common pitfalls, founders can gain a deep understanding of user needs and pain points.

Once these insights are collected turn them into actionable steps that prioritize high-impact improvements. Whether addressing usability issues, fixing onboarding problems, or exploring new features, user feedback should be at the core of your product development strategy.

Follow these steps to ensure you’re extracting essential insights from your users, driving meaningful growth, and ultimately creating a product that users love… paying for.