Ask questions that can't be answered with a compliment

The most popular interview question is also the most pointless. “Would you use this?” invites the person to be nice. They say yes, you feel great, and you’ve learned nothing about whether anyone would pay for the thing. Rob Fitzpatrick calls it the difference between a compliment and a fact, and his book, The Mom Test, is one long argument for writing questions your own mother couldn’t flatter her way through.

The rule is to ask about the past and never the future. People can’t tell you what they’ll do, but they can tell you what they already did. “Tell me about the last time you had to deal with this” gets you real behaviour. “What did you try, what annoyed you?” gets you the problem. “Would you buy a tool that fixes it?” gets you a maybe that means nothing. Past behaviour is the only reliable material an interview has to work with.

You aren’t there to pitch, and you aren’t there to march through a fixed list of questions, so don’t let an interview turn into a sales call or a survey read out loud. You’re there to find out what someone does and where it hurts, which means following the unexpected. When someone says something that surprises you, that’s usually the moment a rehearsed answer slips and the real one shows through, so go there. The question you’d planned can wait.

Often the most useful thing you can do is stay quiet. Ask a short question, then stop, and let the silence sit. People fill silence, and what they fill it with is usually the bit worth writing down. If you talk to fill the gap, you teach them what you want to hear. Watch the phrasing too. A leading question carries the answer inside it, “don’t you find the checkout slow?”, and turns the conversation into a survey of your own opinions. Ask the plainest version and let them choose the words.

You don’t need many of these. After five or six good interviews the same problems start repeating, and that repetition is your signal. Twenty interviews where you talked and they agreed is worth less than three where you shut up and listened.

The version to avoid is the interview run as a sales pitch: put questions to people until someone says the idea is good, then write that down as demand. You can spot it the same way every time. The questions were about the future, and the interviewer did most of the talking.

Put it to work

Take your next interview script and strike every question that could be answered with a compliment. Replace each with a question about a specific past time they did the thing.

Your answer

Show the worked example

There is no right answer. Write yours first, then compare.

Sources

1. Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test
2. NN/g, User Interviews