The right participants make or break your JTBD interviews. In this post, I’ll share how we design screener questions that separate signal from noise, and how UserInterviews helps us streamline the selection process.
Why Interview other people's customers?
If you already have paying customers, it can be tempting to wade straight into interviewing them. After all, who knows more about your product or service than the people who pay your wages?
Janis was definitely unsure about this step when we launched – which is commonplace. I suspect he was doubtful about the way this research runs:
- Am I trying to learn how to position against my competitors or am I trying to learn what my best customers want?
- I don’t sell “sketchnoting courses”, so why would I want to interview someone that bought one?
- Why do we want to learn about a product I DON’T sell?
My belief is that you should interview your customers AND your competitors (including people that have bought a solution you DON’T view as a competitor product). UserInterviews is one of the tools we use to recruit these interviews, and this article shows how we are able to find the right people to get insights from.
What is the role of the Screener Survey?
Simply put – we need to interview the right people who have had the “struggling moment” and eventually purchased a solution.
A Screener Survey is the way you filter JTBD interviewees that you want to talk to from those you do not. As you’ll see in the video below, just because you think you’re written good questions does NOT mean you’ll get good answers. If you interview people that have bought the wrong thing, or those that have taken a free trial, you run the risk of letting more noise into your project.
What's next in the Project?
As you can see from the video – I have already interviewed three of these individuals (this is the benefit of a platform like UserInterviews – it’s quick and easy to get the recruit done right).
The next steps:
- Publishing the full transcripts for each of these interviews
- Sharing my own notes and analysis from each interview – so you can see how we extract insights from these calls
- Sharing Janis’ thoughts and ideas as a result of listening to these interviews (he has joined 1 of the three)
- Interviewing and sharing the analysis and thoughts from Janis’ own customers
We should be in a position to publish these between now (September 2nd 2025) and September 12th 2025 – recruiting Janis’ customers directly has taken more time than we anticipated.
You’ll see each interview recorded and analysed in full, plus the follow up insight workshops where we unpack what we have learned and change his go-to-market approach to grow his business.
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