The Interview Tool

The Interview Tool is a generic interview / questionnaire / discussion template plus the responses you capture when you actually talk to someone. Like Notes, it's available in any phase — use it whenever you need to learn from a real person.

Two parts

The template — a reusable design: a purpose, the problem you're validating, the persona you're talking to (reference an existing User Persona artefact or type one in), and an ordered list of questions. Sandai can draft questions for you.
The captured interview — one record per interviewee, with their name, email and segment, the date, and their answers. The questions are snapshotted when you start, so editing the template later never changes a past interview.

You might keep several templates — for example, one to test "it's difficult for artists to deal with tech to sell merch" with artists, and another to test "would you buy tees and hoodies with an artist's design?" with buyers.

The interviewees you capture are designed to become contacts/leads in a future mini-CRM, so capture real names and emails where you can.

Inspired by the Lean Problem Interview

The tool is generic, but it follows the spirit of Ash Maurya's Problem Interview from Running Lean — a systematic way to validate whether a problem is actually worth solving, and whether customers are already looking for a fix, before you build anything. It has three parts.

1. Preparation

Before you speak to a single person, define what you already believe to be true:

Identify your target customer — who exactly are you trying to help?
Define your problem hypothesis — the top 1–3 problems you think they struggle with.
Identify the alternatives — what are they doing about it today? (Workarounds, competitors, or nothing at all.)

2. The script structure

A good problem interview takes about 15–30 minutes. Maurya's battle-tested script runs roughly:

Welcome (2 min) — set the stage. You're here to learn about their workflow, not to pitch a product.
Customer context / demographics (3 min) — confirm they fit your target profile.
The story / journey (10 min) — instead of "what are your problems?", have them walk you through how they handled a specific task recently — the last time they faced the problem you're investigating.
Problem ranking (3 min) — present your 1–3 assumed problems and ask them to rank how painful each is, and — most importantly — why.
Solution exploration (2 min) — how do they handle it today? If they aren't spending time or money to fix it, the problem usually isn't severe enough.
Permission & wrap-up (1 min) — ask if you can follow up when you have something to show them.

3. Key mindset rules

The "Innovator's Gift", not the curse — don't present a solution. Resist fixating on the product and diving blindly into building.
Behaviours over opinions — people give polite opinions and list features they think they want. Dig into what they actually do.
Validate the "must-have" — if someone doesn't admit to a painful problem that costs them time, money or frustration, and they use no alternative to fix it, you don't have a viable idea yet.