How to run your own customer interview workshop
A guide to running your own customer interview workshop with Deploy Empathy
Once you have a handle on customer interviewing yourself and have seen the transformation it can lead to in the quality of information you get from customers, you might find yourself wanting to teach others how to interview, too.
Over the years, I’ve heard from a variety of people, from Meetup organizers to product team leaders, who’ve used Deploy Empathy to teach groups how to interview.
There’s no one-size-fits-all way to do this. My aim here is to provide a general guide that you as a facilitator can build on.
Have you run your own customer interview workshop? Have tips for other facilitators? Let me know!
Structuring the workshop
Here’s how I would suggest structuring the workshop. I’ll go into each in more detail below.
Overview of JTBD and the Buyer’s Journey
A quick run through of empathetic interviewing techniques
Practice interviews
Fill out Buyer’s Journey worksheets
Group discussion
I would budget approximately two hours for the entire workshop.
1. Start with JTBD
To give people a sense of where they’re going and why they’re learning this, it’s helpful to start with an overview (or refresher) on Jobs to Be Done and the Buyer’s Journey.
A JTBD elevator pitch you can steal
People purchase things—toothbrushes, screw drivers, software—because they want to get something else done.
It’s never just about that one particular product or service, and it’s important to zoom out. That might be a much larger process (avoid dental problems throughout their life) or a smaller one (put up a picture of their family on the wall).
Jobs, in turn, have different dimensions:
functional (put a nail in the wall so that it stays and can support a picture)
social (be reminded of their family, show others what they look like)
emotional (feel reassurance from the sight of their family, be reminded of good memories)
This even applies to products that seem like the goal themselves, like luxury products or bars of gold. “People buy vintage Patek Phillippe watches just for the sake of having one!” Yes, true, yet that watch is doing something else for them. Functionally it tells the time and serves as a fashion accessory. Socially, they hope it telegraphs to people their social status and ability (willingness) to pay for expensive things. Emotionally, it might reassure them of their own sense of belonging in a particular social strata, or on a day-to-day basis, give them confidence in an important business meeting because it reminds them of a loving grandparent who used to wear one. And chances are, there are other things they’re doing in their life to accomplish the job of “Have confidence in my work and in my social standing.” Perhaps they wear tailored suits and go to the gym frequently. A watch is never just a watch.
The Buyer’s Journey
Next, walk them through the idea of the Buyer’s Journey. I’d suggest that in the workshop, you provide them with a blank copy of a Buyer’s Journey worksheet to fill out after their practice interviews.
Every purchase decision goes through this journey (also called The Timeline), starting with a vague thought about the job (not the product! the job), events that lead them think more seriously about getting that Job done, to finally buying a potential solution and experiencing it.
For some jobs, this process may take years. It may never be completed. It may repeat many times. Or, it may be complete within a few days or weeks.
Either way, the desire to solve a job doesn’t come out of nowhere. The desire to buy a product might hit suddenly, but that’s because it’s speaking to a particular intrinsic job that already exists within someone or an organization. Purchase decisions do not come out of nowhere, even for impulse purchases.
2. How to talk so people will talk
At this point, they will have a general grasp of why they’re doing interviews and what they’ll be looking for.
The next step is to prepare them to be able to pull that information out of people.
If you’re running a workshop within your company, you might assign them to read the How to Talk So People Will Talk section of Deploy Empathy. That’s what Josh Frank, a fractional product leader, did when he led a workshop with a product team. Each participant was given a copy of the book a week in advance to prepare.
It’s amazing if people have read Deploy Empathy before a workshop, but realistically, not everyone will have the time, or desire, to. And that was Josh’s experience: some people were able to devote the time, while others skimmed it.
And if you’re leading a workshop in a more casual setting, such as a Meetup, you may not be able to give people assigned reading.
That’s why I’d suggest doing a quick slide-show of the highlights of empathetic interviewing. People who’ve read the book, or done interviews before, will benefit from a refresher and might think about the concepts in a new way. And those who aren’t familiar will have enough to get started.
When I’ve run workshops, I’ve done a full run-through of How to Talk So People Will Talk. But after talking to Konstantin Diener, organizer of the Crafting Products meetup, who hosted a customer interviewing workshop recently, I’m not so sure about that. On the topic of preparation, Konstantin compared it to when a child is learning how to ride a bike: a balance bike will give them a little bit of support but put them in control, whereas training wheels will hold them up entirely but don’t necessarily teach them how to balance on their own.
There’s a balance to be struck between too much guidance and too little.
So, I’d suggest emphasizing just two things: giving prompts for elaboration, and being a rubber duck.
In talking to people who’ve run workshops, the skill that new interviewers often need to focus the most on is having the courage to be curious and ask open-ended follow-up questions. In interviews, this can take getting used to, as follow-up questions may not even end with a question mark (“that makes sense”) yet they encourage people to continue talking on that topic. I would suggest you equip the participants with the following phrases:
That makes sense. [Remember to pause]
Can you say more about that?
Can you tell me more about that?
The second is to tell them to think of themselves as a rubber duck. It’s silly and unexpected, and in turn, that’s what makes it memorable. Tell them the story of software engineers keeping a rubber duck on their desk to explain bugs to, and how in the process of explaining it to the duck, they end up figuring out the problem themselves. (Most developers I know use Claude for this now, but no matter.) Tell them to picture themselves as a rubber duck: Listen, reflect back, and put the interviewee in the spotlight.
3. Practice interviews
Now it’s time to practice interviewing!
Materials
Each participant should have the following:
Practice interview script (on one side of paper)
A pencil
A blank piece of paper, for additional notes
You’ll also need a worksheet of the Buyer’s Journey to distribute after—but hold on to that for now
The Practice Interview Script is available here (rough draft version), Chapter 12 of Deploy Empathy, and also available in the Scripts and Templates bundle.
If you’re running the workshop in another language, you might take a page from meetup organizer Konstantin Diener’s book: run my script through DeepL, then tweak its translation. That will save you time on manual translation.
Pairing people up
If you can, people should pair up with someone they don’t already know. If they’re coworkers, pair them up with the people they know the least.
Why?
If two people are familiar with one another, they might fill in gaps with their own knowledge of the person rather than asking follow-up questions (“I know Samira always checks reviews before buying something, so no need to ask about that…”). If it is absolutely unavoidable to pair them up with a stranger or near-stranger, ask them to pretend like they’re strangers.
Practice interviews
Let the interviewing begin!
I would suggest giving them about 15-20 minutes each per interview. Each person should have the opportunity to interview and be interviewed.
If they run through the questions quickly, they can probably finish in about 10 minutes. As the facilitator, walk around the room and notice who might be finishing early, and encourage them to use the rest of the time to ask follow-up questions.
4. Buyer’s Journey analysis
After they’ve completed the interviews, distribute worksheets of the Buyer’s Journey (or blank pieces of paper with a slide of the Buyer’s Journey visible) and give them 10 minutes to look at their notes and construct the timeline for the other person’s purchase.
They should be able to identify:
The overall job
Functional, emotional, and social aspects of the job
The “first thought”
At least one event during the process
Their journey from passive looking to active looking
Their satisfaction with the purchase and whether they would buy it again
I’ve found in giving workshops of my own, going through the Buyer’s Journey is when the magic of customer interviews clicks for people. They might be bought in on the concept, but working through the timeline is what gives them an excited “a-ha!” moment.
That’s exactly what one participant in Darmstadt, Germany’s Crafting Products Meetup said after attending a workshop recently. (Video in German here.)
This evening, I learned how to map the entire customer journey from interest to purchase to repurchase for a specific product in the interview with 14 questions within 10 minutes.
(PS: German speakers should check out the Crafting Products Conference, which will be held in May in Darmstadt.)
5. Group discussion
Lastly, bring everyone together once they’ve completed their Buyer’s Journeys.
I encourage you to ask them about what surprised them about what they’ve just done. In interviews, the best parts are the moments of unexpected insight. Asking what they learned can feel academic and stilted, but asking what surprised them triggers intellectual delight—exactly the kind of feeling you want them associating with customer interviews. It’s that feeling of delight that will carry them forward and encourage them to keep interviewing.
Ask them open-ended questions, such as:
What surprised you about being the interviewer?
What surprised you about being interviewed yourself?
What stood out to you when you did the Buyer’s Journey analysis?
Notice these are phrased as what questions, which assumes there is something, and can’t be reflexively answered with “no” (like a did question: “Did anything surprise you?”) You may very well find that people say, “Nothing. [pause] Well…” and then go on to tell you everything they learned.
And that’s the heart of it, isn’t? People might think they don’t have anything to say. But if you give them the space to say something, they do. And what they say might surprise you.
Here’s to delightful surprises,
Michele