Interview guide
A discovery interview guide starts with what you are trying to settle, not with a list of questions. This writes the guide from the assumption you want to test, in the order a real conversation goes, then plays the participant so you can rehearse before you sit down with anybody.
- Asks for
- What you are building or considering, in a few sentences
- What you are unsure about — the thing the interviews are meant to settle
- Who you are talking to, and roughly how long you have
- Gives back
- The assumptions your idea rests on, for you to confirm or correct
- A guide in interview order: opening, the questions that test each assumption, follow-ups, close
- The questions to avoid asking, and why each one would mislead you
- A rehearsal with a participant who answers in character, and honest feedback on how you asked
- Plan
- Free
- Use next
- Interview notes, Interview synthesis, Survey, User persona
What it gives you
Assumption 1 — Teams abandon the weekly report because writing it takes too long. Ask about the last one: "Walk me through the last weekly report you wrote. Start from opening the doc." "How long did that take? What were you doing in the gaps?" "What happened after you sent it?" Do not ask: "Would a tool that writes it for you be useful?" It tests nothing. Everyone says yes, and you learn what they hope, not what they do.
How it works
Most interview guides fail the same way: they are a list of things the team is curious about, so the interview wanders and the notes afterwards support whatever anyone already believed. The fix is to decide first what would have to be true for your idea to work, and then write only the questions that could show it false.
You say what you are building and what you are unsure about. Piko turns that into the assumptions underneath it, in plain language, and you confirm or correct them — that step is what makes the rest of the guide yours rather than a template. The guide is then built against those assumptions: an opening that does not telegraph the answer, questions about what the person actually did rather than what they would do, and follow-ups for the places people give you a tidy story instead of a fact.
Then it rehearses with you. Piko answers as the kind of participant you described, you ask your questions as written, and you get told where you led the witness, where you asked two things at once, and which question will get you a hypothetical instead of a memory. Fixing that in a rehearsal costs ten minutes; finding it in interview three costs the first two.
Who it is for
A PM about to run discovery interviews who has a week of slots booked and no guide, or one whose last round produced quotes that agreed with everything.
Where it stops
It writes the guide and rehearses it; it does not find you participants, book the slots or sit in the room. And a guide cannot save an interview you run with the conclusion already written down — if you are not willing to hear that the assumption is false, no question order will help.
Questions people ask
How is this different from a list of interview questions I could find online?
A template asks generic questions about a generic product. This starts from the specific thing you are unsure about and writes only the questions that could prove it wrong, which is the part a template cannot do because it does not know what you are building. It also marks the questions to avoid — the ones that get you a polite hypothetical instead of a memory — and those are usually the ones a template is full of.
What makes a discovery interview question good?
It asks about something that already happened. "Walk me through the last time you did this" gets you a memory with details you can check; "would you use a tool that did this" gets you a guess about a future self, and people are reliably wrong and reliably positive about that. Good questions are also single: two questions in one sentence get you an answer to whichever half was easier.
Can I rehearse before the real interview?
Yes, and that is the part people get the most from. Piko answers as the kind of participant you described, you ask your questions as you wrote them, and you get told afterwards where you led the answer, where you asked a hypothetical, and which question will produce a story rather than a fact. It takes about ten minutes, and it is cheaper than learning the same thing from your first two real interviews.
Run it on your own work
Interview guide needs an account, because it writes against what you give it and remembers what you have told it before. It runs on the Free plan. Or see what the plans cost first.