Why you’re doing interviews wrong (and how to fix it)

7/4/2025 ☼ interviews ☼ methodology ☼ research ☼ uncertainty

tl;dr: Interviews can offer deep and valuable insights into uncertain, emerging, and poorly understood situations — but only if you’re rigorous across all 4 phases of the interview lifecycle, each of which calls for different skills.

Last year, at coffee, the R&D director of a big CPG brand told me that their team had spent north of $300k on market research surveys and interviews to understand just-emerging patterns of consumer behaviour, shifts that could affect entire product lines. The intent was good, and the budget was generous. But the outcome? Almost no usable insights.

The interviews had been conducted by senior staff and external vendors. But despite paying good money for the work, the interviews hadn’t been tightly conceptualised. The questions were broad and reflected baked-in assumptions from the company. The selection of respondents was haphazard. No one had thought through how the data would be analysed until the data was already collected. So they missed what they were looking for: The faint signals in the noise, the early signs of change.

This isn’t a one-off story.

This happens all the time in the private sector, in the public sector, in nonprofits. Interviews are one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding emergence and for making sense of uncertain situations. But they’re also easy to do thoughtlessly and poorly.

Let’s talk about how to do them better.

Interviews aren’t taken seriously enough

Interviews are often the research tool we reach for when something complex but poorly understood needs to be figured out. Need to understand why a product isn’t reaching the market it’s designed for? Interview customer-facing staff and intended users. Trying to make sense of conflicting stakeholder demands? Talk to them about their concerns. Looking for strategic guidance in a rapidly changing policy environment? Call up the front-line employees who see it happening.

Interviews are often treated as “just talking to people”: Schedule some time, ask a few questions, take some notes, do a transcript. The problem is that insight doesn’t emerge automatically just because you talked to someone.

Without conceptual clarity, methodological discipline, and a clear plan for analysis, interviews become time-intensive exercises in collecting anecdotes instead of tools for insight.

Where interviews go wrong

When teams bring me in to help with interview-based work, I often see the same set of problems:

They’re doing too many interviews.
The interviews take longer than they need to.
The sequence of respondents is arbitrary, not strategic.
The questions are, too vague, too narrow, or reflect implicit assumptions held by the interviewers that may not be valid.
The interviews generate large quantities of data that no one is sure how to interpret.
The analysis drags on, and even then, key insights are missed.

These are especially problematic when the goal is to understand something emerging: Something that hasn’t stabilized yet.

In those situations, you’re not looking for a pattern whose form you know well and can describe; you’re trying to detect a pattern as it is forming. That requires a level of sensitivity and research strategy that most interview processes lack.

The root cause is simple: Very few people are trained to do interviews well. Not just the asking-questions part, but the entire interview lifecycle: conceptualising, planning, conducting, and analysing.

This is an opportunity for improvement.

The better way: Rigor across the interview lifecycle

Skills needed at each stage of the interview lifecycle.

Interviews should be treated like any other research method that informs important decisions: With rigor, planning, and conceptual clarity. That starts long before the first question is asked, and continues well after the last transcript is filed away.

This is how I break down the competencies needed in the different parts of the interview lifecycle:

Stage 1: Conceptualisation

This is the foundation of interview research: Figuring out what question the research is trying to answer. This is harder than it looks, and most teams skip straight past this. But without building this solid foundation, everything else is compromised. The skills needed here are:

Articulating the research question clearly, without conflating questions. No “we want to understand everything” briefs.
Testing rigorously for methodological fit. Some questions are better answered quantitatively. Others can’t be answered at all. You want to catch that before you start booking interviews.
Framing the question so it’s open enough to allow emergence, but narrow enough to produce usable insight.

Get this stage right, and everything downstream gets easier.

Stage 2: Planning

Good interview planning isn’t only about logistics and tactics. It needs to begin with strategy. The skills needed here are:

Assessing the respondent pool to ensure you’re not missing key subgroups.
Designing effective interview protocols and question flows that respect the respondent’s time and extract the most value.
Sequencing interviews and respondents to build insight cumulatively, not redundantly.
Crafting the communications with respondents (emails, briefing notes) that set the stage for honest, focused conversations.
Developing an early plan for analysis. Have a strategy for reviewing and evaluating the data you collect, as you collect it.

Planning is the crucial bridge connecting intention with execution. Skip it, and you’re flying blind.

Stage 3: Execution

Actually conducting an interview involves simultaneously listening, holding space for the respondent to fill, and doing real-time analysis to figure out where to direct the conversation. The skills needed here are:

Managing interview flow to prevent sidetracking and time overruns.
Controlling the pacing so early questions don’t soak up all the time.
Bringing conversations back to the research question when they veer off-course.
Doing immediate post-interview synthesis, not just note-taking.
Refining interview protocols on the fly based on what’s working and what’s not.
Being ready for worst-case scenarios: Rambling responses, evasive answers, hostile respondents.

Interviews are dynamic, live interactions. Treating them as static scripts is a recipe for missed insight.

Stage 4: Analysis

This is the second most neglected phase, even though it’s where insight actually happens. The skills needed here are:

Tracking emerging patterns as you go, not just at the end.
Synthesising insights across interviews, not just within them.
Building arguments from the interplay of transcripts, notes, and synthetic memos.

Analysis isn’t just summarising what was said. It’s interpreting what it means in light of your research question. And it’s hard. But it gets much easier when it was planned for from the start.

If your interviews matter, they deserve to be done well

Why settle for interviews that give you shallow answers and too much uninformative data? I can provide hands-on, high-leverage support that helps your team do better interviews, while learning how to do better interviews: Anything from battle-testing respondent selection, to designing interview protocols, to analysing tricky interviews.

We do the work on the actual interviews your team is conducting for real research, not on hypothetical interviews.

Over time, your research team builds skill, confidence, and good habits for more insightful interviewing. This is not a workshop that sits in a drawer afterward. It’s support that directly improves the quality and impact of your research and stays with your team long after I’m gone.

If your team is conducting interviews to understand something complex, uncertain, or significant — especially if you’re trying to detect emerging patterns — and wants to be better prepared, get in touch. I’d love to chat.

I’ve been working on turning discomfort into something productive. idk is the first of these tools for productive discomfort.

And I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating how organisations can succeed in uncertain times. The Uncertainty Mindset is my book about how to design organisations that thrive in uncertainty and can clearly distinguish it from risk.