Interviewdriven

Interviewdriven is an approach in product development and requirements elicitation where decisions and priorities are guided primarily by structured conversations with stakeholders, users, customers, and subject matter experts. The emphasis is on qualitative insights gathered through interviews, often within agile or UX workflows, to define problems, uncover needs, and shape feature sets. The term describes a preference for user-centered information over assumptions or metrics-driven criteria.

Process: identify a representative set of participants, create a semi-structured interview guide with open-ended questions, and conduct interviews. Transcribe and analyze responses to identify themes, pain points, goals, and context. Synthesize findings into artifacts such as user stories, personas, or journey maps, and prioritize items in a product backlog based on value, risk, and feasibility. Validation with stakeholders helps ensure alignment, and iterative cycles refine understanding as new interviews are completed.

Applications: interviewdriven methods are common in product discovery, requirements elicitation, user research, and stakeholder alignment. They are used to inform roadmaps, usability considerations, and strategic decisions, and are often integrated with other approaches such as design thinking, jobs-to-be-done, or rapid prototyping.

Advantages include deep, contextual understanding of user needs, alignment across teams, and flexibility to explore unexpected findings. Limitations include time requirements, potential bias in sampling and interpretation, and challenges in generalizing qualitative insights. Effective interviewdriven work relies on skilled interviewing, rigorous analysis, and clear translation of insights into actionable product items.

See also: user interviews, qualitative research, requirements elicitation, design thinking, jobs-to-be-done, backlog prioritization.