A story of how Brand24 started with product discovery interviews to find matters important to our customers quicker, from building mostly on feeling and proxy feedback to decisions based on the mix of direct conversations, relevant data and intuition. What can you expect from the talk - things that worked well, challenges we faced, how to talk to customers to get as much unbiased information as possible and examples from my own experience.
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This Brand24 case study explains how discovery interviews became a repeatable part of product development rather than an occasional research event. The speakers cover the first participant groups, the difference between facts and opinions, follow-up questions anchored in recent behavior, reusable topic guides, recruitment, scheduling, recording, note-taking, and collaboration with other teams. The emphasis is practical: begin with accessible customers, learn from imperfect conversations, ask about concrete past situations, and design the operating process so insights benefit sales, support, and product colleagues as well as the interviewer.
Feature requesters and bug reporters provided a reachable first cohort because they had a recent experience and a reason to discuss the product.
Watch from 5:00A confident statement about a use case is only a starting point; follow-up questions about the last real example reveal what the customer actually did.
Watch from 10:51Interviewers lose evidence when they explain, suggest, or rescue too quickly; silence and neutral probes allow the customer's own reasoning to emerge.
Watch from 16:59A small set of current learning goals and behavioral opening questions creates consistency while leaving room to follow unexpected but relevant paths.
Watch from 23:19Recruitment, insight sharing, and interview access become easier when support, sales, and product colleagues can see how customer conversations improve their work.
Watch from 30:00These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.
The first interview pool did not require a sophisticated recruitment program. Customers who had requested a feature or reported a problem already had a concrete experience and a reason to engage. Speaking with them reduced the distance between support activity and product discovery, while also showing customer-facing teams that a difficult interaction could lead to learning rather than ending with a ticket.
Watch from 4:40A customer may describe a use case as if it were a stable fact, yet the statement can still be an interpretation. Asking what happened the last time they performed the task reveals tools, sequence, constraints, and exceptions. In one example, the follow-up changed the team's understanding of what monitoring the brand actually meant in day-to-day work.
Watch from 10:29Interviewers often hear a partial answer and rush to explain the feature, supply vocabulary, or propose a better response. That instinct is understandable, especially for product experts, but it replaces the participant's model with the team's own. A short pause and a neutral request for an example usually produce better evidence than completing the thought on the customer's behalf.
Watch from 16:59The team maintains a few current areas it wants to learn about and prepares behavioral opening questions for each. If a participant says they never perform the expected task, the interview is not broken. The interviewer can explore another relevant topic or investigate why the assumption failed. The guide supplies direction without turning the conversation into a questionnaire.
Watch from 22:59A sustainable interview practice creates value beyond the product team. Customer-facing colleagues gain calmer follow-up conversations, teams receive examples that clarify requests, and shared access to evidence reduces arguments based only on opinion. Recruitment and cooperation improve when participants inside the company can identify what they gain from the process rather than seeing research as an extra demand.
Watch from 29:19
