Essay · About a 12 minute read

Ask Teresa: How Do You Select Customers for Customer Interviews?

Teresa Torres · Product Talk Free Intermediate

The strongest way to research a private competitor is to talk to the people who left them, and this essay grounds that tactic in a real interview method. Teresa Torres explains the story-based approach, where you collect the customer's actual story of what happened rather than asking leading questions, and she names churned users as a segment worth interviewing to learn what the real problem was. It turns a vague idea (go talk to their ex-customers) into a repeatable habit you can run every week.

• Interview people who churned from a competitor: they tell you the real friction and gaps that no public number would.
• Use story-based interviewing, spend the time collecting what actually happened, not pitching your own product or asking hypothetical questions.
• Deliberately vary who you talk to (power users, first-timers, disengaged, churned) so you are not just hearing one slice of the story.