Ultimate Guide to Interviews #4: Don't just ask for problems

How to uncover the hidden goals that actually drive sales

Chapter overview

1. Goal: Build a customer theory

2. Structuring and starting the interview: Keep your baby in your bag

3. Framing the interview

4. Don’t just ask for problems ⬅️ This post

5. Finding what matters to your customer

6. Identify the big picture of your customer

7. Understand the criteria of success via competition

8. Using the film reel technique to get detailed explanations

9. Six techniques on how to wiggle out extra information

10. Getting your baby out of the bag

11. Crafting your customer theory

Chapter 4 - Don’t just ask for problems

Based on the previous chapters, the interview should be underway, and we’ve framed it correctly. Now we can start to dig deep.

In the current chapter, I cover the following:

• Example questions to get deep and rich answers

• Why you should not focus on problems (right away), and what to do instead

• How to assess the relevance of discovered problems in interviews

• A very, very brief philosophy of problems and jobs to be done

• How to get people to start talking about their jobs to be done

4.1 Don’t open with problems

Everyone says, “Love the problem”. Yes, problems are extremely important for startups.

But asking for problems is a terrible strategy. Let me show why jumping to problems at the start of an interview can lead to unreliable answers.

Q (you): “What problems do you have, Jeroen, with using Substack?”

A (Me): “Well, I’m not growing fast enough. I wish I had more statistics to understand my readers better. I want more people to have a paid subscription”

or

A (Me): “I don’t understand why some posts perform well and others don’t. It’s a bit hit and miss sometimes.”

While valid, these points hide two critical traps every founder needs to see.