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Interview Guide Templates

Document Information

Version: 1.0 Last Updated: December 2025 Status: Active Owner: Product Team

Table of Contents

  1. Discovery Interviews
  2. Usability Testing
  3. Feedback Interviews
  4. Onboarding Interviews

Discovery Interviews

Purpose: Explore problems, needs, and workflows to identify opportunities for platform improvements.

Objectives

  • Understand current workflows and pain points
  • Identify unmet needs and frustrations
  • Discover workarounds and manual processes
  • Validate problem hypotheses
  • Prioritize areas for platform investment

Screener Questions

Use these questions to select appropriate interview participants:

  1. Role: What is your current role and team?
  2. Experience: How long have you been working with internal developer platforms?
  3. Frequency: How often do you deploy applications or use platform services?
  4. Technology Stack: What programming languages and frameworks do you primarily use?
  5. Platform Usage: Which platform tools do you use daily? (e.g., CI/CD, monitoring, service catalog)

Selection Criteria:

  • Mix of experience levels (junior, mid, senior)
  • Diverse roles (developers, DevOps, platform engineers)
  • Various teams and business units
  • Different technology stacks

Main Questions

Current State

  1. Walk me through your typical development workflow from local development to production.

  2. Follow-up: What tools do you use at each stage?

  3. Follow-up: Where do you spend the most time?

  4. What are the biggest challenges you face when deploying applications?

  5. Follow-up: How often does this happen?

  6. Follow-up: How do you currently work around these issues?

  7. Describe the last time you had to troubleshoot a production issue.

  8. Follow-up: What information did you need?

  9. Follow-up: How long did it take to resolve?

  10. Follow-up: What made it difficult?

  11. What tasks do you find yourself doing repeatedly that feel like they should be automated?

  12. Follow-up: How much time do these tasks consume?
  13. Follow-up: Have you tried to automate them?

Pain Points

  1. What frustrates you most about the current platform?

  2. Follow-up: Can you give me a specific example?

  3. Follow-up: How does this impact your work?

  4. What information do you wish you had easier access to?

  5. Follow-up: Where do you currently find this information?

  6. Follow-up: How often do you need it?

  7. Tell me about a time when the platform prevented you from doing your job effectively.

  8. Follow-up: What was the business impact?
  9. Follow-up: How was it eventually resolved?

Ideal State

  1. If you could wave a magic wand and improve one thing about the platform, what would it be?

  2. Follow-up: Why is this most important to you?

  3. Follow-up: How would this change your day-to-day work?

  4. What does "developer experience" mean to you?

  5. Follow-up: Can you give examples of good vs. bad developer experience?

  6. What capabilities or features do you wish the platform had?

    • Follow-up: What would you use them for?
    • Follow-up: What's preventing you from achieving this today?

Follow-up Questions

  • Can you show me an example of that?
  • How often does this happen?
  • What did you do instead?
  • Who else is affected by this?
  • What would success look like?
  • Is there anything else you'd like to share?

Interview Guidelines

Before the Interview:

  • Schedule 45-60 minutes
  • Send objectives and topics in advance
  • Request permission to record
  • Prepare your note-taking system

During the Interview:

  • Start with rapport building
  • Use the "5 Whys" technique to dig deeper
  • Observe non-verbal cues
  • Allow for silence (don't rush)
  • Be curious, not leading
  • Take notes on direct quotes

After the Interview:

  • Send thank you note
  • Synthesize notes within 24 hours
  • Identify key themes and insights
  • Share anonymized findings with stakeholders

Usability Testing

Purpose: Validate that features and workflows are intuitive, efficient, and meet user needs.

Objectives

  • Evaluate feature usability before launch
  • Identify UI/UX friction points
  • Measure task completion rates and time
  • Gather qualitative feedback on design
  • Validate information architecture

Screener Questions

  1. Role: What is your role and primary responsibilities?
  2. Platform Usage: How frequently do you use [specific feature/tool]?
  3. Technical Proficiency: Rate your comfort level with [technology]: Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced
  4. Availability: Can you participate in a 45-minute usability session?
  5. Environment: Do you have access to [required environment/tools]?

Selection Criteria:

  • Representative of target user personas
  • Mix of technical skill levels
  • Unfamiliar with the specific feature (for new features)
  • Regular users (for redesigns)

Main Questions

Pre-Task Questions

  1. What are your expectations for this feature?

  2. Follow-up: What problems do you hope it solves?

  3. Have you used similar features in other platforms?

  4. Follow-up: What did you like or dislike about them?

Task Scenarios

Task Format: "Imagine you need to [accomplish goal]. Use the platform to complete this task."

Example Tasks:

  • Task 1: Deploy a new microservice to the development environment
  • Task 2: Set up monitoring and alerts for your service
  • Task 3: View the deployment history and rollback to a previous version
  • Task 4: Configure environment variables for your application

For Each Task, Observe:

  • Time to completion
  • Number of clicks/steps
  • Errors or wrong paths taken
  • Hesitation points
  • Facial expressions and body language

During Tasks, Ask:

  1. What are you thinking as you do this? (Think-aloud protocol)
  2. What do you expect to happen when you click that?
  3. Is this what you expected to see?
  4. If not: What did you expect?
  5. How would you describe what you just did?

Post-Task Questions

  1. How easy or difficult was that task? (Scale 1-5: Very Difficult to Very Easy)

  2. Follow-up: What made it [easy/difficult]?

  3. Was there anything confusing or unclear?

  4. Follow-up: What would have helped?

  5. Did you feel confident completing this task?

  6. Follow-up: What created uncertainty?

  7. What would you change about this workflow?

Wrap-up Questions

  1. Overall, how would you rate your experience? (Scale 1-5: Very Poor to Excellent)

  2. Would you use this feature in your daily work?

    • Follow-up: Why or why not?

  3. What did you like most about the experience?

  4. What frustrated you the most?

  5. Is there anything we didn't ask about that you think is important?

Testing Guidelines

Before the Session:

  • Prepare test environment
  • Create realistic test data
  • Test your recording setup
  • Have tasks written out clearly
  • Prepare consent form

During the Session:

  • Encourage think-aloud narration
  • Don't provide help unless stuck for >2 minutes
  • Take notes on both actions and comments
  • Use neutral language ("How would you do X?" not "Click X")
  • Record time and success metrics

After the Session:

  • Calculate success rates and time-on-task
  • Categorize issues by severity (critical, major, minor)
  • Identify patterns across participants
  • Prioritize fixes based on frequency and impact

Feedback Interviews

Purpose: Gather feedback on existing features to identify improvement areas and prioritize enhancements.

Objectives

  • Understand feature usage patterns
  • Identify improvement opportunities
  • Gauge user satisfaction
  • Prioritize feature requests
  • Discover hidden issues

Screener Questions

  1. Feature Usage: How often do you use [specific feature]?
  2. Duration: How long have you been using this feature?
  3. Outcome: Do you typically achieve what you set out to do with this feature?
  4. Context: What is your primary use case for this feature?

Selection Criteria:

  • Active users of the feature
  • Mix of successful and struggling users
  • Different use cases
  • Various team sizes

Main Questions

Usage Patterns

  1. How do you typically use [feature] in your workflow?

  2. Follow-up: Walk me through a recent example.

  3. Follow-up: How often do you use it?

  4. What prompted you to start using this feature?

  5. Follow-up: What alternatives did you consider?

  6. What do you use this feature for?

  7. Follow-up: Are there use cases we might not have anticipated?

Satisfaction

  1. On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with [feature]?

  2. Follow-up: What would it take to make it a 10?

  3. What do you like most about this feature?

  4. Follow-up: Why is that important to you?

  5. What frustrates you about this feature?

  6. Follow-up: How do you work around these limitations?

  7. Is there anything missing that would make this feature more useful?

  8. Follow-up: What would you use that for?

Specific Feedback

  1. How intuitive is the feature to use? (Scale 1-5)

  2. Follow-up: What was confusing when you first used it?

  3. Follow-up: What would make it more intuitive?

  4. How well does the feature integrate with your other tools?

  5. Follow-up: What integration would be most valuable?

  6. How is the performance of this feature?

    • Follow-up: Have you experienced any issues?
    • Follow-up: How does this impact your work?

Future Direction

  1. If you could add one capability to this feature, what would it be?

    • Follow-up: How would you use that capability?
    • Follow-up: How important is this to your work?

  2. What would make you use this feature more often?

  3. Is there anything about this feature that you wish worked differently?

Follow-up Questions

  • Can you show me how you do that?
  • How much time would that save you?
  • How does this compare to other tools you've used?
  • Who else on your team would benefit from this?
  • What's the impact when this doesn't work as expected?

Interview Guidelines

Before the Interview:

  • Review usage data for the participant
  • Identify specific behaviors to explore
  • Prepare scenarios if needed
  • Have recent feedback/issues available

During the Interview:

  • Ask for demonstrations when possible
  • Explore both positive and negative experiences
  • Dig into workarounds (they reveal needs)
  • Validate feature requests with use cases

After the Interview:

  • Categorize feedback (bugs, enhancements, education)
  • Prioritize by impact and feasibility
  • Close the loop with participants on actions taken
  • Share themes with product and engineering teams

Onboarding Interviews

Purpose: Understand the new user experience and identify barriers to adoption and productivity.

Objectives

  • Evaluate onboarding effectiveness
  • Identify knowledge gaps
  • Reduce time to first value
  • Improve documentation and training
  • Measure initial impressions

Screener Questions

  1. Tenure: How long have you been using the platform?
  2. Experience Level: How would you rate your overall technical experience?
  3. Onboarding Method: How did you learn to use the platform? (docs, training, colleague, trial-and-error)
  4. First Impressions: What was your initial impression of the platform?

Selection Criteria:

  • Users within first 30-90 days
  • Mix of self-guided and trained users
  • Different roles and backgrounds
  • Various entry points into platform

Main Questions

First Impressions

  1. What were your first impressions when you started using the platform?

  2. Follow-up: What surprised you (positively or negatively)?

  3. How clear was it what the platform could do for you?

  4. Follow-up: What helped you understand this?

  5. Follow-up: What was confusing?

  6. What did you want to accomplish first?

  7. Follow-up: Were you able to achieve it?
  8. Follow-up: How long did it take?

Onboarding Experience

  1. Walk me through how you learned to use the platform.

  2. Follow-up: What resources did you use?

  3. Follow-up: What did you find most helpful?

  4. What was the hardest thing to figure out?

  5. Follow-up: How did you eventually solve it?

  6. Follow-up: How long did it take?

  7. Did you get stuck at any point?

  8. Follow-up: What helped you get unstuck?

  9. Follow-up: Who or what did you turn to for help?

  10. How useful was the documentation?

  11. Follow-up: What was missing or unclear?
  12. Follow-up: What documentation did you wish existed?

Knowledge Gaps

  1. What concepts or features are you still unclear about?

  2. Follow-up: Why do you think that is?

  3. What do you wish someone had told you when you started?

  4. Follow-up: How did you eventually learn this?

  5. Are there features you haven't tried yet?

    • Follow-up: Why not?
    • Follow-up: What would motivate you to try them?

Comparison

  1. How does this platform compare to others you've used?

    • Follow-up: What does it do better?
    • Follow-up: What could it learn from others?

  2. How long did it take before you felt productive?

    • Follow-up: What milestone made you feel that way?
    • Follow-up: What would have accelerated this?

Suggestions

  1. If you were redesigning the onboarding experience, what would you change?

    • Follow-up: What should stay the same?

  2. What would have made your first week easier?

  3. What advice would you give to someone just starting with the platform?

Follow-up Questions

  • Can you show me where you looked for that information?
  • What did you expect to find?
  • How did you feel when that happened?
  • What alternatives did you consider?
  • Would you recommend this platform to colleagues? Why or why not?

Interview Guidelines

Before the Interview:

  • Interview early (within 2 weeks of onboarding)
  • Review their activity logs
  • Identify which onboarding path they took
  • Prepare to capture emotional responses

During the Interview:

  • Focus on the journey, not just facts
  • Capture what they tried that didn't work
  • Ask about emotional highs and lows
  • Identify "aha moments" and friction points
  • Explore workarounds and external resources used

After the Interview:

  • Map the actual onboarding journey
  • Identify drop-off points
  • Categorize issues (docs, UX, training, technical)
  • Calculate time to productivity
  • Prioritize improvements by impact on adoption

Tips for All Interview Types

Building Rapport

  • Start with casual conversation
  • Explain the purpose and how feedback will be used
  • Assure confidentiality
  • Thank them for their time

Active Listening

  • Don't interrupt
  • Use non-verbal encouragement (nodding, "mm-hmm")
  • Paraphrase to confirm understanding
  • Stay curious, not defensive

Effective Questioning

  • Ask open-ended questions ("How...?", "What...?", "Tell me about...")
  • Avoid leading questions ("Don't you think...?")
  • Use silence to encourage elaboration
  • Ask for specific examples, not generalizations

Note Taking

  • Capture direct quotes (mark with quotation marks)
  • Note emotional reactions
  • Record context and environment
  • Use consistent shorthand

Avoiding Bias

  • Don't sell or defend the platform
  • Remain neutral in tone
  • Don't finish their sentences
  • Accept negative feedback gracefully
  • Probe negative feedback as deeply as positive

Interview Analysis

Synthesis Process

  1. Transcribe and Clean Notes (within 24 hours)
  2. Highlight Key Quotes and Insights
  3. Identify Patterns Across Interviews
  4. Create Affinity Diagrams (group similar themes)
  5. Prioritize Findings (frequency × severity)

Deliverables

  • Summary Report: Key findings, themes, recommendations
  • Quotes Library: Organized by theme
  • Issue Log: Prioritized list of problems to address
  • Opportunity Backlog: Features and improvements to consider
  • Journey Maps: Visual representation of user experiences
  • Personas: Updated with real user insights

Additional Resources