tl;dr: Interviews can offer deep and valuable insights into uncertain, emerging, and poorly understood situations — but only if you’re rigorous across all 4 phases of the interview lifecycle, each of which calls for different skills. Last year, at coffee, the R&D director of a big CPG brand told me that their team had spent north of $300k on market research surveys and interviews to understand just-emerging patterns of consumer behaviour, shifts that could affect entire product lines. The...
