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User interview script
A user interview script template with warm-up questions, non-leading core questions, a 'tell me about the last time' prompt, and a wrap-up.
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# User interview script: How small teams choose project management tools
**Goal:** Understand the trigger that makes a team switch project tools, not just which features they compare.
## Warm-up
- How long have you been in your current role?
- Walk me through a typical Monday morning for your team.
- What tools are open in your browser tabs right now?
## Core questions
- Tell me about the last time you looked for a new tool to solve a work problem - what happened?
- What made you decide the old way wasn't good enough anymore?
- Who else was involved in that decision, and what did they care about?
- What would have to be true for you to switch away from what you use today?
## Tell me about the last time...
Tell me about the last time your team missed a deadline because of a coordination problem. Walk me through it from the moment you realized something was wrong to how it got resolved - who did you talk to first, and what did you wish you'd had at that moment?
## Wrap-up
Is there anything about how your team plans work that I should have asked about but didn't? Would it be okay if I followed up by email with one or two clarifying questions?
How to use it well
- →Every core question should survive the test of asking about a real past event, not a hypothetical - "tell me about the last time" gets a memory, "would you use" gets a guess.
- →If a question can be answered with a feature name, it's leading. Rewrite it around the situation and the trigger, and let the person volunteer what they used to solve it.
- →Leave room to go off-script. The best line in most interviews comes from a follow-up to something the participant said, not from the next question on the page.