You’ve interviewed churned retired business owners, passive heirs and active clients from both segments.
You now have hours of recordings and pages of notes.
The next step is to turn those conversations into insights.
This article shows you how to make sense of individual interviews. How to break down each conversation, extract what matters, and decide whether to keep going or stop.
Let’s start with what to do right after each interview.
Transcribe and review each interview
After each interview, transcribe the recording using ChatGPT or any transcription tool.
Print the transcript.
Then read it with a pen in hand. Highlight key moments and mark anything that stands out.
Why paper?
Because screens make you skim but paper forces you to slow down and think.
As you read, you’re trying to answer five questions:
- What outcome was the client trying to achieve?
- Why were they trying to achieve it?
- Why couldn’t they achieve it?
- What challenges did they face along the way?
- What alternatives did they do instead?
These questions help you uncover the core problem. The actual breakdown in the client’s experience.
Let’s apply them to the retired business owner interview.
Example: Debriefing the retired business owner interview
1) What outcome was the client trying to achieve?
The client needed to transfer large sums of money from Canada to the US on a regular basis.
2) Why were they trying to achieve it?
They had became a snowbird. They were spending winters in the US, setting up a second home, buying a car and managing major cross-border expenses.
3) Why couldn’t they achieve it?
Their relationship manager was unavailable. Large transfers required the manager’s approval due to transaction limits and cross-border rules. Without that approval, the transaction couldn’t proceed.
4) What challenges did they face?
The client called the general support line from a US number. The system didn’t recognize them as high-net-worth and routed them into the regular queue.
After multiple security checks, they reached the high-net-worth support team. But that team couldn’t approve the transfer either. Only the relationship manager had the authority.
There was no documented backup relationship manager. No one owned the client’s context in the manager’s absence.
5) What did they do instead?
The client used another bank to transfer the funds.
This is how you debrief each interview.
Evaluate the interview process itself
Before you schedule the next interview, pause and ask one question:
Should you keep going with the same questions, adjust them, or stop interviewing altogether?
There are three valid options.
Option 1: Don’t change anything
This is common early on, when you’re still learning how a segment thinks.
If the first few retired business owners give very different accounts of how they handle transactions, keep the script as is. You need more interviews to find the common thread.
Don’t tweak the questions yet. You don’t have enough data to see patterns.
Option 2: Adjust your questions
This happens when you start hearing the same answer again and again for a particular question.
A question has done its job. It’s no longer revealing anything new.
For example, if every retired business owner describes the baseline relationship in the same way:
“The relationship manager was always available.”
At that point, you don’t need to keep asking about the baseline. Update the script and spend more time on what changed and why the relationship broke down.
Make this adjustment only after the same answer repeats across several interviews.
Option 3: Stop interviewing
Sometimes you reach saturation.
You hear the same core problem from four or five clients in a row. The story doesn’t change. The challenges stay the same.
For example, you might hear the same story from four retired business owners. They can’t reach their relationship manager. There’s no visible backup. Transactions stall. At that point, interviews five and six are unlikely to reveal anything different.
That’s your signal to stop.
At this point, the work shifts from interviewing to synthesis.
What comes next
You’ve debriefed each interview and decided whether to keep going, adjust, or stop.
Now you have a stack of debriefs. One for each interview.
The next step is to step back and look for patterns across all of them.
That’s Part 2.
In the next article, you’ll learn how to find common problems across interviews, separate symptoms from root causes, and decide which problems actually deserve attention.
For now, focus on doing the basics well.
Debrief each interview carefully.
Answer the five questions.
Evaluate your process.
Get this right and everything that follows becomes much easier.