How we run the same customer interview every quarter

Every quarter, on the second Wednesday of the last month, we sit down with three Velo customers and ask them the same eight questions we asked last quarter. Same script. Same order. Roughly the same time of day. The value is not in any one conversation. The value shows up when we diff the transcripts.

The script we do not change

The temptation to tweak questions is strong, and we resist it. Once you edit a question, you cannot compare answers across quarters. Our fixed eight, in order:

• Walk us through the last thing you did in Velo this morning.
• What did you almost use Velo for, and then use something else?
• Which tab do you open first when you log in?
• Who else at your company touches Velo, and how?
• What have you built around Velo that we did not ship?
• When was the last time Velo surprised you, good or bad?
• If we shut down tomorrow, what would you replace us with?
• What are you doing on the days you do not open Velo?

Three users, chosen from a rotating pool of twelve power accounts. One customer we keep constant across the year for a longitudinal read. Two rotate.

The diff is the deliverable

We record with Grain, get transcripts back within the hour, and drop them into a Notion database with one row per user per quarter. On Friday we run a working session with product, design, and one engineer. The rule for that session: no talking about individual quotes until we have compared the same question across quarters.

What we look for in the diff:

1. Words that appear this quarter and did not appear last quarter. Q1 nobody said “audit.” In Q2, all three did.
2. The “almost used Velo for” answer shifting toward one workflow. Two quarters in a row of the same near-miss becomes a Linear ticket in the next planning cycle.
3. Tab-first answers drifting away from the tab we consider the home screen. That happened to Reports in Q3 last year and pushed the nav redesign.
4. Homegrown scripts built around us. Every quarter someone shows us a Google Sheet stitched to our API. That sheet is the roadmap.

The interview does not tell us what to build. The diff between interviews does.

What we do with it

By the following Monday, the working session produces a one page memo in Notion with three sections: patterns that hardened, patterns that softened, and one thing we were wrong about. That memo goes to the whole company in Slack, and the three tickets it generates land in the top of the next sprint. That is the whole loop. Eight questions, three users, one diff, one memo, three tickets.