How you start off can vary a ton based on the setting. The way you'd kick off an interview in a B2B context is different whether they are new customer or they have a longstanding relationship with the company, and it's also different with how you would probably kick off a B2C interview.

The most important thing to do here is orient your participant to the conversation at hand and focus their attention from wherever it was in the world to the here and now. It also is a time for you to start building rapport and getting a sense of how they answer questions so you know how to ask questions effectively.


There are a few reasons you want to call this out at the beginning of a conversation.

First off, it's important to make sure everyone knows why they are in the room. There's been times where I end up in interviews where someone had different expectations or understanding about the point of the call, and doing this helped us realize it would be a bad use of our time.

Second, being clear about your perspective and orientation to the call is the first step in building rapport with your participant. This isn't a quiz or a test.

Finally, language like this can help remind your participants that they are the main character here and you're excited to learn their story (or at least a specific part of it).

I always like to ask this so that there is room for the participant to share concerns, questions, or even hopes about conversation topics before we dive in so that I can plan accordingly.


Asking for consent to record is important! It's not only unethical, it can be illegal to start recording by default.


These questions are helpful ways to get a participant talking. The questions invite the participant to speak from their experience and help you get a sense of how they will respond.

While you generally want to ask about specifics in an interview, I find that opening up with broad questions like this are good ways to get the conversation flowing.

Given that I was talking to people who were responsible for managing Slack at these organizations, I imagined that I would start to get answers to questions that I had later. Instead of diving in at this moment when we're just getting started, I would make note of these things and then follow up about them as I got into the core questions later.


Sentences like this act as "signposts" and signal changes in the conversation. Everyone I've worked with has different phrasing for this, so feel free to use words that feel authentic to you. What you want to do is make sure that you are signaling to your participant that you're shifting the conversation to a new direction or altitude.


I may ask a more direct question like this if I feel like the participant isn't sure what I'm looking for. I also will make a note to myself later to fix that question based on the conversation so that I can do better next time.


This is a good example of a question that I'm using as a springboard.

What I really want to understand is the second question here — how is this person's team involved in managing various tools. But to do that, I need to get a sense of what tools they use. I'm probably not making a detailed list of every tool, but identifying the different categories of tools and how management changes by category.

This helps me contextualize their responses later about the way they manage Slack.

This is likely a complicated question, and one I'd probably pull an example or category from the previous question to help anchor them.

I knew that some people would tell me "I'm not sure" based on their seniority and tenure, since they may not be involved in this process — and that was also helpful information to gather.

Everything I've asked up to this point is a build up for what I want to know here — how do they manage Slack?

Because this was a guide for me, there are only a few questions listed here. I would often ask many more in the interview, especially follow ups, but these highlighted the three big topics I wanted to understand:
1. How they managed Slack
2. What they were struggling with
3. How the Slack team helped them manage Slack


This was often a big question, where we'd spend 5+ minutes on each activity. I'd hear about their onboarding process, issues that would come up, policy decisions, and so on.

Because I've asked questions about other tools, I could ask more pointed follow ups.

If this guide was meant to reflect the actual conversation I had, this question would be repeated a number of times for the different activities.

This is a very important question to ask, and it was one where I was often taking very detailed notes because it would be things that I'd likely have to share with their account team as follow ups.

Part of the reason that this is important is you have covered so much ground with participants that you want to let them pause and identify what this conversation has brought up for them.

Always thank them — customer time is not free.


Behzod Sirjani

In order to better understand how to improve the experience of managing Slack at scale, I created this discussion guide to conducted interviews with Slack Admins at our largest customers.

Slack Enterprise App Admin – Discussion Guide

 How is your morning/afternoon/day going so far?

Hey [PARTICIPANT NAME], my name is [NAME] and I am a researcher at Slack. I really appreciate you taking time to chat with me today about your work and managing Slack at [COMPANY]

If there are other people on the call, introduce them as well.

We’ve heard a lot of feedback about how challenging Slack can be to manage at scale, especially in terms of apps and integrations, so I’m looking forward to talking with you today to figure out how we can make that better. I may ask you some questions that feel really basic, but I promise that they come from a place of genuine interest.

There are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions, I’m truly just interested in your experience and perspective.

Do you have any questions for me before we get started?

Is it okay if I record this call so that I can review it later? We will not be sharing this outside of our company.

To kick things off, can you tell me about your current role at [COMPANY]?

What are your core responsibilities at [COMPANY]?

For each of the key responsibilities, dig into the following. You likely won’t need to ask all of these, since much of it will flow naturally. Try to keep this to 5 minutes.

Who do you collaborate with to get this done?

If you went on vacation tomorrow, what important activities would not happen?

What really breaks? Who would fill in for them?

Now I’d love to zoom out a bit and talk about your company more broadly.

How is your company currently structured?

You mentioned that you are a part of [TEAM]. What part of the company does that belong to?

Do you have centralized teams, distinct business units, product squads, or something else?

What are some of the tools that everyone at [COMPANY] relies on?

These are probably communication, project tracking, HR, wiki, etc.

How are you/r team involved in managing these tools?

Can you tell me a bit about who all is involved in deciding what tools people are or aren’t allowed to use at [COMPANY]?

If it’s helpful, we can use a recent example that you went through.

What role do they play in making the final decision?

How do tool decisions get communicated throughout the company?

Where can people learn about what tools they are or aren’t allowed to use?

Is there a specific request process people can go through?

Now I’d love to shift gears and talk about managing Slack specifically. 

When it comes to Slack, how do you and your team divide the labor for various tasks like adding/onboarding users, installing and managing apps, and so on?

How much time do you spend on these activities?

What are some of the challenges that you’re facing when it comes to managing Slack at COMPANY?

Dig into how much of these challenges are technical versus social. i.e. Do we need better education and training, actual product changes, or something else?

 How do you and your team work with your Customer Success Manager [NAME]?

How are they involved in triaging issues, escalation, etc?

 As we’re wrapping up, I wanted to go back to something you said. Can you tell me more about [TOPIC]? 

I really appreciate your time and this conversation. Is there anything else you’d like to share before we end?

Often, if the interviewee is familiar with your product, they’ll end with some feature requests or ask for customer support. It’s helpful to think about what your response might be when this comes up.

Enterprise App Management Research - Discussion Guide at Slack

Slack Enterprise App Admin – Discussion Guide

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