A research interview
Understand someone’s experiences, circumstances and needs.
GREATIDEA.SAYS WHO?
You believe in your idea.
Understand what your customers need before you build.
Inside your head01 / 03
“This could be huge.”
Your conviction.
Use the arrow or choose a perspective. Illustrative dialogue.
How to Know Which Idea to PursueStop guessing. Start knowing.
Why we created CBL
Help customers feel comfortable challenging your assumptions.
In a customer interview, someone may feel comfortable answering your questions but less comfortable telling you that you’ve misunderstood their situation.
We created Conversation-Based Learning to make that challenge easier. Customers can question what we think, explain what matters to them, and help us see what needs to change before we decide which idea to pursue.
See what happens in a conversation
We ask about
her experience.
From answering our questions
to correcting our thinking.
The learning conversation
Give customers something they can question and change.
We bring a rough picture of their situation and how our idea might help. We explain that it contains our assumptions, and invite them to change it: “What have we misunderstood?”
The picture gives us something concrete to explore together. Customers can correct it, explain their reasons, and show us what we’ve missed. We compare those reasons across customers before making a decision.
She shows us what we’ve misunderstood.
What we thought mattered
“Get this done faster.”
What the customer explains
“I need to know
who I can trust.”
Illustrative dialogue. We compare learning across customers before drawing conclusions.
Take a closer look
What does that change in practice?
Open a page to explore the purpose, the invitation and the way we learn.
01Why we meet
What are we trying to learn?
A CBL learning conversation
Explore customer needs and possible offerings to inform a decision about your idea.
02How we invite customers to challenge us
How do we make our assumptions open to correction?
A research interview
“I’d like to ask you about how you handle this today.”
A CBL learning conversation
“Here’s what we think your situation looks like. What have we misunderstood?”
03What we work with
What helps us explore the reasons?
A research interview
Open questions and follow-up questions that explore their experience.
A CBL learning conversation
A prepared picture of their needs, followed by offering ideas they can question and correct. We explore the reasons behind their responses.
Good interviews can be open and relaxed too. CBL brings preparation, customer conversations and analysis together in a defined process for deciding what to pursue.
CBL, supported by AI
AI helps us prepare
and learn faster.
We’ve been using Conversation-Based Learning with clients for more than ten years. As we write this book with fellow practitioners, we’re testing and refining how AI supports the method, from preparing what we show customers to organising conversation records and examining patterns across them.
AI helps with the work. Your team checks the interpretation, follows it back to what customers actually said, and decides what to do next.
AI helps prepareA first picture
to question.
to question.
Customer assumptions
and rough offering ideas.
changes the picture.
AI helps organiseTrust matters.See the customer’s words
“I need to know who I can trust.”
Your team checks this interpretation against the conversation, then looks for supporting and conflicting reasons across customers.
Illustrative material. Open the finding to follow it back to the customer.
Working with customer conversations also means deciding carefully how their information is recorded, shared and processed. How we work with AI and confidential data
From one conversation to a clearer decision
Use what you learn to decide which ideas to pursue.
Explore how customer corrections and the reasons behind them change an idea.Play the journey
A fictional daytime dog-care service. Choose a step to follow the learning.
Fictional example / Weekday dog care
One business. Several possibilities.
Choose a step, or use the next arrow
Maya“I hate owing
another favour.”
another favour.”
Sam“I’d want to meet
the carer first.”
the carer first.”
Lee“We share care.
It works for us.”
It works for us.”
VWBF
ParkNew possibilityRevise ↶
V Paid short visitW Long walkB Emergency backupF Familiar carer
Dots are offering ideas, not scores. All accounts are fictional.
01 / The discovery journey
Start with assumptions
Use AI to draft customer assumptions and the material you’ll bring to the conversation. These are starting ideas for customers to correct.
Use the reasons behind their responses to make your decision.
Compare customer groups, then needs, then offerings. Keep differences and counterexamples visible. People decide what to pursue, revise or park. Desirability alone does not prove a business will succeed.
A closer look / A fictional conversation
Meet Maya, and see what she changes.
Follow her conversation, from our first assumptions to a revised offering.
Go deeper with the book’s method
Take the
Masterclass.
Learn with Paris Thomas and Christian Doll
Bring a customer-facing idea and the decision your team needs to make. We’ll guide you through CBL with AI, from preparing a learning conversation to making sense of what customers tell you and handling their information responsibly.
Challenge the assumptions.
Use AI to prepare a first picture that a customer can question.
Find out what matters.
Practise conversations that uncover the reasons behind a response.
Make a call you can explain.
Review AI-assisted analysis and connect customer evidence to what you pursue, change or set aside.
Meet the authors
Meet the people behind CBL.
Paris Thomas and Christian Doll created Conversation-Based Learning. More than 100 practitioners have helped shape the book through feedback, stories and experience.
A few practical questions
Before you get started.
Which business decisions is CBL useful for?
CBL helps teams investigate new business ideas, product and service improvements, pricing models, and ways of reaching or serving customers. Start with a concrete decision: which customers to focus on, which offerings to pursue, or how to improve an idea before investing further. It works with both business customers and consumers.
How does CBL relate to customer interviews?
Customer interviews can be open, flexible and exploratory. CBL builds on customer-learning practice with a defined process for exploring needs and offering ideas, then comparing the reasons across customers. It makes your assumptions explicit and invites customers to correct them. You prepare customer profiles, related jobs, pains and gains in Need Bundles, and rough scenes showing an offering's proposed value. Conversations and systematic analysis connect those corrections to recommendations. The point is to understand why an offering meets a real need, with reasons your team can examine.
Does CBL prove product-market fit or that a business will succeed?
CBL builds evidence of desirability: which customers value an offering, why, and what shapes their willingness to pay. That is a crucial part of the decision. Technical feasibility, commercial viability and the size of the opportunity need additional work. A positive conversation is not a purchase, and a strong desirability finding is not a guarantee of business success.
The next chapter is yours
Great idea.
Let’s find
out.
You don’t have to have all the answers.
Start by testing the assumptions behind your idea.
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