Why AI Interviews Are Better Than Surveys for Product Discovery
Surveys give you numbers, but they miss the 'why'. Interviews give you depth, but they don't scale. Here's how AI bridges the gap.
Every product manager knows the dilemma: you need to validate a new feature idea. You have two main tools in your belt:
- Surveys: Great for reaching 1,000 people, but the data is shallow. You get "70% of users want X", but you don't know why.
- User Interviews: Great for deep insights, but you only have time to talk to 5 people.
For years, we've had to choose between scale and depth.
The Problem with Surveys
Surveys are rigid. If a user gives an unexpected answer, a survey can't ask "Tell me more about that." It just moves to the next question. This means you miss the most valuable insights—the ones you didn't know to ask for.
The Problem with Human Interviews
Human interviews are amazing, but they are expensive and slow. Scheduling, conducting, transcribing, and analyzing 50 interviews would take weeks of full-time work.
Enter AI-Led Interviews
This is where tools like Fieldrun come in. We built Fieldrun to give you the best of both worlds.
An AI interviewer can:
- Ask follow-up questions: If a user says "I find this feature confusing," the AI immediately asks "What specifically confuses you? Is it the layout or the terminology?"
- Scale infinitely: You can interview 50, 500, or 5,000 users simultaneously.
- Analyze automatically: Instead of reading 5,000 transcripts, you get a structured report with themes and patterns.
When to Use What?
- Use Surveys when you need quantitative data (e.g., NPS scores, demographic splits).
- Use Human Interviews when you are exploring a completely new space and need to read body language and emotional nuance.
- Use AI Interviews for everything in between: validating features, testing messaging, and understanding user pain points at scale.
Fieldrun isn't replacing human researchers; it's giving them a superpower to talk to everyone, not just the loudest few.