The Peak Phase
The Peak phase is where value is generated. It should consume roughly two-thirds of your total interview time, because the deepest insights come from sustained exploration of specific problems, not surface coverage of many topics.
The Three Guiding Questions
Throughout the Peak phase, hold these three questions in mind:
- Are we discussing the right problem?: Is what the participant is describing actually the issue your team hypothesized, or is something else going on?
- Are users approaching the problem with alternatives?. What workarounds have they built? Spreadsheets? Manual processes? Other tools? Human coordination?
- How painful is the problem?: Does it change their behavior? Do they lose time? Money? Do they feel frustration or resignation?
Staying in Problem Space
The hardest discipline of the Peak phase: do not pitch solutions. When a participant describes a painful workaround, your instinct will be to say "we're actually building something that would solve that!"
Don't. This destroys the evidentiary value of the interview. It shifts the participant from reporting their experience to evaluating a hypothetical solution. The quality of what they tell you drops immediately.
The Structure-Serendipity Balance
The Peak phase is semi-structured. You have specific hypotheses to test, but you're also listening for the unexpected.
When a participant mentions in passing that they "have a spreadsheet for that," the right move is to stop and probe: "Tell me more about that spreadsheet. When did you create it? How often do you update it? Who else sees it? Have you ever tried to get rid of it?"
This follow-up might reveal a workaround that dozens of users employ: a problem far more valuable to solve than the one you originally hypothesized.
But every detour has a cost. The skill is deciding consciously whether the unexpected thread is more valuable than the planned Peak questions. The decision-first framework gives you the criteria: does this thread produce evidence relevant to the decision?