Interview the switch
When: People are buying, churning, or ignoring your product and the usual research is not explaining why. Feature requests conflict. Surveys report preferences that behaviour contradicts. You have real customers who recently started or stopped using the product, and nobody has asked them what actually happened.
The action: Interview recent switchers about the specific event, not their opinions. Walk the timeline backwards from the moment of purchase or cancellation: first thought, passive looking, active looking, the deciding moment. Draw out the four forces at work in the switch: the push of the current situation, the pull of the new solution, the anxiety about change, and the habit of the present. One real story, fully excavated, beats twenty stated preferences.
Forces: Interviews of this depth cost an hour or more each and the skill takes practice, against the ongoing cost of building from guessed demand. The pull towards asking about opinions is constant, and the interview only works if resisted. Recruiting genuine recent switchers is harder than recruiting users in general.
Signals: Within weeks, product debates get settled by reference to specific switching stories rather than by seniority. At least one roadmap item is reframed or dropped because the timeline showed the real trigger. The team can name the forces holding non-customers in place.
When not to: When there is no switching behaviour to study, as in a genuinely novel category with no incumbents and no workarounds. When the question is usability rather than demand, since a switch interview explains why people hire a product, not whether they can operate it. When you need statistical confidence across a population rather than causal depth in a handful of cases.
Instance: The Re-Wired Group's mattress interviews, reported by Moesta and Klement, in which walking one buyer back through a single purchase surfaced the push, pull, anxiety, and habit forces that stated-preference research had missed.
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