Problem Interviews Without Overengineering (B2B SaaS)

B2B SaaS interview content tends to be heavy. Stakeholder maps, jobs-to-be-done canvases, persona docs, decision-maker matrices. All useful eventually. None of it earns its place before fifteen real conversations. Here is the lightweight version.

Fifteen Calls, Three Roles, One Notebook

Fifteen interviews split across user, buyer, and gatekeeper roles. Three open-ended questions per call. Notes in a single doc. Roughly seven users, five buyers, three gatekeepers. The proportions can shift but the rule is to never let the round be all users.

The Three Questions

One: walk me through the last time your team did X.

Two: where did things get slow or break, and who fixed it?

Three: if you wanted a tool to help with this, who would have to approve it and what would they ask?

Question three is the B2B-specific one. It surfaces the buyer-gatekeeper system inside the conversation.

What You Can Skip

Skip the buying committee diagram. Skip the persona docs. Skip the stakeholder map. Skip the customer journey canvas. Skip the win-loss analysis spreadsheet. Skip the value-pricing template. Skip the consideration-set tracker.

None of them are bad. They are infrastructure for sales teams running hundreds of opportunities. You have fifteen interviewees.

What You Cannot Skip

You cannot skip splitting the calls between user and buyer. You cannot skip asking the procurement question. You cannot skip writing down exact phrases. You cannot skip noting champion profiles when they emerge.

Those four habits are the entire engine for B2B problem interviews. The frameworks are decoration around them.

When Heavier Tooling Earns Its Place

Past about thirty interviews across multiple segments, you will need lightweight infrastructure - a tagged interview log, a champion profile sheet, a recurring synthesis cadence. By then you will know exactly what to track, because the customers will have told you.

Add infrastructure when the lack of it visibly hurts you. Not before.

The Trade

Two to four weeks. Twenty-five to thirty hours. At the end you have a workflow map, a buyer-user system map, a champion profile, and procurement constraints - enough to design both the product and the launch motion. The alternative is heavier methodology that delays the round and produces no more useful data than the lightweight version.