If you walk into any product meeting in San Francisco, London, or Bangalore today, the energy is almost always the same. It is frantic. It is exciting. And it is entirely focused on the next thing.
"What if we added a collaborative mode?" "We need a dashboard update by Q3." "The competitors just launched X, so we need Y."
The main problem in product teams today isn't the inability to build; it is the inability to prioritize.
We are drowning in ideas but starved for validation. We treat the roadmap like a shopping list instead of a strategy.
The result? We become feature factories. We ship code that works perfectly for a problem nobody has.
The Rigor of "Why"
Before a single line of code is written, the most successful teams stop asking "How do we build this?" and start asking "Does the market actually care?"
This is where User Research moves from being a "nice-to-have" checkbox to the only leverage that matters. It is not about asking users what they want—users are terrible at predicting their future behavior. It is about understanding their current friction.
To do this effectively, you need to understand the toolset. You don't use a hammer to turn a screw, and you don't use a survey to understand deep motivation.
Screeners
This is your gatekeeper. Who are you actually talking to? If you are building for senior engineers, feedback from a junior marketing intern is not data; it's noise.
Quantitative Questions
The "What" and "How Many." These give you the breadth. They tell you 70% of users drop off at the signup page.
Qualitative Questions
The "Why." This is the gold mine. This is where you find out why they drop off (e.g., "I didn't trust the logo," or "I didn't know it was free").
The Magic Number is 5
There is a prevalent myth that user research requires hundreds of hours and a PhD. It doesn't.
Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group—the gold standard in UX research—famously proved the "5 User Rule."
The data shows that 5 interviews are enough to uncover 85% of usability problems. By the time you talk to your fifth participant, you hit a saturation point.
1 User gives you the first insights.
3 Users confirm the patterns.
5 Users solidify the data.
Beyond that, you encounter diminishing returns. This means you don't need a massive budget; you need a rigorous process. You need to validate the problem before you attack the solution.
The Future of Validation
We know all this. Every Product Manager knows they should be doing research. So why don't we?
Because it is hard.
Scheduling 5 interviews takes 50 emails. Conducting them takes 5 hours. Synthesizing the notes takes another 5. It is a grind. So we skip it. We rely on "intuition" (which is usually just bias in a trench coat) and we build the feature anyway.
We added Codiris Interviews to break this cycle.
We believe that user research shouldn't be a bottleneck; it should be a continuous stream of truth. Codiris isn't a survey tool. It is an AI-native environment that connects user insights with your roadmap, conducts voice-to-voice interviews with your users at scale.
- •It handles the Screening, finding the right people.
- •It manages the Qualitative depth, asking follow-up "Why?" questions in a natural, human voice.
- •It delivers the Analysis, turning hours of conversation into clear, validated specs.
You can now validate 100 users in the time it usually takes to schedule one coffee chat.
How this works in practice
Here's a concrete example of validation in action.
Step 1: Start with a question, not a feature
Don't start with a solution. Start with a question. For example: "How do people use LinkedIn today when their only goal is to find and connect with a specific person?"
Step 2: Write the prompt in Codiris
Inside Codiris, write a simple prompt:
Step 3: Let Codiris find the right people
Instead of manually sourcing users or sending cold messages, Codiris handles the screening. It filters users based on real usage patterns, prioritizes people who actively match your criteria, and excludes low-signal participants.
Step 4: Multimodal interviews
Codiris conducts real conversations—not forms, not multiple-choice questions. Actual, voice-to-voice interviews that adapt based on what it hears. It asks natural follow-up questions like "Why is that frustrating?" and "What did you try instead?"
Step 5: From conversations to patterns
After the interviews, Codiris automatically synthesizes the conversations into structured insight. It detects repeating pain points, groups similar statements into clear behavioral patterns, and attaches direct evidence to each insight.
Step 6: From insights to product decisions
Once the patterns are clear, Codiris helps you understand what should not be built and what deserves focus right now. Building is no longer risky. The problem is validated. The audience is clear. The success criteria are explicit.
This is where product development becomes confident instead of speculative.
You're not shipping "features." You're executing on evidence-backed decisions.
Stop guessing. Start validating.
User research shouldn't be a bottleneck. It should be a continuous stream of truth that powers every product decision you make.
What will you validate first?
Christmas Special · 95% Off
— Joël, Humiris AI