Most interview advice is build rapport, ask open questions. In practice that gets you polite nothing.
What works for me is staying concrete. I ask about one specific thing that actually happened, not what they think in general. Then I let it breathe. I allow the silence and wait for their pace instead of jumping in.
The reason I do it is the payoff. People end up landing on something they hadn't noticed about themselves, and that's the part I'm actually after.
Ten years in and it's still the hardest thing to hand to someone else. Half of why I built Koecle, launching Monday.
Most AI interviewers parrot a script or won't stop digging. Koecle was built by design researchers to interview the way one would. It picks up the exact word you used, paces its follow-ups, and pushes deeper only when the moment's right, until it reaches the insight people can't put into words. Your interviewee just opens a link, no account. Then one conversation becomes an insight report, a 1-on-1 brief they control, or a cross-interview analysis.
