Talking to humans

1. Customer discovery is about gaining much deeper insight into your customer, or your partners, or your market
2. Being told your idea is cool is not useful; seeing behavior that validates your customer’s willingness to buy is very useful
3. Prepare an interview guide before you get out of the building
4. To ask the right questions, you need to understand your risks and assumptions
5. Get creative when trying to recruit people — if at first you don’t succeed, try something new
6. Sometimes observation is as powerful as interviews
7. Take good notes, especially on your key risks, so that you can calculate metrics later. Even better, set your target goals ahead of time!
8. Bring learning back and analyze your patterns as a team
9. Never stop asking hard questions about your business

Who do you want to learn from

• The typical customer you envision if you get traction with your idea
  • What are the commonalities across your customer base
• Your early adopter
  • The mainstream customers is waiting for proof from early adopters before they try something
  • Someone who feel the pain point acutely, or just love to try new products
• Critical partners for distribution, fulfilment or other parts of your business

B2B

• Strategic buyer - who is excited about the change your can bring
• Economic buyer - who controls the purse
• Technical buyer - who might have approval/blocker right
  • Talk to mid level managers first rather than straight to the "C-suite"

What do you want to learn

• How do you know your most important question?
  • Understand the most important and risky assumption
    • My target customer will be?
    • The problem my customer wants to solve is?
    • My customer's need can be solved with?
      • “very concise description / elevator pitch”
    • Why can't my customer solve this today?
    • The measurable outcome my customer want to achieve is?
    • My primary customer acquisition tactic will be?
    • My earliest adopter will be?
    • I will make money (revenue) by?
    • My primary competition will be?
    • I will beat my competitors primarily because of?
    • My biggest risk to financial viability is?
    • My biggest technical or engineering risk is?
    • What assumptions do we have that, if proven wrong, would cause this business to fail? (Include market size)
• Get stories, not speculations
  • Humans are spectacularly bad at prediction their future behaviour
  • It is more effectively to ask interview subject to share a story of theirs
    • Warm up first, make a concise intro about the purpose of this conversation, and ask some basic question of the person
    • What is you current approach, how did you find it
    • Walk me through a process
    • What was frustrating, what did you like about the experience
    • Have you thought of changing your approach
• Asking for open-ended questions
  • Usually starts with who, what, why and how
  • If asking yes/no question, follow up by a open ended question
  • You can ask "What should I have asked you that I didn't"
• Testing for price
  • Set up a situation where the subject thinks they actually buying
  • How much do you currently spend to address this problem?
  • What budget do you have allocated to this, and who controls it?
  • How much would you pay to make this problem go away? (this can lead to interesting answer as long as you don't take answer too literally)
• Getting feedback on a prototype
  • Mockup used to receive initial feedback, but there is a degree of skepticism
  • Ask your questions about behavior and challenges first, so that the discussion about product feature does not poison or take over the conversation.
• Design "Pass/Fail" tests
  • Set target ahead of time to test
    • Such as "we expect more than 40% of customer to ..."
  • Just a guid rather than script
• Observation can be really valuable
  • See uninterrupted process or someone, and gather relevant information based on what do you wish to find out.

How do you find your interview subjects?

• Three general rules
  • Try to get one degree of separation away
  • Be creative
  • Fish where the fish are
• Find the moment of pain
  • Such as someone who failed behavioural question
• Make referral happen, set a goal of walking out of every interview with 2 or 3 new candidates
  • Ask them if they know someone facing the same issue
• Conferences and Meetups
  • Book time after the meetup, send email or message while they have a fresh memory on you
• Enterprise Customers
  • On LinkedIn
• Advise and selling
  • In early stages, asking for advise is the best method
    • My name is ... , I have hear you are smartest people in the industry, and you had really valuable advice to offer, I am not trying to sell you anything, but wish to grab 20 mins of your time
  • Use the sale pitch if you past the learning and want to test your assumption around customer acquisition
• Benefitting from gatekeepers
  • Asking to redirection to the right person to speak to from the assistant
• Say you are a student and researcher as additional advantage, and you can share something afterwards
  • Get survey links to the customers
• Online forms and landing page, build up list of people to contact
• CTA, price choice, and then a request for an email address

How to ensure an effective session

• In person > video > phone call > text based
• Talk to one person at a time
• Add a note taker - record, and note down immediately after conversation
• Start by few warming up questions
  • Do not follow a strict question list
• Disarm your own bias, going into the conversation trying to "kill" the idea rather that support it
• Get them to tell a story
  • Get people to tell their experience, whether they tried to solve the problem
  • Help them to set the scene if can't remember
• Try to look for solution hacks
  • A great indictor would be use understood the issue, and actively implement solutions
  • Need to research upon these solutions
• Understanding whether the pain you are address is top of their priority list or not
• Listen more, and don't embed the answer you want into the question
• Drill into the question by asking why, as long as the user has attention
• Parrot back or misrepresent to confirm
• Getting feedback on your product
• Getting feedback from product
  • Seperate the storytelling from the product
    • Since features may mislead their thought on the matter
  • Ask them to by up-front brutally honest, explain this is the best way to help. If still confused, explain that how horrible it is to create something that nobody wants
  • "I like the product" is quite easy to say, always put people through an actual experience, or get them to open their wallet

How do you make sense of what you learn

• Take good note
  • At the start of every entry
    • Name of interview subject
    • date and time
    • Name of interviewer
    • In person or video conference
    • photo
  • Make metrics, but don't rely on them
  • Brainstorm and look up the pattern from the response, then update your business canvas accordingly
  • Make human judgement, moving fast in making decision based on credible pattern, try to filter out the bias
• Don't abdicate your role as product designer
  • you are gathering information and making decision, rather than order-taker
• Fantasy -> Conversation -> Paper test -> MVP -> Live
  • Each level can reveal more truth about your idea
• How many people to talk to?
  • 50-100 at first
  • Constantly talking to customers, but update the question you are exploring
• Still need to have a vision rather than only strategies, vision goes a long way.

1 .Keep things concise
2.Keep things convenient (meet near their office, etc)
3 Name drop when you can
4 Follow up if you don't hear an answer, but don't be annoying
5.If you are leaving a voice mail, practice it first you might think it
sounds practiced, but to others, it will sound more professional)