Unpacking process: Discovery interviews with customers 101

So what I'm playing right now is actually a Van Morrison track. And it's, as you could hear from the loudness of it, it's a track called And the Healing Has Begun. It's from his 1979 album. I think it's called Into the Music. And, you know, Van Morrison, Van the Man, one of Ireland's great musical heroes. I have this song actually on. my current summer mixtape. If you can find it on the How This Works Co. website, if you actually go down to the bottom of the page, there's a little cassette tape. It's a bit of an Easter egg, but you can get the whole playlist there. So it's about five after, so I'm going to go ahead and kind of kick things off. Let me know in the chat. I've got YouTube and LinkedIn open in another window. I'll try not to be too distracted by it, but if you all have any issues... I don't see that anyone has joined in the Zoom meeting, so I'll keep an eye on that as well. This is one of those moments where I wish I had a meeting assistant, but I don't, and I appreciate everyone being here. So let's keep going. If you don't know who I am and you're tuning in, let me actually, the music was supposed to fade out. This is another thing that my meeting assistant might do, but... as I don't have one, I am my meeting assistant. I will do it on my own. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Skipper Chung Warson. I work in the areas of product strategy and design. I also am a workshop facilitator and I do some coaching as well. And I do this all through my services practice called How This Works Co. My most popular offering right now is something called a bullseye customer sprint. and the folks that I mainly work with are early stage startups and mid-market businesses. And part of that focus is around how budgets are really lean for both of those types of businesses and also this idea of needing to really focus in on business outcomes, outputs, and leveling up. certain aspects of a business, things like increasing revenue, increasing number of customers, decreasing costs, things like that. And part of what my topic is today, customer interviews, is actually one of the integral parts of the Bullseye customer sprint. So that's what I want to talk about today. And so in the area of customer interviews, let me just do a quick check to make sure there's no one. chatting or having a problem. Okay. So why we're here today. So as I said, the title of this particular conversation is around the idea of customer interviews, how to talk to customer interviews. And in all of the product strategy and design work that I've ever done, the subject of customer research or interviews comes up. And seven out of 10 times, I hear something like, and this can be from clients, this can also be from potential clients. There's some sort of response to this idea of what do you know about your customers? What sort of customer work have you already done? And usually the response about seven out of 10 times is something like, oh yes, we know all about our customers. And either myself, maybe it's my team, maybe it's a mixture. We'll think something like, great, great. Glad you know so much about your customers. Happy to dig in. This will save us so much work and we can just get started right away. But more often than not, what turns out to be knowing all about our customers is quite a mixed bag. It involves things like maybe old and half done email surveys, or maybe it's something like marketing personas that an agency overcharged them for. or maybe even something like recorded sales calls. And these are all really good sources of information, but quite frankly, they're very tactical and they're not customer interviews. So the question that I ask on this particular slide that's showing up on the screen is, have you ever worked on a feature or a series of features that customers barely noticed? And part of that is that it's not being informed by the customers. We're not talking to them in these robust and regular ways. and so and more importantly not understanding what it is what their goals are what their context is what they need what they want and what's stressful uh also sometimes called pain points and today in thinking about customer interviews we're going to fix some of that how to talk to customers in ways that can inform our products and experiences and ultimately help the businesses that we uh either operate or we work in um or maybe we're looking to stand up any any sort of number of things so there are three key books that i'm leaning on for this particular topic let me make sure that no one's joining the zoom meeting participants there i am great um so this is one of those books uh it's called the mom test it's written by a fellow named rob fitzpatrick And it's a funny title. It's got this great pink cover, so it's really easy to remember. The back, you can't see it on this particular image, but it's a nice blue, so there's this funny pairing between the pink and the blue. But the book itself is about this idea that your mom, for sure, will tell you that your business idea, it's great. She's going to support you. She's going to thank everything you do. She's going to put that business idea up on the refrigerator, and she's going to be proud of it. But what she doesn't tell you is that what she's telling you, that business idea being great, it actually might be terrible or it might be misguided or it might be incomplete. And this goes back to the general idea that people are nice and for the most part, and they don't want to hurt your feelings. And so... The three general principles that I gleaned from this particular book, and it's really short, it's only about 150 pages, and it's a really small book. I don't have a copy of it right here at my desk. But the three basic ideas is when you're talking to a customer and you're doing one of these customer interviews is you talk about them. This is not the time for your idea. People like to talk generally, but they don't want to be propositioned in this way. And one of the things that I often say as I'm starting a customer interview is this notion that in a conversation, there's this invisible expectation that we're going to speak 50-50. I'm going to speak half the time and the other person is going to speak half the time. And in a group, it changes a little bit. But there's this expectation that I'm not going to over talk, you're not going to over talk, and we're going to self-modulate that. But in a customer interview, I actually expect and hope that I'm speaking much less than the person that I'm speaking to. So that's an expectation that I set up front as we start the conversation. I also typically don't know this person, so I want to set the stage properly. The second point is about not asking certain questions. So the second point that's on the slide is asking about specifics in... and it should say their past, I suppose, specifics in the past, not hypotheticals. Don't ask, would you buy this? Would you buy this product? Would you buy this experience? Instead, ask something like, what's the last thing that you bought to solve this kind of problem? You really want to talk about what they've done and not necessarily their aspiration. And we'll talk about that more here in a... few minutes and part of that is because what they've done in the past their past behavior predicts their future behavior for the most part and so you really want to dig underneath what they've done before because that's going to past equals future like i said generally and then the third principle being talk less and listen more i always think of that line from hamilton where The character, Alexander, sorry, Aaron Burr rather, is coaching Alexander Hamilton to say, talk less, smile more. But in this instance, it's listen more. You can smile while you're doing it as well. But as I said about setting expectations at the front of a customer interview, it's about listening more than you talk. Because your job during that customer interview isn't to talk. Your job is to... find out the edges of what's happening in their life, their context, their, like I said, goals, needs, desires, and pain points. And then find out for you what's worth solving. Because you can't solve everything. You can't do everything. The iron triangle of time, cost, and scope, you can really only pick two. But the idea being that you need to figure out what are the things that are most actionable for you. So some examples of this, and we talked about this just a minute ago on the previous slide, but let's look at some questions that are good and then some questions that are better. Sorry, questions that are bad, not so good, and questions that are better. That's the more appropriate way to say this. So one... Misguided question, so maybe we don't want to call it good and bad, but a misguided question might be, would you buy this product? And part of the reason why that's not such a great question is that it's inviting people to lie to you to make you feel better. This is begging for a lie. By asking a question like this or this question specifically, you're inviting in a bunch of false positives. Another not so good question is this idea of, is this a good idea? because it's too vague, number one. Number two, on a five, 10 minute, 20 minute conversation, you're not going to be able to fill in every single feature or every single piece of what your idea is. So it's also quite a lot to load onto one person. And then the question, how much would you pay? So you're speculating about pricing, how much they would... pay to solve this problem or satisfy this need or desire. And part of the reason why this is not such a great question is that people are wildly optimistic about what they would do in the near or distant future. So the previous point that I made around how past behavior, rather, yeah, past behavior dictates future behavior. What you want to do is dig into something that they've done to understand their motivations, to understand their mindset. And granted, that might have changed, but for the most part, we operate according to patterns as human beings. So I'll give you an example. If you are working on a fitness product or you're working for a gym or some sort of... fitness app or things like that and one of the things that you want to as i'm telling this story i'm gonna check linkedin and uh youtube to make sure there's nothing pending there um okay i don't see anything um i hope that thank you uh i'm saying thank you to dave's um comment from 12 minutes ago to lower the music oh dima um i see an admit uh and then I think everything's also okay. Streaming can't tell. Okay, I'm gonna assume everything's okay if I haven't heard anything. So the example that I was giving around the fitness app or maybe working for a gym or something like that is the kind of customers that you might be wanting to talk to are folks who go to the gym or have some sort of fitness routine or something like that. And so an example of a not so good question or bad question, as I've titled this slide, is something like, oh, how often do you go to the gym? What does going to the gym look like for you? And so a typical answer to that might be something like, oh, I go to the gym five days a week. Oh, great. That's a fantastic cadence and routine. But the better question is actually the fourth one on this list. Walk me through the last time you faced this problem. Last time, when you were last week, let's say, how often did you go to the gym? And that becomes a more accurate representation of what their execution, not their desire, not their intention, not what they want to do, but what it is that they actually do. So if you ask them about last week or maybe last month, what their frequency of going to the gym was, they might say something like, oh right uh last week i went three times um one morning i wasn't feeling super well so i skipped the gym um another morning my significant other um had something to do early in the morning so i had to drive them to so and so so that gives you a more realistic view of their life and how they make certain decisions um so to get back to the list uh this idea of walk me through the last time You went to the gym right or face this problem You're really looking for concrete facts about their experience not opinions or Like I said aspirations and definitely don't want them to speculate about your idea Because as I said Human beings are generally polite and they're going to want to make you feel better and then the fifth better question on this list or the The second better question, fifth question overall is what else have you tried? Because if your customer hasn't bothered to look for solutions, then it might be that they don't care enough about the situation or the problem. And this helps for sizing how important this is for them. And then also market sizing and some other more sort of technical and product terms. And then the last good question might be something like, or better question might be something about, you know, what's the hardest thing about doing this today? So that way there is a little bit of speculation, but you would also want to follow up and say things like, well, why is that hard? And really dig underneath. And we'll get into that point in a slide or two. But what this does is that you're uncovering the friction in their current process, which is where that opportunity or maybe even your solution what you're building that might be where it's waiting so you really want to get all around the edges of this to understand the context so i already mentioned the mom test by rob fitzpatrick and i firmly believe that everyone should have a copy of that book whether or not they work directly with customers or not i think it's a really helpful framework for being able to answer questions about experience matters as well as products and other paradigms as well. Really getting into that exploratory layer of why the positioning of certain products and services are so important. But there's more. And remember I said there were three different books that I was thinking about in putting together this material and this presentation. And one of them, as you see on the screen, is Teresa Torres' Continuous Discovery Habits. And this, for anyone who's working in product or design or even in a JSON area, I think that this is really important. And the very first step of this book is about talking to customers. And not just talking to customers, but Teresa says the way that you should be talking to customers are on a regular cadence. Her recommendation is every week. And in the book, she talks about how it doesn't even need to be a full hour. It can be something really small, even 15 minutes or 30 minutes, but something that's regular. And if you do the math on what talking to one customer every week would add up to, it would add up to something like 50 conversations a year. That's going to be 50 more pieces of information, pieces of individual human context that you wouldn't have in some other way. And one of the other things about doing it regularly, whether it's every week or it's on some other cadence, maybe it's twice a week, maybe it's once a month. Once a month is better than zero. So that's another thing to keep in mind is that talking to a customer shouldn't be an earth shattering or monumental event. It's not a special occasion. The idea here is to have customer conversations regularly. And by doing it in this way, what you're doing is you're not only able to spot opportunities, but then you're also potentially catching problems. And that's something that we can get into a little bit later around how talking to customers and maybe pairing that with some kind of assumptions testing or prototype testing can really be a supercharged element of the way in which you take that customer information and you fold it into what you're currently building. Remember I said there were three, so this is the third one. And this book by Erica Hall, if you don't have this book, especially the 2024 edition, which has this lovely, I think Erica calls it a pumpkin orange. If you don't have this copy, you should get one. Because One of the things that Erica is very experienced in matters of user research, all things research, and this book in and of itself is the quick start guide that you should have and a good reference guide for anyone who's doing this kind of research. And I think that the book boils down to these four points. I think that the first point... that you can take away from this book is this idea of asking better questions. So we talked about that a little bit in the context of the mom test. We talked about it a little bit in terms of making sure that you're asking about things that they've done versus things that they'll do in the future, that hypothetical, aspirational sort of mindset. So don't ask something like, do you like this? Instead, Ask something like, walk me through how you might solve something like this today, or even better, how did you solve this yesterday or last week or whatever. And we've talked about this, so I won't bang on this too much, but this notion of making sure you get into your taking the time to ask those focused questions. The second one around thinking critically about answers. So as you're conducting an interview, there are lots of things that are going to be happening. This idea that you're going to be able to kind of multitask or pay attention or hear everything that's happening, you're just not going to be able to. But the more that you can think critically and dig underneath to understand what it actually means. So ask follow-ups. If someone says something like, oh, you know, last week I went to the gym and I just went three times and they stop. Well, they might be someone who is either conforming to that 50-50 paradigm in conversations, or they might be someone who's just very short worded, if that's the right way to say it. So ask why, why did you only go to the gym three times last week? And, you know, you can also offer something like no judgment. You know, last week I only got to the gym once. So if that's helpful, you don't want to make things up, but we're human beings. We want the people that we're talking to to feel better about this experience. The third point I think is around don't look for statistical significance. This isn't a scoreboard, although you will be tracking and thinking about how these patterns are coming up in these conversations and you want to have them in a qualitative fashion and not a quantitative fashion. You don't need to talk to 20 people. You probably only need to talk to seven to nine. Although as a really easy way, I often talk with my clients around starting with five. Five feels much more manageable than somehow the difference between five and nine is pretty stark. But you're looking for insights. You're looking for patterns. And more than that, it's about what you're picking up on as a human being. What kinds of patterns are you picking up on? And then the last thing, and we talked about this with Teresa Torres's paradigm around doing it regularly, make research a habit. It's not a special event. Don't treat customer conversations like a big formal process. And just because it shows up once doesn't make it a pattern. Even if it lines up with your bias or your team's bias or some hypothesis that your team has, just go and talk to another person and see if it shows up again. right in that stack of five to nine or however many it is you don't need hundreds of responses you just need the right questions with the right number of conversations so that's i think an important thing to keep in mind there so i don't want to go too far down i've thrown a lot of theory and referenced three different books so i also want to make this really practical I've voiced over some of these questions in my examples, but I want to spell it out much more deeply. And I think there are four things to balance when you're preparing for a customer interview. One of the things is figuring out what matters most. If for your team, it's about increasing the number of customers or what is the goal? that you're working towards. Are you validating that some problem actually exists? Are you understanding how people might solve it? Are you testing a specific paradigm within the application? Just get really specific about what you need to learn in this sprint and think about it in chunks. You're not going to learn everything at once. Think about the five interviews in a section and use those as input for what it is that you're what goal it is that you're moving towards then identify the right participants who faces this problem you can call this the ideal customer icp you can also call this a lighthouse customer or you can even call them a bullseye customer who is the person to use april dunford who wrote a great book on positioning And I think I've actually talked a little bit about the edges of some of the concepts in her book. The book's called Obviously Awesome. It's another book you should get. Think about someone who cares a lot about your product or experience or service for that matter. So make sure that you're focusing in if that makes sense, as the first point makes, if that makes sense for your learning goal. It might also be that you're casting a wide net and you actually want to talk to a variety of people. So that's going to factor in according to the goal that you have. The third point that I think is really important and often overlooked, it might sound conversational, what happens during a customer interview, but the best customer interviews, and I would go one step further and say the best kinds of conversations have some kind of framework behind them, some sort of planning mechanism. So for customer interviews, you want to create an interview guide. If you have a team or other folks who are interested in these outcomes, you're going to want to clear that interview guide with them. And that way you have an inventory of those better questions that you can be asking, understanding that you're going to want to follow the threads or follow your curiosity. The interview guide, while agreed upon and needs to be solid, it's just a conversation starter. I think the more important thing is to be curious about that particular customer and what it is that's happening in their life. And then the last piece in terms of preparation is about including the whole product team. And part of why this is important is that customer interviews or customer discovery is not just one person's job it's really everyone's job and one of the things that i find so important in the process of going through customer discovery is when a variety a diversity of people are involved in that process you're not saying only one person can do interviews you're actually democratizing it i suppose amongst the whole team and using that interview guide as an anchor and the regular cadences understanding that there might be an interview that doesn't go super well or you don't uncover the things that you're hoping to uncover with this particular person move on to the next one right so all of these concepts are are intermeshed with each other in that when you have a regular cadence and you're doing this on a weekly basis if you screw one up or and i've screwed up a ton of interviews if you screw one up you'll just have another one next week right so you just keep you keep moving keep swimming And I think another parting note for this idea of preparation is around targeting people who are actively experiencing the problem or recently tried to solve it. Because those people are the most motivated to tell you those stories about what's going on in their context. So it makes them pretty easy customer interview subjects. One last thing that I would say that I didn't write on this particular slide. But a good gauge for if you're doing customer interviews, quote unquote, properly, and you're not doing the pitching or you're not overloading too much into the conversation is the person at the end of it should want to talk to you again. If you've done the customer interview in the quote unquote right way to uncover those. needs and desires, pain points and context. So that's another thing to keep in mind is that at the end of it, if you feel like it's been a little lighter than, oh, we have to find these things and accomplish these things, it should feel like a conversation that you might have with a friend or a family member or, you know, someone of that ilk. So a few pointers. There's this idea in most user research or customer interviews. that you don't want to ask these really simple yes or no questions. Things like, do you use Netflix? Yes. Now, of course, that might be a gateway to other things to set the context. It might be more open. So one way to reframe that question or to re-ask that question in a way that would invite a non-yes or no answer might be something like, do you utilize a video streaming service? Yes. If so, yes, great. Which one? Do you use Disney? Do you use Netflix? Excuse me. What is the product or service that you utilize? So ask them open-endedly. And there are all sorts of following questions, even to that example that I tossed off, which is, oh. How long have you used Netflix? How do you use Netflix? Do you typically watch it on your phone? Do you watch it on a tablet? Do you watch it on your TV? So really fill out the edges of the who, what, where, when, why. Because at the end of it, those are the components of good storytelling. You want to be able to understand, see, feel, maybe even smell the experience that someone's having. So really fill out those edges, which is... a little bit around the second point is using a technique called the five whys. I believe that this was initially developed by someone who was at the Toyota Corporation in the 70s or 80s, but the idea is that in order to get to the core answer of a question that you're asking just keep asking why and typically if you ask why five times and you receive an answer every single time that fifth answer should be the root cause and for this i would embrace if you have kids or if you don't have kids just embrace your inner seven-year-old right who just asks a ton of questions over and over which might seem obvious to a lot of people but really embrace that and lean into it The other thing, and remember we talked about this 50-50 divide of conversations, and this notion that if in a normal conversation you talk as much as the other person, they talk as much as you do, lean into the silence. As human beings, a lot of us don't like white space or for things to go quiet, because if things go quiet... then it signals to a lot of us that we're not having a good conversation. But what I would encourage you to do when you're talking to a customer, or maybe even when you're talking to your coworkers, is really lean into the silence. Sit and wait. Count to seven. I often don't make it to seven because I am impatient. And so I often say count to five. So whatever that number is for you, Five, seven, heck, stretch it out to nine. See if you can make it to nine. Two, good purpose. Because what will happen is that the person on the other side of that conversation will fill in that silence. And sometimes you will stumble upon an unexpected story or an unexpected piece of context that will inform the thing that you're working on. The fourth point here is about focusing on specific stories. And by that, I mean, we just use the example of a video streaming service. And so there's a paradigm that we talked about earlier, which is how to dig into someone's past experiences and have them tell you what happened. So something it's as simple as, oh, You know, we started on the path with video streaming services. Do you watch it on your phone? Oh, yes. Do you watch it on your phone, tablet, TV? Oh, I always watch it on my phone. Oh, cool. Will you tell me about the last time you watched something on your phone? And where were you? You know, what was going on? So you might learn about how they might download movies or TV shows before they get on a plane or flight or plane or a train or things like that. Or maybe they... are on a long road trip and they don't do much of the driving. But already in some of those scant details that I just threw out there, I don't do much of the driving so I end up like watching movies in the back seat. So that's a lot of information that we don't know and that behavior of downloading it before they go on a trip is really important for someone who might be working on a video streaming service. Especially if that's some of the detail. If the person that they're talking to is one of their focused users, their bullseye customers, they want to learn and maybe they are really interested in this idea of downloading and queuing and those sorts of things. The fifth point on this is as you're having these conversations, I would encourage you to really watch for emotional responses. And part of what I mean by that is the notion of frustration or excitement. These are signals when you begin to see that someone is uncomfortable or maybe they're really jazzed about something. Maybe the volume of their voice increases. Maybe, you know, if you're able to see their hands, maybe they gesture loudly during a certain part. Maybe they're visibly uncomfortable. Maybe they do sit in a pause or they're reflecting on something. So. Really pay attention to emotional responses. And then the last thing that I would say is, I think it's important to also pay attention to, as you're talking to people, when they talk about their workarounds. Because this shows you where real solutions live. What are they doing to solve this today? if they're not solving it then it may not be a big enough problem for them so maybe they're not the right person to talk to or they're the sort of person that doesn't care enough to actually pay for a product or service or experience that might remedy that so the last point on this particular slide is one of the strongest signals what you want to listen for is when they've spent money or they've built their own solution. That's actually proof that they care enough to action on it. So that's something you really want to pay attention to. So we talked a little bit about the first point on here, body language, emotional reactions. Do they lean in when they're discussing certain problems? Do they look away? Also, what are they saying that they do versus... maybe what they do. They might have an aspirational piece to, well, I goal set once a week. Oh, cool. In terms of your goal setting session for last week, what did it look like? Oh, I actually didn't do it last week. I was traveling. So really dig into, and you can even say things like, no offense, or offer some color or example from your own life if it helps them. if you feel like it helps them to feel better. And that goes into the second point as well, what they do versus what they say. So we talked a little bit about this on the last slide. You really want to look for where are the disconnects, which goes into the third point. Are there contradictions when they claim something is important, but they haven't done anything about it yet? The fourth point on this particular what to capture is really grab onto their actual language. So if you have a note taker, hopefully it's a... if you do have a machine note taker, hopefully you also have a person who's with you. We'll talk about that in just a minute. But capture the actual language. Look at the thing that they're saying. So if they say something like, this thing, it's kind of annoying. Write down kind of annoying or annoying or whatever it is. Don't write down major pain. Don't write down big problem, right? Write down the thing that they're actually saying. And the other thing that's important is we are human beings who don't remember. We don't have perfect memories, or at least I don't. I'll speak for myself. And so document these observations. during or immediately after each interview. So that way you're not forgetting what it is that happened because this context is really important for how we build these products and experiences and even services too. So with this slide, I wanted to call out this notion of be careful of the traps. And there's a number of things that I've listed here. Leading questions, you know, you don't want to bias responses. Don't, a question like, do you think this would save time? That's really fishing for validation, right? And more than that, it might get you the validation, but it really won't get you to the truth. Listen, don't sell, right? Don't focus on selling instead of listening. Because the moment you start pitching, your customer is going to switch to polite mode. We've been in situations like that where we walk into a meeting or an interaction and then you realize that someone's trying to sell to you. Well, some people's response is to say anything and everything in order to get out of that situation because they're not interested in buying. There are people who will lean forward and actually buy or partake in that service, but you're going to lose a lot of people if you've set it up as a, hey, I just want to have a conversation because you've fooled them, you've tricked them in some sort of way. The other thing would be focusing on features and not problems. Teresa Torres talks about this all the way through her continuous discovery habits, where she talks about focusing on the danger, the pitfall of focusing on features and not necessarily outcomes. Because if you focus on features, and you're asking about things like, oh, button colors or, you know, a checkout flow or things like that. You want to hear more broadly about how they go through a process, right? If this is a customer interview, there are other kinds of interactions and interviews that you can do. But if this is specifically a customer interview, you really want to understand the larger context. And I would say, that one of the dangers here is that you're cherry picking and being really selective while ignoring what might be warm signals by not digging underneath it. When interviewing, and so to fill out the one, two, three, four, five, six, waiting too long between interviews and jumping to solutions too quickly. You want to make sure that you can offer solutions, of course. However, if the purpose is a customer interview, you want to make sure that you're focused in that discovery mode. You want to learn more about this particular customer. I mentioned the Bullseye Customer Sprint. And one of the interesting features about the Bullseye Customer Sprint is that what they call the interviews within that format is actually half discovery and half prototype testing or assumption testing. So typically what I'll do before one of those interviews is I'll let them know we're going to have a conversation for the first 30 minutes. And then for the second 30 minutes, we're going to go through two to three prototypes that talk about some value proposition of this work that I'm doing for my client. So you can set that expectation, but you don't want to jump to those solutions too quickly is what I meant by that. And then to go back to this idea of doing customer interviews regularly, you don't want to wait too long between interviews because you don't want it to feel special. You want to make sure that you're kind of feeding the fire of what it is that your team is learning about the product or experience. And then the last thing that I would say about this is too many or too few people attending. When interviewing, you really want a core a really small number. And what I, especially if you're only talking to one customer, you really want one person who's running the interview, doing the talking, guiding, asking questions, and you want a note taker and no more. You don't want any more than that. In the Bullseye Customer Sprint, one of the most interesting things is that when you're having the interview with a customer, you might be recording it for transcript purposes or maybe just video evidence, but you're also transmitting it live. to the rest of the team. So the person who's being interviewed doesn't necessarily see that there are, I just did some two bullseye interviews yesterday, and I had a team of four people who were watching on a private live instance. So you want to make sure that it's not a wall of people. This is not a panel discussion. This is not a bunch of people just staring at one person. You want to make them comfortable in the context of having a conversation and the last thing that i would say here is that remember you're there to learn not to convince someone you're not there to have some sort of interrogation or inquisition at the end as i said earlier the customer that person that you're talking to should actually want to talk to you again so if they do or if they're if they will book that next call that's a good sign that you're at least conforming generally to the principles of a customer interview so to begin to wrap things up and uh to to set expectations also with um folks who are listening in whether you're listening in currently or you're listening in later i had thought that there might be time and space to have Q&A. If you're on the LinkedIn Live or you're on the YouTube Live for that matter, if you do want to throw in any questions that you're curious about, happy to go through that. I don't see anything. I see something around, I see lots of like emojis coming through. So I wasn't Now I see it. It was off to the side. So thank you for that. If you have any questions, post it in the LinkedIn chat. You can also post it in the YouTube chat if you're there. But I would wrap things up by saying how to take action on all of this, because I've just thrown a lot of information at you from three different books and mentioned a fourth one. So how to put this into practice, because it's all fine and good to understand the general concept. But if you're not actually doing these things, then how do you get better? You don't practice doing customer interviews by watching a webinar. You practice customer interviews by doing customer interviews. So if you're currently on a team or working for a business, I would ask some of these questions. And we can alter these if you're not currently on a team or if you're running kind of a solo business. But who's one customer that you could talk to this week, not a month from now, like who's someone you could talk to right now. And so I'll actually give you an example of things that I've done inside of my own business. So in my consulting practice, where I have lots of different things that I do, I can work fractionally, I can coach, I can, but one of the things is around figuring out how Who is my core customer? So I talked about that a little bit in my intro, early stage startups and medium businesses, medium sized businesses. I think those are the kinds of companies that can benefit most from the kind of work that I do. And so who's one person that I could talk to this week? So if my ideal customer is someone who works a decision maker inside of an early stage startup, how can I connect myself to someone who works in an early stage startup? Who's a decision maker? i would challenge you to apply that same logic for yourself who's one person that you could talk to this week i understand today's thursday that i'm recording this uh tomorrow's july 4th in the united states so maybe not today maybe for the purposes of the literal day we'll we'll say who's one customer you could talk to monday or tuesday of next week then the second thing that i would ask is What's one decision that you need customer input on that you're just not sure whether or not that this is something that is important? Is it something that a stakeholder is making a case for or someone with you just need a little bit more information? Maybe it's a priority on a certain feature that you're working on and a certain angle on messaging or maybe it's something around like understanding why customers aren't upgrading or something like that. And then how do you make this into a habit? Could you book 30 minutes every Wednesday? Do it over lunch so that way it's not biting into too many people. And 30 minutes, and I understand people need time and space in order to do the work that they need to do, but 30 minutes is... in the course of an eight-hour day, if that's what someone's working, is quite a small bite. And if you can stand up and just make a standing instance where this is where we do customer interviews and we will schedule a set of customers, one customer to talk to every Wednesday at noon, then it becomes regular, part of your rhythm, part of your cadence. you know set a reminder make it a calendar event make it a team event normalize it just don't overthink it just pick one person ask one question ask why ask why again like some of the things that we've talked about in this like just try it out even someone who may not be an official customer of your product or experience if you have friends or family members like try it out with them there's gonna be a ton of stuff that you learn i think just have that first conversation and then keep doing it I see there are some questions that are coming in the LinkedIn, so I'll address those in a minute. I just want to call out some references. So the mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick, continuous discovery habits by Teresa Torres, just enough research by Erica Hall for purposes of just being above board. I did use claw.ai to check grammar going through this. And some of the photos here are from Unsplash. So let me click over to the LinkedIn Live. So Dave Summers, have you had clients who are hesitant about having others not in the room listen in? So Dave, that's a really good question. It's not something that I transmit or I'm not intentionally deceiving. I do ask to record the call. So by... asking to record the call i feel like i am getting permission to share this with others uh so what i might offer there is um and and i do recruiting in a variety of ways uh and i have a funny story that i don't have time for necessarily but um in this current age in which we live i've had a couple of recruiting failures with um two of the bullseye customer sprints, actually one, let's just call it one. But so I think by using something like userinterviews.com, which or any other recruiting platform like that, I, part of that is they all kind of, I built something in where they opt into being recorded just for the purposes of internal purposes. This is not part of a social media marketing strategy. This is all just about learning. Brad Diderickson asked about, can you share an example of digging deeper into warm signals during an interview? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think one of the things that I would say about digging deeper is, I mean, I gave the example as I was voicing it over this idea of video streaming platforms, but I'll actually dig into without naming names or talking. about specific parts of the example, a conversation that I had yesterday with a product manager. And one of the things that we were talking about is how, and I believe they worked in the growth space, and so they worked a lot with customer success people, as well as other folks on the team. And so one of the things that they were talking about is how to take the information that they were learning about customers using spreadsheets and other ways in which to document information about their customers and coordinating all of these things together. And so as they're describing the process, they described it generally. I asked about, you know, about how many do you process a week? Can you give me an idea of like what that size looks like? Are there other tools that connect to it? So just, I think that follow your curiosity is what I would say. And so as a result of some of those questions, I learned that they were trying to connect Asana, they were trying to connect Airtable, they were trying to connect a few different kinds of services into this information that they were processing and compiling manually. So this felt like a really big pain point for them. And in fact, when I asked the question, which is a pretty typical kind of discovery interview question, if you could wave a magic wand and solve one problem, what would you solve? And this particular person said, compiling all of this information. So I think... Brad, I hope that answers your question around digging into that signal of, oh, is there something here? But then sometimes what you think is a warm signal, you might dig into something and say, yeah, okay, let's switch subjects. I'm going to move on to something else. So that's where having an interview guide is really helpful because then you have other questions that you can leapfrog to. Dima asked in the LinkedIn chat, how would you approach a situation where a startup invites you to do a quick UX feedback on their platform, but you know that meaningful improvements require understanding real problems first? What's the right way to communicate that so founders don't get disappointed with your initial feedback, but at the same time, they understand that a deeper discovery process is needed before? Yeah. So I think as you're working with your team, I think that the principle of yes and applies here. Be improvisational about it because I think one of the things that's really important in the way that I think about my work in product strategy and design is that there are proper research ways, studied ways that lead to nothing in life is a guarantee, but some levels of success. So you need to do the calculation of how can I stand this up and do this in a really quick way such that we can get the sort of MVP version of some kind of result right so maybe in addition to the idea of standing up an instance of customer research doing a few customer interviews you also say this is another thing that we're going to work on. Here are some pain points that we know are broken from the process. We're going to look at customer service logs to say, oh, let's dig into these areas. So that way we're able to provide some immediate impact, but at the same time doing the right things to build that foundation. I think it's about balance. Thanks so much for your time and attention. I really appreciate it. If you're here on LinkedIn, you can find how this works co pretty easily. I am pretty active here on LinkedIn as well. You might also find this at YouTube live on the How This Works YouTube page. So however you're watching this, I really appreciate your time and attention today. And I hope that your Thursday or whatever day you're watching this turns out to be a good one. We'll talk more soon. Thanks. Bye.

Most customer interviews feel more like peer pressured interrogations than actual conversations. This session covers the fundamentals of talking to customers (and other humans) using principles from "The Mom Test," Teresa Torres' continuous discovery, and Erika Hall's "Just Enough Research."

The plan is to have some lecture, some demo, and some question & answer.