Building Your Customer Development Plan

Building Your Customer
Development Plan

Cindy Alvarez
The Experience is the Product - http://www.cindyalvarez.com

Copyright 2010 Cindy Alvarez

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

If you don’t have a plan...



What we’ll cover

• What should I ask and how?

• Is this working? Iterate.

• What does it mean? Finding patterns.

• Devil’s advocate.



If customers could talk...
• Here’s why it’s a problem.
• Here’s how we try to deal with it now.
• Here’s who is involved.
• Here are the contexts where it’s a
problem.
• Here are our constraints.
• Here’s what we’re willing to pay to solve
it.


Teasing out the information

• Who, what, where, why, how
• “Other customers have told me...”
• Expectations vs. realities vs. aspirations



“Tell me about how you do
_________ ...”

• High-level
• Don’t mention your solution
• 60 seconds of silence



“What did you originally hope to
do be able to do with ______?”

• Mental model of ‘how it should be’
• Listen for emotion here
• If
neither of these, IS there a
problem?


X
“What’s wrong with what you’re
using / doing now?”

• Don’t put customer on the defensive.



“Are you able to do that as often as you’d
like?”

“Are you able to do that as easily as you’d
like?”

“How happy are you with the results?



“Who works with you on doing
____?”

• How will stakeholders change with
your solution?



“What other tools or processes
have you tried?”

• Thisis your competition.
• Value anchoring.
• Why not X?



“If you could wave a magic wand
and do anything with _____,
what would you be able to do?”

• Explicitly grant permission to ask for
the impossible.



“Is there anything you’d like to
ask me?”

• Remember, it’s a conversation.



It’s not about you

“The first rule of Fight Club is, you do
not talk about Fight Club.”

“You[r product] is not a beautiful and
unique snowflake.”



What I do (YMMV)

• Ask for 20 minutes (Provide suggested
timeslots or Tungle.me URL)

• Emphasize no preparation needed

• Phone or face-to-face

• Let customer lead, encourage tangents

• Take notes (silence is OK)


Simple notetaking
other tools
Customer name how often

Company what do they wish they
knew?

Date stakeholders
do they use GA?

Freeform notes



Summarizing is critical

(most companies
skip this --> fail)

surprises / trends /
(in)validates hypothesis


Stop! Are you learning?

after 3 interviews

• Am I getting the information I need?
• Do interviews feel comfortable?
• Am I talking to the right people?
• Am I getting yes/no answers?



Watching for Trends

1 person might be a nutcase

2 people means keep listening
(and start asking others)

3 people is interesting



“I’ve talked with other people
who said [the opposite]...”

• Peopletend to agree out of
politeness
• Disagreeing = emotion = validation!



“If you could do ______, how
would that make your life better?”

• Dig deep.



How many is enough?

• About 50 KISSmetrics interviews pre-
MVP
• About 20 KISSinsights interviews pre-
MVP
• No surprises in last 5 interviews? MVP.



More resources from my blog
• FAQ: Customer Development for Product Managers http://
www.cindyalvarez.com/learning/faq-customer-development-for-product-
managers

• The “Who” and “Why” of your Target Customer http://
www.cindyalvarez.com/lean/the-who-and-why-of-your-target-customer

• The Plural of Anecdote IS Data http://www.cindyalvarez.com/learning/
the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data

• Customer Development Interviews: What you SHOULD be learning
http://www.cindyalvarez.com/communication/customer-development-
interviews-how-to-what-you-should-be-learning

• Customer Development Interviews: Finding People http://
www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/customer-development-
interviews-how-to-finding-people



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