3. Customer Discovery Loop
“Problem & Product”
Phase 1
State Your Hypothesis
- Problem
- Product ( solution )
Phase 4
Synthesize, Verify,
Prepare to Do it Again.
Phase 2
Test Your “Problem”
Hypothesis
Phase 3
Test Your “Product”
Hypothesis
The Problem and Your Solution (the product)
3
4. Phase 2: Test & Qualify
Problem Hypothesis
• Actions
– Get out of the building
– Test the problem
– Become the customer
• Goal
– Solve a real problem
4
5. Test & Qualify Problem
Hypothesis
•
•
•
•
•
Friendly First Contacts
“Problem” Presentation
Customer Understanding
Market Knowledge
“Service Journey”
5
6. Test & Qualify Problem:
First Contacts
• Build a Rolodex
– Build List of ~50
prospects
– People who will talk to
you.
• Develop “Innovators”
list
– who “gets” new ideas
• Create reference
story/sales script
– Assume 10% of your list will
meet with you
– Means lots of calls
• ~ 10 phone calls per day
per team member.
• Schedule Customer Visits
6
7. More - First Contacts
• Start Broad: Friends, Family, LinkedIn
– Qualifying Questions
– Referrals
• Possible Users: Industry Veterans
– Market Insights
– Problem/Solution Feedback
• Target Users: Early Adopters
– Product Market Fit Insight
– Customer Acquisition
7
8. Test & Qualify Problem:
Create Problem Presentation
• In the Meeting :Think: I want to listen.
– How do I get the prospect to talk?
– whiteboard, single sheet of paper, … napkin. (Powerpoint)
• I’m not kidding.
• Give “them” the pen.
• ! Not a Sales Pitch !
– Test of your understanding of the customers problem
– Problem/Solution – “One Pager” idea (page 204 Fig 5.4)
• Problems
• Today’s solution
• Your solution
column 1
column 2
column 3
– Capture other missing data
8
9. Test & Qualify Problem:
Customer Understanding
• Meeting Goals -? What do I need to learn from these meetings ?
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Become a Domain Expert
Understand their “Day-in-the Life”
Understand their problems/pain
Get a feel of how this impacts their life/work
Who has similar products that solve this problem
How do they learn about new solutions
Can they be helpful later
• :Think: I need to present the above to my company?
9
10. Test & Qualify Problem:
Market Knowledge
• Get a feel for the “lay of
the land”
• Adjacent Market players
• Industry Influencers
• Key Analysts
• Attend Conferences
/Tradeshows
• Based on Initial visits
expand your list to
include the whole
“Ecosystem” of the
problem.
• Begin “developing” an
Ecosystem “sketch”
10
11. :Extra:
“Service/Product” Journey
• “Who Is Your Customer?”
– :idea: Sketch Your Product and the People it
“touches” through it’s usage.
• Often it is difficult to determine who is your
customer. The service journey gives you a
“top level” insight.
11
15. Customer Archetypes
• A more detailed
articulation of your
customer.
• Lots on this in the
textbook.
• This is not version 0.1 (
this is the goal)
:Extra:
15
16. Prospects
? Who are you gonna talk to?
Early Customers
–
–
–
–
Budget
“home brew solution”
Actively looking
Know they have
problem
– Have a Problem
:Extra:
16
17. :Tricky:
Review Time
Does Our Product Idea …
• That we didn’t talk about
• Actually solve the problems that we’ve
learned about in our first pass of talking to (
experimenting on) customers?
• This is formal review time.
– Do we need to re-Do our Product Idea or are we
ready to “pitch it”??
17
18. Test Problem Hypothesis:
First Reality Check
• Team Review
– What did we learn?
– What are we gonna do about
it?
– Make Decisions.
– Take Action.
• Fyi … this Review can turn into a “jihad”
;-)
… be calm … this is how real learning
happens.
• Review Details
– Build a Workflow Map of
customer
• Before and after your
product
– Problem scale
– Key insights
– How did the product spec
match needs?
– Re-review product feature
List
– Why are you different?
Getting everyone on same page is not
easy in practice.
18
21. :Extra:
Note: Product Context
• You can’t talk product until you can “position
it” as a solution to a problem.
• In Customer Discovery you are still
“searching” and “not selling” therefore your
“Product” should be the minimum necessary
to gain the information you need. This is
called “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP)
21
22. Really Three Separate Steps
3. Develop/Sketch “Your Solution to
the Problem” (Your Product )
2. Develop/Sketch “The Problem”
( No Talking Product Yet!)
1. Develop/Sketch “Market Understanding”
(What You Did Last Week)
time
(that never end)
22
25. Customer Discovery: Rules
• Rule 1: Facts are outside the building,
opinions are inside.
• Rule 2: Solve a problem that customers say is
important and valuable
• Rule 3: Does the product concept solve that
problem?
25
26. Customer Discovery: Exit
Criteria
• What are your customers top problems?
– How much will they pay to solve them
• Does your product concept solve them?
– Do customers agree?
– How much will they pay
• Can you draw a day-in-the-life of a customer
– before & after your product
• Can you draw the org chart of users & buyers
26
27. Customer Dev’t Process
Time Frames
Customer
Discovery
Customer
Validation
Customer
Creation
Scale
Company
Existing Market: 1 Months - 1 Year
Resegmenting a Market: 6 Months - 3 Years
New Market: 1 - 3 Years
27
Hinweis der Redaktion
1. One person at a timeFocus groups are a group-think, distraction-filled mess. Avoid them and only talk to one person at a time. If desired, you can bring someone with you to take notes — some UX designers like this approach. Personally, I tend to do one-on-one interviews because I think people loosen up and thus open up a bit more.2. Know your goals and questions ahead of timeHave your assumptions and thus learning goals prioritized ahead of time. Decide who you want to talk to (age, gender, location, profession/industry, affluence, etc), and target interviewees accordingly. Prep your basic flow and list of questions. You might veer off the plan to follow your nose, which is great, but go in prepared.3. Separate behavior and feedback in discussionDecide up front if your focus is going to be on learning a user’s behavior and mindset, and/or getting direct feedback or usability insights on a product or mockup. Do not mix the two in the discussion flow or things will get distorted.Put “behavior and mindset” first in your discussion flow. During this part, don’t let the interviewee go too deep in terms of suggesting features (some people can’t help it), but keep them focused on if they have a problem, how they think about the problem space, and if and how they have tried to solve it in past. Getting people to discuss their actual actions, not just opinions, is very useful.4. Get psyched to hear things you don’t want to hearIf you don’t do this, you might find yourself selling or convincing, or even hearing what you want to hear. Remember, the goal in this early stage is learning and validation/invalidation, not a sale.Unless, of course, you have set a sale or LOI as a goal. You might want to shoot for a commitment from the interviewee as a way to measure true demand. If so, keep it entirely out of the behavior/mindset portion of the discussion.5. Disarm “politeness” trainingPeople are trained not to call your baby ugly. You need to make them feel safe to do this. My approach was to explain that the worst thing that could happen to me was building something people didn’t care about, so the best way they could help me was absolute, brutal honesty.6. Ask open ended questionsDo not ask too many yes/no questions. For example, minimize such questions as “do you like Groupon?” Instead ask “what kinds of deals do you look for, if any?” “What motivates you to hunt for deals?” “How do you discover deals?” “Do you get frustrated with the deal sites out there?”7. Listen, don’t talkTry to shut up as much as possible, and try to keep your questions short and unbiased (i.e. don’t embed the answer you want to hear into the question). Don’t rush to fill the “space” when the customer pauses, because they might be thinking or have more to say.Make sure you are learning, not selling! (at least not until that part of the conversation, if relevant)8. Encourage but don’t influenceIf you stay *too* quiet, some folks might start getting uncomfortable, thinking that they are boring you or you are judging them. You can keep things rolling with little motions of encouragement, such as nods, “I see”, “interesting”, etc. But do not say things that might steer or influence the interviewee.9. Follow your nose and drill downAnytime something tweaks your antenna, drill down with follow up questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for clarifications and the “why” behind the “what”. You can even try drilling into multiple layers of “why” (see “Five Whys”), as long as the interviewee doesn’t start getting annoyed.10. Parrot back or misrepresent to confirmFor important topics, try repeating back what the person said. You can occasionally get one of two interesting results through this. In the first, they correct you because you’ve misinterpreted what they said. In the second, by hearing their own thoughts, they’ll actually realize that their true opinion is slightly different, and they will give you a second, more sophisticated answer.Another approach is to purposefully misrepresent what they just said when you parrot it back, and then see if they correct you. But use this technique sparingly, if at all.11. Ask for introductionsAt the end of every interview, see if you can get leads to another 1 to 3 people to talk to.12. Write up your notes as quickly as possibleThe details behind a conversation fade fast, so if you haven’t recorded the session, write up your notes and color commentary as soon as you can. I brain-dump into a shared Google Doc so the rest of the team can see it. (Note: I typically have not recorded sessions for fear of making interviewees more self-conscious or careful, but other entrepreneurs have said to me that, while it takes some rapport-building at the start, pretty soon people forget about a recorder.)Afterwards: Look for patterns and apply judgementCustomer development interviews will not give you statistically significant data, but they will give you insights based on patterns. They can be very tricky to interpret, because what people say is not always what they do.You need to use your judgement to read between the lines, to read body language, to try to understand context and agendas, and to filter out biases based on the types of people in your pool of interviewees. But it is exactly the ability to use human judgement based on human connections that make interviews so much more useful than surveys.Ultimately, you are better off moving fast and making decisions from credible patterns than dithering about in analysis paralysis.
