This document discusses customer development and outlines its key steps: forming a hypothesis about a customer problem; finding potential customers to interview; asking open-ended questions to understand customer frustrations, constraints, decision-making processes, and workflows; making sense of interview findings to validate or invalidate hypotheses; and using insights to build minimum viable products that test learning. It emphasizes that half of all product ideas fail and that customer development can save significant time by avoiding building the wrong products.
4. You’re wrong
half the time
At Yammer, nearly 50% of our projects fail to
ship because they do not move the intended
metrics.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix all agree that at least half of
their feature ideas fail too.
http://ai.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/ExPThinkWeek2009Public.pdf
7. Customer Development
steps:
• Forming a hypothesis
• Finding potential customers to talk to
• Asking the right questions
• Making sense of the answers
• Figuring out what to build to keep learning
• Repeat as needed
14. Asking the right questions:
• What is the potential customer already
doing?
• Frustrations
• Constraints
• How they decide, how they buy, how
they use
15. Getting customers to talk:
• Tell me about the last time…
• 60 seconds of silence
• No “yes/no” questions
• “Other people have told me…”
• Who / What / When / How / Why
17. Do you use any [tools/products/apps/tricks]
to help you get ________ done?
18. If you could wave a magic wand and be
able to do anything that you can’t do today,
what would it be?
(Don’t worry about if it’s possible)
19. Last time you did ___________, what were
you doing right before you got started?
Once you finished, what did you do after?
20. Is there anything else about _________
that I should have asked about?
21. You may be wondering
about:
• Compensation for interviewees
• On-site, face-to-face, phone, other?
• Should I record?
• Who needs to interview?
• What if the customer isn’t useful?
22. Making sense of what you
hear:• Validates
• Invalidates
• Surprises
• Emotion
23. What to build next:
• What is your biggest risk?
• (Use the magic wand on yourself)
• MVPs are not scalable!
24. MVPs for learning can be:
• Concierge MVP
• “Wizard of Oz” MVP
• Single use case MVP
• Pre-order (“vaporware”) MVP
• Other peoples’ products
25. Pick your metrics (for
example):• X% increase in signup conversions
• Y% decrease in time between signup
and successful task completion
• Customer reports qualitative data
26. You can ask questions anytime!
cindy@cindyalvarez.com or @cindyalvarez
(also stay tuned for Lean Customer