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Executive Summary

The problems we're facing often seem as intractable as they do complex. But as Albert Einstein famously observed, "We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them." So what does it take to increase the complexity of our thinking? To cultivate a more nuanced, spacious perspective, start by challenging your convictions. Ask yourself, "What am I not seeing here?" and "What else might be true?" Second, do your most challenging task first every day, when your mind is fresh and before distractions arise. And third, pay attention to how you're feeling. Embracing complexity means learning to better manage tough emotions like fear and anger.

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The problems we're facing often seem as complex as they do intractable. And as Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying, "We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them." So what does it take to increase the complexity of our thinking?

Too many leaders default to looking at decisions as either-or: The answer is right or wrong, good or bad, win or lose. This binary thinking has a built-in limitation: Overrelying on any given solution eventually generates the opposite problem.

Consider the familiar story of the esteemed consultant brought in to address the CEO's concern that decision making in her organization has become too centralized. The consultant's solution? A detailed plan to decentralize. Three years later the CEO calls the consultant back in, worried that decision making has become too decentralized. The solution? A detailed plan to centralize.

Simple answers make us feel safer, especially in disruptive and tumultuous times. But rather than certainty, modern leaders need to consciously cultivate the capacity to see more - to deepen, widen, and lengthen their perspectives. Deepening depends on our willingness to challenge our blind spots, deeply held assumptions, and fixed beliefs. Widening means taking into account more perspectives - and stakeholders - in order to address any given problem from multiple vantage points. Lengthening requires focusing on not just the immediate consequences of a decision but also its likely impact over time.

To cultivate this more embracing perspective, my team and I encourage leaders to adopt three core practices:

Forever challenge your convictions. This practice begins with asking two key questions in the face of any difficult decision: "What am I not seeing here?" and "What else might be true?"

Most of us tend to default to what we already know. Confirmation bias is one of the most pernicious and predictable influences on our capacity to see more. Early in childhood, we begin to develop an internal narrative about how the world works and what we think is true. Over time, without realizing it, we come to believe our story is factual, and most of us spend the rest of our lives sticking to it. As Paul Simon puts it in "The Boxer": "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." Confirmation bias makes us feel safer, but it also prevents us from seeing a more nuanced picture of the possible.

The reality is that any strength can be overused to the point that it becomes a liability. Think for a moment about one of your primary strengths. Then ask yourself: "What does it look like when I overuse it? What is the cost to my effectiveness, and what is the balancing quality I must cultivate?" For example, too much confidence eventually turns into arrogance. So long as we hold onto the mindset that the only alternative to confidence is insecurity, we're far less likely to develop the balancing quality of humility, which is critical to considering multiple perspectives.

Do the most challenging task first every day. Most leaders we encounter have every minute of their calendars filled, typically with meetings and emails they write in between, often on the run. But relentless demands and the pressure to respond rapidly undermine more complex thinking. Critical as decisiveness can be, nuanced solutions emerge from wrestling with the most difficult issues, rather than prematurely closing in on a decision.

One of the most powerful rituals I've built in my life, one I've shared with many leaders, is to take on my most difficult challenge as the first work priority of the day, for at least 60 minutes without interruption. Scheduling this practice is a way of ensuring that I give complex issues time and attention that might otherwise be consumed by more urgent but less intellectually demanding and value-adding priorities.

Pay close attention to how you're feeling. Embracing complexity is not just a cognitive challenge, but also an emotional one. In part, it's about learning to manage negative emotions - anger and fear above all. When we move into a fight-or-flight state, our vision literally narrows, our prefrontal cortex begins to shut down, and we become more reactive and less capable of reflection. In these moments our attention automatically shifts from focusing on the task at hand to defending our sense of value. This awareness by itself helps to modulate the inclination to attack, blame, or scapegoat, and instead to turn inward to restore a state of equilibrium.

When we're triggered, as little as 60 seconds of breathing deeply can be a powerful way to maintain physiological and emotional equilibrium. You can also do something as simple as getting up from your desk and taking a five- or 10-minute walk. Reacting from emotion tends to make us one-dimensional.

Above all, managing complexity requires courage - the willingness to sit in the discomfort of uncertainty and let its rivers run through us. The best practice is to not overrely on best practices, which typically emerge from our current assumptions and worldview. "In complex systems," says leadership consultant Zafar Achi, "there is no recipe, only art."

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What It Takes to Think Deeply About Complex Problems

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Executive Summary The problems we're facing often seem as intractable as they do complex. But as Albert Einstein famously observed, "We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them." So what does it take to increase the complexity of our thinking?

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We need customer input to create products people love-products they want to use and pay money for. You can use questionnaires to try and understand your users' motivations, but the problem is that questionnaires lack flexibility and don't get to core human emotions.

The solution: generative research.

Hands-on exercises unlock the mental space where your customers' motivations live. There's always a gap between what we say and what we do-that's just human nature. Generative research gets past the cognitive filters and brings out the deeper levels of human experience.

Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders wrote (opens PDF), "When all 3 perspectives (what people do, what they say, and what they make) are explored simultaneously, one can more readily understand and establish empathy with the people who use products and information systems."

Benefits of hands-on exercises for interviews

1. Become a better listener and reach a shared understanding

2. Make a conversation unfold naturally and achieve a strong rapport

3. Get rich information on users' motivations and expectations

4. Discover ways to get stories full of emotion and detail

5. Learn from the participant's own insights about themselves

6. Feel true empathy to generate a solution

Types of exercises

The cool thing about the generative research method is that it's just a framework. It's a way of thinking and conducting research, and it encompasses many types of exercises. Let's explore some of them.

Lists

This exercise is basically asking participants to recollect ideas related to a given concept. What you'll get are ideas from the top of their mind, which is good because it means those are the most important to them. Lists are low effort to complete but yield rich discussion.

Lists are useful for:

1. Collecting elements of a category (e.g. "Types of meals I cook")

2. Gathering feelings and needs around a topic

3. Compiling inventories (e.g. "What's in my bathroom cabinet")

4. Capturing schedules about a day

Sentence completion
For this exercise, you give participants a series of incomplete sentences that they must finish. This is a good trick to have them project their inner associations with the concept you're exploring. These are easy to complete and are good conversation starters.

Use sentence completion to:

1. Elicit associations, desires, preferences, and values about a topic

2. Gather a participant's own words to understand the symbolic meanings associated with the concept

3. Assess motivations and attitudes

Sorting

Card sorting involves giving participants set of cards, each labeled with a piece of content or functionality, then asking them to sort the cards into groups that make sense to them. The result you get will help you to increase the system's findability.

With card sorting, you can:

1. Identify and explore categories

2. Understand relationships among elements, which leads to uncovering users' mental models

3. Learn about preferences and priorities (when participants rank order elements)

4. Remember stories (when participants select or sort images)

Make

This is a broad range of exercises, but they all center around the idea of giving participants tokens they can arrange to tell a story about themselves. They're also useful to help them exemplify subjective and complex ideas, like thinking about the future or health-related issues.

Some activities to consider:

1. Drawings

2. Collage

3. Sculpture, models

4. Building (e.g. with Legos or paper cut-outs)

Keep in mind participants need lots of time to create and explain.

1. Expressing hard-to-articulate ideas

2. Capturing moods and feelings

3. Generating future scenarios

Design is all about people

Customers are no longer passive consumers. In order to create meaningful solutions, we must understand the emotional range of our audience.

We can gain access to the emotional space of our users if we use hands-on exercises. If we empathize with them, chances are we can design a product that will fit into their lifestyles.

Generative research techniques will help you explore the hidden nuances and create solutions to their problems. Let's not forget that people are the real experts at understanding their own ways of living.

As Steve Jobs said: "It's not the consumers' job to figure out what they want."

More from Misael Leon

Don't miss Misael's InVision DesignTalk, How to really understand your users' motivations.

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Tips for understanding what motivates your users | Inside Design Blog

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We need customer input to create products people love-products they want to use and pay money for. You can use questionnaires to try and understand your users' motivations, but the problem is that questionnaires lack flexibility and don't get to core human emotions. The solution: generative research.

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Interviewing Customers is a Special Kind of Torture

1. Talk to a stranger. Fun.

2. That stranger is immensely busy...and hates being sold things. Getting better.

3. That stranger will likely destroy your vision for a company. Ready to get started?!

When I started interviewing customers, the only thing I cared less about than talking about other people's problems, was asking about them. So, I skipped all the questions I thought were BS, and jumped to the most important ones:

"Would you use a product that does _____________?"

and

"How much would you pay for it?"

Turns out, those aren't the most important questions...they're the most misleading. Apparently, I am not a natural interviewer.

When I realized interviewing customers meant standing in front of strangers doing something I was awful at, any enthusiasm I had towards "getting out of the building", evaporated.

When I see other founders hesitate to interview customers, or do them wrong, I empathize. I've been there. It's a daunting task we have no experience with - and - isn't nearly as fun as building stuff.

Let's Fix That

Despite my early misgivings, learning to interview customers has become one of my most indispensable skills. Not just because it gives me a leg up on competitors, not because it helps me (in)validate ideas quickly, and not because it helps in my personal life as much as it does my professional. It's indispensable because...

For me, interviewing customers makes customer development...fulfilling.

Instead of being stressed about what the customer is going to think about my idea, instead of fumbling over my words and worrying about the perfect way to pitch my product, a customer interview isn't about me, my product, or my words. It's about theirs. All I have to do is listen. No pitching, no negotiating, just ask a handful of questions with a sincere interest to learn.

Other people's problems are interesting - when you're in a position to solve them.

How Not to Interview

A few ground rules I use that will prevent you from torpedoing your interviews:

1st rule of validating your idea: Do not talk about your idea.

Your brain is hard wired to screw you as soon as you start thinking about your idea.

Once your idea pops into your brain during an interview, your body will literally turn against you. It will start looking for validation that the idea is good. Your interpretations of statements, intonation, body language will all be skewed. What's worse, the person you're talking to subconsciously knows what you're looking for, and based on our desire to build relationships, will want to help you. They'll be your unwitting accomplice and provide the "validation" you're looking for - leading you in the wrong direction. To the best of your abilities, avoid thinking about your idea during the interview - and certainly avoid talking about it. These interviews are about your customers and their problems. Do your best to keep the conversation focused there.

2nd rule of validating your idea: Do not ask about the future.

No hypotheticals, no projections, no guesses. The way I remember this rule? I never ask a question with the word "would" in it:

"If we built a product that solved X problem, would you use it?"

"How much would you pay for something that did X?"

"Would you like your existing solution better if it did X?"

When you use the word "would", you're making a thinly veiled attempt to validate your product...not their problem. Don't do that. See Rule #1.

In addition, when you ask about the future, you're asking your customer to predict it. She can't do that. She'll try, but she'll be wrong. Listening to wrong answers can only serve to harm you ("75% of people I talked to said they wanted...", "Half of the interviewees said they'd pay $20", etc.) - they're all bad guesses. There are better ways to answer those questions.

How To Interview

There are five questions I use to form my customer interviews. Start with these, and you'll not only to learn about your customer's problems, you'll learn if they're worth solving (and how to solve them):

My Customer Interview Script

The trickiest part is figuring out what to put in the blank for Question #1, but I've created an Interview Script Generator that will do the heavy lifting for you! You don't want to be so specific that you tell them about the problem you want to solve. For example, imagine you want to build Yelp for Vegetarians...

Don't ask: "What's the hardest part about finding a good vegetarian restaurant in a new city?"

But you also don't want to be so broad that you're inviting discussion about a range of problems you have no interest in solving:

Don't ask: "What's the hardest part about being a vegetarian?"

You want to ask about a significant problem context - situations that occurs frequently enough, or are painful enough, to warrant solving:

Ask:"What's the hardest part about eating out as a vegetarian?"

This question will certainly evoke responses, but they could range from:

"The portions aren't large enough" to

"I don't really trust that the things I order are meat-free" to

"A yelp search for 'vegetarian' returns results like 'Joe's All American Steak House' with comments like, 'Don't bring your vegetarian friends here.'"

And that's the best part about interviews! Not only will they help you validate whether the customer has the problem you hypothesize, if they don't, interviews will point you to one they do have. You win either way.

Btw, this is one of the benefits of interviews vs. surveys. Surveys might tell you how often a customer experiences a problem, but if the answer is "not very often", surveys won't give you another problem to explore. Interviews will. More specifics on why we ask each of the questions in the video above, but here's here's the gist:

Question #2 - We ask stories because they enable us to dive deeper into paths we could never hypothesize "inside the building." You'll learn 23x more from a story than you will a yes/no answer. It's science.

Question #3 - Customers don't buy the what, they buy the why. We'll use this answer to craft our marketing copy.

Question #4 - If they aren't looking for solutions already, this isn't a big enough problem for us to solve. For someone to take a bet on us, a startup, an unknown entity, we must be solving a problem so pressing, customers are actively searching for solutions.

Question #5 - This is our Unique Value Proposition. We'll build something that solves our customer's problem, in a way that's better than their alternatives.

That's the list of starter questions. Other great questions to consider adding to your script:

How often do you experience this problem?

How much are you spending to solve this problem now?

Where do you find information about [problem context] online?

That last question is great for a couple reasons: if you don't already know, it can tell you some of your online channels and, if you're not interviewing an early adopter (someone trying to solve this problem already), the answer to this question may point you to folks who are. There are some other recommendations I make in the video above regarding looking for emotional cues, asking why, and repeating the process with the same customer - watch it for full details.

[New] Interview Script Generator

Want some help drafting your interview script? I've created a free Customer Interview Script Generator that will help you start your interview script in less than 30 seconds.

The tool creates a custom Google Doc for you, based on who you're interviewing and the problem you want to interview them about. Here's an example:

The script also includes tips on:

How to make your customer feel comfortable and open up about their problems

For each question, what you should listen for

How to get their permission to get in touch with them again about your solution

How to ask them for introductions for additional interviews

Check out the Customer Interview Script Generator to get a head start on your interviews.

Invalidation

If the problem you hypothesized doesn't get mentioned during interview, you can still ask about it - just start the interview again with Question #2:

"Can you tell me about the last time you tried to find a good vegetarian restaurant in a new city?"

The trick is, you must put extra weight on their response to Question #4.

If you have to bring the problem up and they're not taking steps to solve it, they won't use your solution. It doesn't matter how simple it is, how well it solves the problem, how cheap it is...none of it matters. This problem is not a big enough concern for this customer to take the time to find it, pay for it, learn it, or use it. Something must change.

Your hypothesis has been invalidated.

This scenario happens more than any other - and when it happens to you, like it's happened to me (over, and over) - know that it's OK. It means you're doing it right. While disappointing, this truth is a reflection of reality. Knowing it sooner than later will serve you well.

The good news is, because you asked Question #1 & the channels question during your interviews, you're ready to setup your next interview! Either interview another customer segment (try the online channels customers look to for additional information) or validate a different problem they've mentioned.

Next Steps

Armed with this information, you have everything you need to (in)validate your problem hypothesis:

Validated? You're setup beautifully to test your unique value proposition and channels.

Invalidated? Congrats (and bummer). Good news is, you're doing it right. Time to find a new customer segment, or a new problem.

You can search for new customers in the online channels they mentioned during the interview. If those folks don't have the problem, time to try solving a different one - you'll have a list of them from the responses to Question #1. Pick the most popular one.

Summary

Interviewing customers is the key to customer development. It unlocks all the most important components of the business model canvas. It'll be the skill that distinguishes you from other startups, and it will not only tell you if you're going in the right direction, it will give you a map if you're not. But I promised more than that. I promised interviewing customers would make customer development fulfilling. To me...

Few things are as fulfilling as understanding someone's problem, and helping them solve it.

What's Next?

This is Part 4 of a series of Customer Discovery posts designed in collaboration with Startup Weekend NEXT. I highly recommend the others:

1. Which Customers Should you Interview (The SPA Treatment)

2. How to Find Customers to Interview

3. Getting Customer Interviews with Cold Emails

4. How I Interview Customers

5. You've Interviewed Customers. Now what?

Our next post will be... 5 Tools I use for Customer Development. Subscribe to get it via Email or RSS.

Customer Development Made Easy...

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Written by Posted in Justin Wilcox Uncategorized

Justin,

Love your blog post!

I have discovered huge pain... to one potential customer. Pain is huge and they have no real practical solutions at this point AND are ready to pay. To make it even better, I CAN develop this product!

But how do I find more people like this that have the problem? This is in B2B security space. And there is probably just *one* person in company that is responsible for this. (It's one person in where I am at).

I want to interview potential customers, but I am stuck trying to figure out how to find people to talk to.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Mark

One word , brilliant.

This should be given to all business analysts. Is a great way to tease out problems. We could add an outcome question to this. "What if we solved this problem, what outcome would you like to see". These outcomes would enable us to align requirements and possible offerings, which would help the customer achieve this need.

Outcomes can also be put into categories:

Emotional Outcomes - This is the human element i.e. feelings and experience for the user/customer
Functional Outcomes - The measurable result of activities undertaken by an individual or group
Economic Outcomes - These are the more harder outcomes i.e. financial value
Process Outcomes - These are the "how" outcomes, they relate to the process being performed
http://bridging-the-gap.me/2013/05/15/we-need-to-focus-on-outcomes/

Justin- Clarification please.

First of all- Intelligent stuff THX.

Is the goal to get the other party simply talking in depth about topic X?

How close to the line of a business centric question do you get before you cross the line?

I don't want to pitch, but I want valuable information.

THX in advance

The goal is to identify and understand the customer's problems. If you're worried about crossing a line...you've probably already crossed it :)

This exercise is about being curious about the lives and hardships of your customer. Save your questions about your product and potential solutions for another day. Today is all about hearing their problems.

Hey Justin,

I just stumbled upon your blog... (actually I was reading another guys blog post where he mentioned your workshop at the lean startup conference about pricing and I was curious enough to look for your blog...)

It is indeed the most valuable help and information about a customer discovery interview I read so far! Thank you so much for that.
At the moment, we are trying to launch a product for recruiting, but it seems not very compelling to potential customers... so in review of our interviews made (actually we did them quite unbiased, but when we evaluated, we had the mind set to validating our idea / solution way too much...), I can see now (in learning mode) how we fell into the pit of question #4 -> they didn't even look for a solution yet!
"So they don't know they have that problem yet, that will change as soon as we show them our solution" we thought... But as you can guess, they didn't... ;-)

The good thing: reviewing the interviews we saw some other problems a subset of our customer is facing, and we might be able to provide a solution...
I guess maybe it's necessary to fall into that trap, and it hurts, but otherwise I might have the trust in your advise about interviews as I do have now...

Oh and one question:
would you recommend to re-schedule some interviews to learn more about the other segment of customers who already solved that new discovered problem to look for flaws, or would you start to do solution interviews with the ones who still have that problem? (so we validate more quickly that it's at least a solution for that subset?)

thanks and again: great post!

Hey Justin,

thank you for your response! I thought quite a bit about your question, and I guess that these flaws in existing alternatives are more specific for one group.
As we came across a great talk of Simon Sinek (the Ted Talk about the Golden Circle, nice recommendation from Ash Maurya...), we decided that we currently have gone too far from our initial "why", so we started over and are now running complete new interviews!
So thanks again, your video and post is always an inspiration!

I just started studying the lean startup methodology, and as I'm reading one question kept coming up for me and that's - "How do I ask customers the right questions?" This question was nagging me non-stop until I found this page, and I'm so glad I did before starting with customer interviews. I can't thank you enough Justin, you're really filling a gap here.

Because the better questions lead to better learning, I'm hungry for even more understanding of which questions to ask and how to ask them. Specifically I'd like some ideas of how to find and engage customers for face to face interviews (surely the startup community has this nailed) and really nailing that first question: What's the hardest part about XYZ

Figuring out how to best phrase XYZ for my particular product vision is the new gap that will nag me.

Cheers Brother, I appreciate your good works big time. And offering a half hour of your time is beyond stellar.

Hi Justin, incredible video!

Could you speak a little on how to form the various hypothesis that a company would want to test?

Great question. The quick answer is "Business Model Canvas." Every box is a pile of assumptions that need to be tested. For example: How assumptions made an ass out of my company.

That said, there's a longer answer that deserves it's own blog post. You've inspired me to think more about it. If you'd like the audio version in the meantime, hit me up here: http://sohelpful.me/justin.

From two weeks ago on a mentor call to now trying to scale our services quickly enough to meet demand, the usefulness of this process didn't just help us think through a customer's problem: it helped us entirely reframe our information seeking and uncover an entirely new opportunity.

What happened?

Before digging deeply into the philosophy of these videos, we were using the customer discovery process to continue expanding the capacities of our business. "Wow, we didn't think about that need - we can totally serve that, too!" Bad idea, getting worse. We didn't build anything, thankfully, but we weren't getting any closer to a product.

Enter Justin.

We talked through our process, set some weekly discovery goals - with pass/fail ratios, specific users we were questioning, and a single problem focus we would be trying to invalidate. Our goal: would they pay if we did just one thing? We invalidated almost everything - and went back to the drawing board. Racked our brains, and - finally - thought about the basics: what do we care about, how would we define success for our business, who are the customers we really want to serve? We used the customer discovery on ourselves, and then extended it to others.

Now we're building something we love, that will serve the entrepreneurs we care deeply about working with, that can be MVP'd and is showing more demand that we can provide supply.

So: Justin, thanks. This blog doesn't just rock cusdev - but proper entrophilosophy.

Hey Justin,

thank you for the „buy the why" link. You just changed my life. No kidding. You enabled me to write down why I do *anything*, and this is because I believe we all can live our dreams. I realize that:

I am writing you this comment because I believe I can live my dreams. In one aspect, I do that by being around powerful, inspired people. What I do is letting you know that you just literally changed my life.

What you gave me with this link to the TED talk:
From now on, at any moment, I can refer to this crystal clear formulation of the fire inside my heart.

Live our dreams.

Great question Ron. I usually set context with something like...

"Thanks for taking the time to chat. I'm try to help (insert your problem statement - make remote coding easier for outsourced coding providers such as yourself) and I'm really looking forward to your input!"

After that, start firing away. Once you start asking about their problems, they'll start talking.

When I'm all done, I finish with, "This was really outstanding - thank you again for your time. I'm pretty excited because we're focusing on solving (insert the biggest problem they mentioned). I'm going to take what we talked about here back to the rest of my team and do a little tweaking based on your input. When we're ready, can we setup another conversation to get feedback on our potential solution?"

This separates the problem and solution interviews nicely and gives you a chance to prep for the latter.

Good luck!

Excellent article Justin - I just failed at my first attempt at one potential client (I'm still early stage). I re-read this article with my wife (who is a teacher) and she explained your process is similar to teaching kids.

What I take away is "Don't pitch....hear their b!tch".

Cheers.

Great question Sam.

Ideally, you'd do the interview in pairs with a co-founder. One of you asks questions while the other takes notes. When that's not possible, I've tried both notes and recording.

For me, notes are better because I only write down the most salient details and don't have to spend a bunch of time going back and listening to the interview. Other folks prefer recording so they can focus their energy entirely on the customer.

As for the customer feeling uncomfortable, you can say something like, "So I don't have to be taking feverish notes while we talk, is it okay if I record our conversation? I'll be transcribing the notes later this week and will destroy the recording immediately after I'm finished."

Fwiw, I've never had anyone turn that question down and I've been recorded myself. I don't remember feeling more shy about what I shared in that scenario.

Justin

Fantastic question Nicos. It can get a little awkward for you and the interviewee to ask "why" was that hard when they just told you something that was so obviously hard.

The way I usually do it is by saying something like, "That makes complete sense that _______ is a challenge. I can make some assumptions about why that would be hard, but so that I don't put words in your mouth, can you why is that hard for you?"

It's at this moment when the conversation can get most awkward, because you're asking them to go to an emotionally vulnerable place and share it with you (a stranger). It's really important to create a safe space after they answer the question. It will help everyone feel more comfortable.

I'll usually respond to what they say with something like, "Of course that would be a challenge. I've been in a similar situation myself and it felt ____________ to me too."

That you're asking this question Nicos means you're doing the most important, and most difficult, part of the interviewing process. I'm excited for you. When you master this skill, you will understand the heart of entrepreneurship...

Customers don't buy products, or even solutions to problems (as I once thought). Customers buy feelings.

When you understand the negative feeling they are experiencing when the problem arises, you can find a solution that replaces the negative feeling with a positive one.

Keep up the good work,
Justin

Hi Justin, that was a great great read, very insightful!
Could you clarify something please? I always read about interviews helping to figure out if a certain problem exists in somebody's life, so we can create a product that solves it, here we're validating a product's idea. But how about interviews that are focused to answer other objectives, like for example interviewing customers of a live product to figure out why exactly use it?

Thanks in advance, Juntin!

Hey Franco, that's a good question.

If I want to know why someone uses a particular product, I'd probably ask them straight up, why they use it. I'd probably also ask questions like:

What did you do before you used this product?

Have you used any other products before using your current one?

What would happen if you didn't use a product like the one you're using now? What would the repercussions of that be?

How did you discover this solution?

What's are your 2 favorite things about using this product?

What are your 2 least favorite things about using this product?

Ultimately my goal is the same - identify the problem this product is solving for them, why it's important they solve the problem, the words they use to describe the problem, what's great about their current solution, and what's missing from it.

Does that help?

Great, Justin! Yes, it does help. I can guess how easy may be for you to come up with those nice questions! It's interesting the twist you make.

I see that obviously when interviewing current users, we can talk directly about the product, unless we've got a new feature idea for example, then we must avoid mentioning it.

Since we want to know why people use the app to make smarter improvements in the future, would be enough asking 5-10 active users, until I find patterns, to consider them as a significant sample with which we can make "safe" feature decisions?

My last question. When researching, do we need to be very very very specific in our research objective, like "Discover why our users use our app"?, where all the questions of the interview should be lead towars getting that answer only? But then if I also want to know if they find difficulties to accomplish those goals in the app, and also what's the context of usage, are those all too broad already to ask together? Should we ask them in another time to other people?

Thank you Justin!

You're on the right track. Yes, ask enough people until you start to find a pattern. If after 5 interviews you're not seeing a pattern, there may be more than one type of customer using your product, so you may consider narrowing down on one of those types of customers and focusing on them.

You're also correct in that you want to be very very specific in your research objective, but I can see why you'd struggle because you would want to do all of the following:

- "Discover why our users use our app?"
- "they find difficulties to accomplish those goals in the app"
- and "also what's the context of usage"

The way to resolve this conflict is to take a step back and understand what's most important. There are only two metrics that really matter in terms of usage of your product: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and your Viral Co-efficient (K factor).

Everything else you're trying to measure (including the three questions you have above) are all intermediate things you measure, that will have an impact on your LTV and your K factor. So in your research, you want to ask questions that will help you increase either of those metrics.

Blog post comments aren't the place to dive into how to do that, but luckily, I've just finished the rough draft of my workbook series that covers this information exhaustively.

If you're interested, grab a copy of the FOCUS Framework ( http://focus.customerdevlabs.com) and when you do, you'll immediately get access to the rough drafts of all 5 workbooks - including one on Utility Testing - which spells out exactly how to increase the metrics that matter about your product: LTV and K Factor. Also remember to use the coupon code "preorder" for 20% off.

Justin

Hi Justin, thanks for the great detail there. I understand the point, the more I get into the why I'm actually doing research, the more I'm gonna get close to the concepts you exposed. Congratulations for your seriously good job coming out with those series of books, they look really exciting!

Great question Darren. I got your back: http://customerdevlabs.com/2014/02/18/how-to-send-cold-emails/

The key to getting any interview is to:

1. Recognize you want to talk to people who are already trying to solve the problem (i.e. your early adopters). They're the only ones who are going to use it anyway, and they'll be the easiest to engage with. Eventually you'll win over customers who aren't looking for a solution (early majority) and customers who don't even know they have a problem (late majority) - but you've got to start with the early adopters.
If you don't think there are any, that's good news and bad. Bad because there's no business opportunity there. Good because you found out before you built a solution (although that never tends to make the bad news feel any better :)

2. Go where they're are looking for a solution. Imagine you were a teen today and you were struggling with the problem your solution aims to solve. What would you do to try and solve it? Go to those places and see if you can find your customers looking for solutions (any solutions - doesn't have to be like your solution).
If you don't know where they would go to solve the problem, ask someone like them. Ask a teenager who doesn't have the problem you want to solve where she would go to solve it and see if she has any better guesses than you.
Don't worry about feeling creepy if you're really solving a problem they're trying to solve. The same way your product doesn't need to look great if you're solving a really important product - you won't come off as creepy if you're solving an important problem for a teen (assuming you're not solving it in a creepy way).

Don't worry about feeling creepy if you're really solving a problem they're trying to solve. The same way your product doesn't need to look great if you're solving a really important problem - you won't come off as creepy if you're solving an important problem for a teen (assuming you're not solving it in a creepy way).

Good luck and keep me posted!

Hi Justin,

First, thank you so much for your website and the videos. My team is learning a ton from you!

My company, Booxby, received a National Science Foundation grant and is in the process of deep customer discovery.

We are currently in the midst of many author/publisher interviews.

What's the best way to ask about pricing without breaking the ground rules? Do you have time to answer this or direct me to something you've written that will? Thanks again for your awesome teachings!

Best,
Holly

Thanks for the fantastic question Holly! It's a great one, and it's confusing to gauge pricing during interviews.

One way is to ask during the interview, "How much are you paying to solve this problem now?"

The problem is the answer to that question, or any other question about pricing, doesn't take into account all of the factors that will go into whether they'll buy *your* solution.

The best way to test pricing is not to ask about it, but to do it - to sell your product.

Pre-sales or letters of intent are by far the best way to get data on pricing. For more information about testing price testing, see - Testing your Price: http://goo.gl/41lSNx

Also the FOCUS Framework has an entire workbook devoted to researching, testing and optimizing your price called "Currency Testing." More about FOCUS here.

Justin, thanks for all the incredibly helpful tips and insights. I'm currently in the process of interviewing potential customers, and I'm trying hard to not step into the 'future mode' by asking them whether they would be receptive to solution X (which, of course, is my app).
However, I do want to get a sense of what they WOULD find useful. My current approach is: a) Ask them about their problems doing a particular task, eventually followed by b) What are some things they wish existed, that would make this task easier.

Is this a valid line of questioning?

Hi Bri, great question.

Feel free to ask customers what they want - I definitely do that sometimes as a source of inspiration. That said, don't rely on them. It's not a customer's job to design solutions (that's your job). It's their job to identify problems.

And of course, whatever they tell you needs to be validated with real-world tests.

Keep us posted!
Justin

Hi Justin,

Thanks God I found your site. I have read most of your post, but I still have some questions (maybe I missed out something).
1. My products are matching outfits for moms and kids - they are designed not to exactly solve a problem but to improve a situation where I experienced myself: I would like my kid and me to wear the similar dress - for fun, for pride, for the joy when we hang out. And I myself tried a solution by buying a larger size (size of 15 year old) to try to wear the same design as my kid - and that solution did not work because it looks too childish (of course, it's kid clothing) . That's why I startup with a clothing brand that has similar, but not exactly the same design for moms and kids - it s completely age appropriate for both, while making both looking matchy and fashionable at the same time.

If i ask my potential customers that ' what is the problem with finding something to wear for you/for your kid' -> they'll never think abou the matching outfits. If I ask 'what is the problem with finding something MATCHY to wear for you and for your kid' , it will be a leading question - i suppose. So as for fashion brands and other products that do not exactly solve problems but just improve life (people never knew they needed a thing like 'facebook'!) , how to ask question in an interview to find out about product-market fit?

2. As far as I understand, we need to find early adopters to interview. And does that become trial-and-error process where we have to find 100 pp from our target market and find a few early adopters there? Or how to effectively find early adopters and evaluate if the market size is big enough?

Hi Trudy, cool idea for a startup!

You've got a great understanding of the core principles, so I'm going to give you a bit more complex explanation of the process than I normally do.

At the end of the day, your company needs to provide your customers with an emotion they are seeking. We most often describe these emotions in terms of "problems" because problems elicit the most intense emotions, and drive the most "Early Adopter-ish" behavior.

In your case, you're not providng an emotional experience related to a "problem" so much as you are to an aspiration. In that way, consider what kind of emotional experience your startup will create for your customers (you've already started with "fun, pride, joy, " etc.).

Next, (and this addresses your second question) ask yourself what actions your potential customers are taking to help them achieve those emotions right now in terms of their relationships w/ their daughters - those are your Early Adopters - the people you want to interview.

If you want some help on this front, definitely check out the Adoption Behavior Curve in the FOCUS Framework - it will walk you through step-by-step how to find your Early Adopters.

In terms of sizing your segment, the "SCALE your Segments" exercise in FOCUS (the very next exercise after the Adoption Behavior Curve) will help you identify which segment to target based on their size.

Thanks for the great question and please keep us posted!

Hi Justin!

(I hope you still respond on here!)

This article (and video on the techstars YT) has been so helpful!

Let me make this short and sweet...
I'm interviewing entrepreneurs about their finances - specifically how they manage them.

So, if I ask them something along the lines of:

What's the hardest part of managing your finances as an entrepreneur?

Or

Tell me a story about the last time you were in contact with your tax preparer or accountant?

Am I leading?

The script generator says to ask:

"What is your biggest challenge as an entrepreneur?"

I think it may be too vague/open... but I'm willing to try if I'm leading with questions above.

Also, if you already answered this question somewhere in the loads of posts here, I apologize and I promised I searched.

Feel free to just point me back to them and I'll review.

Thanks in advance for your help! So happy to have found this gem!

Great question Tani. It's one a get a lot during workshops, but I don't think I've answered it here.

I understand why you want to ask about the hardest part about managing finances, and you're right, if you ask 10 random entrepreneurs about their biggest challenges, you're likely to hear 10 different problems, none of which are related to finances. That said, pointing your interviewee towards problems you want to solve for them isn't by asking explicitly about their financial management problems isn't what you want either.

I've got a better way for you. In this case, it's not about what you ask, it's about who you ask.

For you business to be successful, you need to find Early Adopters for a solution to their entrepreneurial financial management problems. In other words, there needs to be a set of entrepreneurs out in the world who are already trying to solve their financial management problems, and you need to be able to sustainably find them.

So what you want to do, is find entrepreneurs who you hypothesize are already trying to solve their financial problems, and then ask them what the hardest part about being an entrepreneur is. Because you're opening the door for them to discuss any problems they are facing, if they cite financial management problems, it's more likely they are the Early Adopters you're looking for and you'll be able to validate your assumption.

To summarize:

If you ask broad questions to a broad audience, you'll hear a bunch of random problems you're not interested in solving.

If you ask a narrow question to a broad audience, you won't find any Early Adopters.

If you ask a broad question to a narrow audience, you'll be able to quickly validate, or invalidate, your hypothesis.

Best,
Justin

Got it.

Thanks so much Justin. I'm off to DO IT!

Best.
Tani

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Talk to a stranger. Fun. That stranger is immensely busy...and hates being sold things. Getting better. That stranger will likely destroy your vision for a company. Ready to get started?! When I started interviewing customers, the only thing I cared less about than talking about other people's problems, was asking about them.

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Free Book Preview: Coach 'Em Way Up

Discover how to be an influential mentor through tips and advice based on the teachings of respected basketball coach John Wooden.

4 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Albert Einstein once said, "If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it." While that may sound extreme, it does highlight the importance of defining problems. It also hints at some interesting facts: A well-defined problem often contains its own solution within it, and that solution is usually quite obvious and straightforward. By defining problems properly, you make them easier to solve, which means saving time, money and resources.
Related: 3 Reasons Why You Are Failing at Problem Solving
Every businessperson needs to master the ability to define problems, or challenges, but very few MBA programs, leadership development programs or management training programs teach this indispensable skill. I spoke to a group of 80 HR managers recently and asked if any of them had been taught how to define problems. Only one person raised a hand. That's common to most business groups I speak with on a weekly basis. Less than 1 percent of the workforce has been taught how to define problems.

During my first five years as a coach, I didn't know how to define problems properly, but in the ten years since, I've learned this critical technique. I use it every single day, with every single client. It has transformed how I work with people and has made the work much more impactful. These days, clients will hire me solely based on the fact that I have the ability to define their problems during our very first conversation together. When I hear them begin to differentiate between issues, asking, "Which problem are we solving?" I know that I've made a major impact on their business.
Related: Problem Solved
Defining problems is simple and any difficulty that arises is because it requires patience, repetition and thorough examination. It is the most important element of critical thinking.

You can define problems correctly in just three steps I call the Problem Definition Filter:

1. Explore the current situation. Paint a picture in words by including the "presenting problem," the impact it is having, the consequences of not solving the problem, and the emotions the problem is creating for those involved.

2. Explain. Once you have examined and clearly explained the situation, draft a simple problem statement by filling in the blank: The problem that we are trying to solve is: ___________. Distill the problem to its simplest form possible.

3. Ask yourself. "Why is that a problem?" If the answer is another problem, then congratulate yourself for moving from the "presenting problem" to a deeper problem. Then ask yourself again, "Why is that a problem?" Do that repeatedly until you either land on what is obviously the source of all of the problems you've identified or you identify unexpected consequences of not solving the problem. If you land on unexpected consequences, the problem you identified right before that is likely your "source problem."

Toyota famously created the "five why's'' technique for their Six Sigma process improvement program. While that number was limited to five why's, the truth is sometimes it takes only one why. Other times, it may take 17. Ask as many times as needed until you get to the source problem.

This high-level overview of the Problem Definition Filter can help you learn how to define the problems in your department or business and determine if you're wasting time and resources on poorly defined problems. When it comes to determining whether you have defined a problem well, ask yourself or your collaborators if the solution to the problem is obvious or straightforward. Also, ask if it is a problem worth solving -- many problems aren't.
Related: Creative Problem-Solving Strategies to Test Your Business Idea

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Defining Problems: The Most Important Business Skill You've Never Been Taught

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Discover how to be an influential mentor through tips and advice based on the teachings of respected basketball coach John Wooden. 4 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Albert Einstein once said, "If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it."

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Quantitative Research

Quantitative research means using statistical techniques to analyze numerical data. For service providers, it generally means conducting surveys consisting of questions with a limited set of answers, and inputting those responses as numerical values to create a dataset. The analysis of usage data and patterns is also considered quantitative research.

Purpose

1. Demonstrates the market opportunity

2. Paints a broad picture of a population.

3. Validates insights from qualitative research with a broader population.

Types of data

Demographics data: information about the individual and her household. Note that for a firm providing business-to-business (B2B) solutions, this will be "firmographics", such as industry, company size, stage, financing, etc.

Psychographic & behavioral: Attitudes, opinions, values, product usage data.

Users vs Buyers: For B2B, distinguish between the economic buyer and other stakeholders involved as their needs are distinct.

Availability and use of alternatives : Products, penetration, pricing for alternative offerings and target customer usage trends.

Technology lifecycle adoption: Current stage of your product market in the adoption cycle. For example, will you be targeting innovators and add segments over time?

2.3 Customer research tips

Publicly available data may be limited and fragmented, making it tough to collect a representative sample, and thus impossible to extrapolate results to a larger population.

Data on existing behaviors is limited, so needs and preferences will be difficult to assess with just secondary research Infrastructure challenges usually make it difficult and expensive to administer surveys at a large scale.

End-customers typically have limited awareness of products and services, and often negative experience with formal financial services.

It's important to build a culture of customer empathy, putting customer experience at the center.

Pay attention to norms, whether religious, cultural, gender, etc. Avoid judgement and unhealthy power dynamics, and be aware of privacy and security risks around your presence or conversation topics.

Make sure someone on your team speaks the local languages. Use visual aids whenever possible.

Respect people's time and consider incentives, particularly if you're asking them to forgo work and daily income.

Your team needs to get really good at listening closely to what customers say, repeating statements back to ensure understanding, and asking additional probing questions.

You want to focus on understanding why customers find certain benefits valuable as this will help you better understand how customers think and what they care about.

During customer interviews, different customers will use different words to describe the same idea, and responses will vary widely in how high-level or specific they are. Be prepared.

A persona is a hypothetical archetype based on real people that represents your target customers, which can help to ensure everyone in the company is aligned with the same target customer.

The key is to select specific characteristics of a number of people you've encountered into one holistic portrait.

Good personas should fit on a single page & include:

Name, photo, job, demographic data, and a quote that conveys what they care about

Needs, goals, motivations, attitudes, and behaviors

Frustrations and pain points with current solutions

Understanding and expertise in the relevant domain

Product usage context (i.e. smartphone in an off-grid village)

Technology adoption life cycle segment (innovators)

Persona creation tips

Like any tool, personas can be misused or misunderstood, especially if they lack complete information or are based on pure speculation. Here are tips to create strong personas:

Focus on the most valuable information to inform design decisions.

View this persona as a first draft that will get revised over time. It's okay if it's not perfect.

Refer to the persona as you make design decisions so the team has the person top of mind.

Keep talking to customers to refine persona over time.

An empathy map is a collaborative tool teams can use to gain a deeper insight into their customers. Much like a user persona, an empathy map makes customers more concrete and relatable. The map can represent a group of users, such as a customer segment.

It is a good idea to complete an empathy map after the user research phase, before jumping into developing your value prop and identifying product requirements. It is a useful tool for distilling and organizing qualitative data from interviews, focus groups, etc.

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Quantitative research means using statistical techniques to analyze numerical data. For service providers, it generally means conducting surveys consisting of questions with a limited set of answers, and inputting those responses as numerical values to create a dataset. The analysis of usage data and patterns is also considered quantitative research.

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IDEO Field Guide to Human-Centered Design