How To Talk To Customers Properly And Learn From Them.
You are not allowed to tell your customers what their problem is. They are not allowed to tell you what to build
I wrote in my previous post that asking the right questions and observing your customers in action is the key to understanding why they would need your product.
But asking a question is one thing, getting an insightful answer is another.
Here’s a story.
When I was in college I wanted to be a writer. Moreso, a travel journalist. I had read and watched Anthony Bourdain long enough to instill in me a fervent desire to meet people, talk to them, and paint portraits of their lives.
But I didn’t act on this for a while, till I read the book, Working by the famed broadcaster and author, Studs Terkel. It’s full of interview after interview of people talking about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.
Curiosity Never Killed This Cat
Of Studs Terkel, it was said that he had enough friends and acquaintances to last several lifetimes. But to me, what stood out was his ability to ask the right question. After which he would listen keenly as the people he spoke to unwound themselves. This way, he got concrete facts about their lives and worldviews.
In ‘Who Built The Pyramids?’ He interviews a man who works in a steel mill. At this point, you might ask yourself, what could be interesting about a man who works in a steel mill?
A few pages later and you learn more about the man. He hates his job. It’s monotonous. But he has a three-year-old daughter and a son in college. So most times he finds solace at the pub, although sometimes he punches guys out. In his own words:
"People will bug you. You fend it off as much as you can with your mouth and when you can’t, you punch the guy out.
When you go into a place to have a beer and a guy challenges you—if you expect to go in that place again, you don’t leave."
Studs Terkel. Working
As a young man, he once punched his boss. It cost him a job. Now when he feels bad he’d rather just punch someone at the pub.
On weekdays, he is usually too tired to do anything after a full day's work. Sometimes his wife wants to play a puzzle. His three-year-old daughter is also keen to spend time with him. When he can, he watches television mostly, or reads erotica ‘so he can later do the homework.’ But on weekends you’ll likely find him reading Hemmingway or Whitman, or out for a picnic with the family…
Studs Terkel’s interviews flow so naturally because, first, he asks the right questions”:
“What are you going to do if a machine replaces you?” or,
“What do you do on weekends?”
“Way back, you spoke of the guys who built the pyramids, not the pharaohs, the unknowns. You put yourself in their category?”
Then he stays quiet and lets them talk, only interrupting to steer the conversation in a different direction.
Interview after interview, he asks questions or nudges people into the right topics should they veer off. And most of the time he is just listening and telling the story as he heard it.
Ps. I eventually interviewed someone over coffee. It went well, you can read it here.
The Mom Test
Studs Terkel’s models set the basis for talking to your users, in that good questions will lead you to richer, more insightful truths.
It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to show us the truth. It is our responsibility to find it. We do that by asking good questions.
Similarly, the measure of the usefulness of any customer conversation is whether it gives us concrete facts about our customers’ lives and worldviews, and these facts in turn allow us to improve our business.
In his book, The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick provides some simple rules for crafting a set of questions if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you.
Here are some examples of how questions could be effective or ineffective:
“Do you think X is a good idea?” - This is an awful question. Only the market can tell you if your idea is good, and opinions would be worthless in this case. Going back to Clayton’s idea of hiring a product for a job, it would serve you well to understand the job first.
Let’s say you’re building an app to help construction companies manage their suppliers. You might ask them to show you how they are currently doing it. Which parts they love or hate, or other tools and processes they’ve tried before they settled on what they’re currently using.
Watch out for problems that are kind of annoying but can be dealt with. A question like, “What are the implications of X?” would help you uncover this better. There are problems whose solution people will pay for, and there are some that they can tolerate. It behooves you to find out which is which and is also a good indicator for how to price your product.
Whenever possible, you want your customers to show you where the inefficiencies are, not just tell you where they think they are. A good question to get them to do this would be, “Talk/walk me through the last time X happened…” This way you learn through their actions rather than their opinions. And you’ll find that such a question provides more context such as what tools they use, how they spend their days, any constraints involved, and so on - answering many of your questions in one fell swoop.
They own the problem, you own the solution.
One of the recurring “criticisms” about talking to customers is that you’re abdicating your creative vision and building your product by committee. Given that people don’t know what they want, that wouldn’t be an effective approach.
Deciding what to build is your job. The questions to ask are about your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals. You humbly and honestly gather as much information about them as you can and then take your visionary leap to a solution.
You aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.