Talking to customers

Principles

1. Make it a conversation, not a formal interview
2. Never talk about your idea, focus on the customer (if you absolutely have to, just share the big vision behind it)
3. Do 10% of the talking and 90% listening
4. Guiding the conversation
   1. Ask specific questions about past experiences
   2. Dig into emotional topics
   3. Don’t pay much or any attention to feature requests, flattering or cheerful comments
5. Never try to sell during these conversations

Questions

To figure out where to start

• As a job title it must be such a pain to assumption
  • As a hairdresser it must be such a pain to have hairs all over the place, right?
• Tell me about what you did yesterday at work
• I’m curious, how do you actually manage/do/handle topic of interest?
  • I’m curious, how do you actually manage to bake while attending clients and answering calls?
• I’ve heard/seen/read that assumed problem is a big deal, when was the last time this happened to you?

To dig deeper

• You make it sound easy, how does that work?
• What do you mean by that?
• Could you give me an example?
• Why? / Why don’t you just no-brainer solution?

To gauge problems

• So how did you solve that?
• How are you handling that currently?
• So you just did it yourself?
• Have you considered workaround that costs money?

Tagging

When taking (or reviewing) notes it’s important to tag them so they become useful in the future. A huge blob of text is useless…

For reference, I use these tags, feel free to steal them or bring your own:

• ℹ️  (or without tag) A piece of information related to the customer that’s relevant or not obvious. Try to be as exact as possible when writing them.
• 💩  A pain, something they don’t like or that frustrates them
• 🔨  A feature request
• 💡  A new idea they’ve suggested that may or may not be related to your research
• ⭐  Something they keep mentioning over and over again, that you feel it’s especially important for them
• 🔥  (or highlighting) Something that’s important to you

You can combine them. 💩⭐ means a very important pain for them, 💡🔥 is an idea that you love… you get the idea!