Talking to Humans

by Giff Constable

no matter what stage you are in, you’ll usually find that your best insights will come from talking to real people and observing real behavior.”

You need to begin with a core set of questions: Who do you want to learn from? What do you want to learn? How will you get to them? How can you ensure an effective session? How do you make sense of what you learn?

You also want to think about your early adopters.

the mainstream is waiting for proof from early adopters before they try something. If you cannot get early adopters, you cannot move on.

Early adopters are usually folks who feel a pain point acutely, or love to try new products and services.

If you are selling to the enterprise, you should also think about the different kinds of participants in your sales process. In a classic enterprise sale, you will often have a strategic buyer (who is excited about the change you can bring), an economic buyer (who controls the purse), a technical buyer (who might have approval/blocker rights), and then the actual users of your product. Can you identify your champion? Can you identify who might be a saboteur?

For B2B companies, Steve Blank also recommends that you start by talking to mid-level managers rather than the C-suite. It can be easier to get their time, it is often easier to get repeat conversations, and, most importantly, it will allow you to get better educated before you go up the chain.

How do you know your most important questions? I like to begin by understanding my most important, and most risky, assumptions. Those tend to be the areas where you need to gather insights most urgently.

My target customer will be? The problem my customer wants to solve is? My customer’s need can be solved with? Why can’t my customer solve this today? The measurable outcome my customer wants to achieve is? My primary customer acquisition tactic will be? My earliest adopter will be? I will make money (revenue) by? My primary competition will be? I will beat my competitors primarily because of? My biggest risk to financial viability is? My biggest technical or engineering risk is? What assumptions do we have that, if proven wrong, would cause this business to fail? (Tip: include market size in this list)

Get Stories, Not Speculation When you are contemplating your questions, be careful with speculation. Humans are spectacularly bad at predicting their future behavior.

Keeping with our second example of an on-call vet service, the team might have a loose interview plan that looks like the following: Warm up: concise intro on the purpose of the conversation Warm up: basic questions about person and pet (name, age, picture) Who is your current vet? Can you tell me about how you found and chose him/her? Please describe the last time you had to take your pet to the vet for a checkup Walk me through the process of scheduling a time to visit the vet. What was frustrating about that experience? What did you like about that experience? Have you ever had an emergency visit to a vet? if yes, can you describe that experience for me? Have you ever thought about changing vets? why / why not?

One tip is to try to ask questions that start with words like who, what, why and how. Avoid questions that start with is, are, would, and do you. But remember, if you do get a yes/no answer to a question, you can always follow up in a way that gets them talking.

An interesting open-ended question, which Steve Blank likes to use to conclude his interviews, is: “What should I have asked you that I didn’t?”

For expensive corporate products, you can also try to get customers to buy in advance or sign a non-binding letter of intent to buy.

Design “Pass/Fail” Tests Customer discovery is made up of a lot of qualitative research, but it helps to take a quantitative mindset. Set goals for key questions and track results. For example, halfway through their initial research, our scientists Koshi and Roberta already knew stats like: 24% of shoppers knew what they wanted when they walked in 45% of shoppers purchased a mid-priced or high-priced pillow 68% of the shoppers we spoke to indicated that better sleep was a major driver of their choice Even better would have been if they had set targets ahead of time. For example, they might have set the following goals: Because we are a new brand, we are hoping that most shoppers are undecided. We want to see that 40% or fewer shoppers already know what they want when they walk in Because our pillow is expensive, we want to see that at least 40% of the shoppers buy mid or high-end models Because we believe that sleep quality is a major differentiator for our product, we want over 60% of shoppers to indicate that this is a major factor in their decision making process

You should use referrals as much as possible. Set a goal of walking out of every interview with 2 or 3 new candidates.

When you end an interview, ask the person if they know others who face the problem you are trying to solve. If they feel like you have respected their time, they will often be willing to introduce you to others.

You can either ask for advice (where you make it clear that you are not selling anything), or you can go in as if you were selling something specific.

Steve Blank used to call people up and say something like, “My name is Steve and [dropped name] told me you were one of the smartest people in the industry and you had really valuable advice to offer. I’m not trying to sell you anything, but was hoping to get 20 minutes of your time.”

Another effective spin on “asking for advice” is to create a blog focused on your problem space, and ask people if you can interview them for an article.

finding bored people stuck in line is a common recruiting hack.)

Some entrepreneurs even take the mindset that they are trying to kill their idea, rather than support it, just to set the bar high and prevent themselves from leading the witness.

I far prefer to get people telling stories about how they experienced a problem area in the past. In particular, try to find out if they have tried to solve the problem. What triggered their search for a solution? How did they look for a solution? What did they think the solution would do, before they tried it? How did that particular solution work out? And if they are struggling to remember specifics, help them set the scene of their story: what part of the year or time of day? Were you with anyone? As they are telling their story, follow up with questions about their emotional state. You might get some historical revisionism, but what you hear can be very illuminating.

Getting Feedback on Your Product If you want to get feedback on your product ideas, whether you show simple mockups or a more polished demo, there are a few important tips to keep in mind: As I mentioned before, separate the storytelling part of your session from the feedback part. People love to brainstorm on features and solutions, and this will end up influencing the stories they might tell. So dig into their stories first, and gather any feedback second. Second, disarm their politeness training. People are trained not to call your baby ugly. You need to make them feel safe to do this. Ask them up-front to be brutally honest, and explain that it is the very best way for them to help you. If they seem confused, explain that the worst thing that could happen is to build something people didn’t care about. Finally, keep in mind that it is incredibly easy for people to tell you that they like your product. Don’t trust this feedback. Instead, you need to put people through an actual experience and watch their behavior or try to get them to open their wallet.

In his I-Corps course, Steve Blank requires his teams, many of which are B2B, to talk to at least 100 people over 7 weeks.

I advise that you never stop talking to potential customers, but you will probably evolve what you seek to learn. If you see the same patterns over and over again, you might change things up and examine different assumptions and risks.

Example Email 1

You did customer development your first week, but haven’t felt a need to do it since It is always sad to see product teams start things off with customer development, and then completely stop once they get going. It is perfectly fine to let customer discovery work ebb and flow. If your learning curve flattens, it can make sense to press pause or change up your approach. However, you want to build a regular qualitative cadence into your product process. It will provide a necessary complement to your quantitative metrics, because it will help you understand the reasons why things are happening.

The two seminal books on the topics of lean innovation and customer development are Steve Blank and Bob Dorf’s The Startup Owner’s Manual and Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup. There are a ton of other resources out there, from books to videos and blog posts. Rather than link to particular items and thus miss out on newer developments, here are a few names that I recommend you pay attention to: Alex Osterwalder, Alistair Croll, Ash Maurya, Ben Yoskowitz, Brant Cooper, Cindy Alvarez, David Bland, Jeff Gothelf, Joel Gascoigne, Josh Seiden, Kevin Dewalt, Laura Klein, Patrick Vlaskovits, Rob Fitzpatrick, Salim Virani, and Tristan Kromer.