Lean Customer Development

🧠 Free Recall ❓ Quiz 🔍 Cues 🔮 Simulation 🥷 ShadowBox 📐 Encode Cards

Why Customer Development is Important
Every hour spent on customer development saves 5, 10, or even more hours of writing, coding, and design. 
Your goal is to invalidate your assumptions about what customers want, so that you can focus on building what they will actually buy. 
Customer development works for companies of all sizes, not just startups. 
Customer development doesn’t replace product development. You are building your customer base while you’re building a product or service that solves their specific problems. 
Customer development informs product management, which then decides what to build and how to prioritize features. 
You have to work to disprove your assumptions. Cognitive bias causes you to naturally see what you want to see (what confirms your assumptions) and tune out what you don’t want to see (what invalidates your assumptions).
Where to Start
Spend time as a team writing down your assumptions so you can validate or invalidate them. Even if you think everyone is in alignment, they probably aren’t. 
Write your problem hypothesis: I believe [type of people] experience [type of problem] when doing [type of task]. 
Make your hypothesis as specific as possible. The narrower your focus, the faster your progress in proving it right or wrong. 
Create a target customer profile with your team using the traits continuum.
Who to Talk To
Find the people whose problem is most severe; they are eager to solve it and may become earlyvangelists. 
People will talk to you because we all like to help others, like to sound smart, like to fix things, and like to complain. 
Ask connections to introduce you to their friends. Explain why you’re asking them in particular. Find people online using LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter, discussion groups, forums — but not Craigslist. 
Find people offline by going where your target customers hang out. 
In your initial reach-out message, be clear and brief, and make it easy for interviewees to respond. Leave time between interviews in case conversations go long and so you can review notes before the next interview.
What you should be learning
Use the five basic customer development questions to get customers talking — then ask them for more details about their answers. 
Tell me about how you do _________ today.... 
Do you use any [tools/products/apps/tricks] to help you get ________ done? 
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 whether it’s possible, just anything. 
Last time you did ___________, what were you doing right before you got started? Once you finished, what did you do afterward? 
Is there anything else about _________ that I should have asked?
Ask open-ended questions so that customers go beyond the surface. 
Find out what they’re doing today. Their current behavior is your competition. Abstract up a level to get perspective. 
Focus on actual versus aspirational behavior. Instead of asking, “How likely would you be to X?”, ground your prompts in the recent past (“Tell me about the last time you...” or “In the past month, how many times ...”). 
Be aware of mental blocks customers may have (not perceiving the problem as a problem, thinking it can’t be fixed, having limited resources, having expectations that limit their behaviors) and ask questions to help move beyond those blocks.
Find out if there are other stakeholders involved in making decisions (family, managers, friends, etc.).
Meeting with Real People
Do a practice interview with a colleague. 
Do pair interviewing to improve your interviews and involve more people in customer development (including those who may not be comfortable talking directly with customers). 
Keep your tone conversational and personal. 
After you ask your first question, wait a full minute before asking a follow-up question. Listen for emotion when taking notes. Emotion is prioritization. 
Listen for anything that validates or invalidates your hypothesis and for anything that takes you by surprise. 
Listen when customers go on tangents. If a tangent recurs, it might be a different opportunity to explore. 
When customers suggest features or solutions, guide them back to talking about the problem. 
Review your notes immediately after interviews to improve your interviews and recap what was said.
How Many Interviews Do You Need
Be skeptical about validating your hypothesis. 
Listen for clues that the customer has tried to solve the problem; many people think they should solve a problem, but won’t really buy your product.
The best predictor of future behavior is current behavior. Lots of exclamation points but little real-world evidence does not validate your hypothesis. 
Create a summary document in which you reduce each interview to about five bullet points, grouping them under Validates, Invalidates, and Also Interesting. 
A validated hypothesis includes the customer confirming the problem, believing it can be resolved, having tried to resolve it, and not having anything from blocking him from trying to fix it. 
Within five interviews you should meet a really excited person; if you don’t, you’ve invalidated your hypothesis. 
Within 10 interviews, you’ll start seeing patterns. Challenge patterns by talking about mythical “other people” who do something else in your next interview, and asking the interviewee to state whether he behaves like the other people or like the pattern you’ve identified. 
You’ve done enough interviews when you stop hearing things that surprise you.
Building Your MVP
When building an MVP, think about how the customer will measure the value she gets from the product.
Stick to minimum: don’t include full functionality. 
Pre-order MVPs involve customers paying for the MVP in some way; try this in one form or another, whether the payment is a pledge, a pre-order, a letter of intent, or a pilot program. 
Audience Building MVPs help build a market. 
Concierge MVPs and Wizard of Oz MVPs solve problems manually to validate that there’s a market. Single Use Case MVPs solve part of a customer’s problem or focus on a single feature. 
Other People’s Product MVPs let you piggyback on others’ ideas while validating demand among your customers.
Customer Development with Customers
If you have an existing product and customers, adapt the MVP concept. 
Being a recognized brand may bias prospective customers. You can practice “incognito customer development” by using a different domain, or rough, unbranded sketches. 
Make it more viable than minimum, but make sure it doesn’t go far beyond minimum. 
Find the customers who would be very disappointed if they couldn’t use your product anymore. 
When doing customer development with existing customers, overcommunicate that you are asking questions, not building something. 
Use the storytelling demo to explain to the customer how a fictional person uses your product. 
Ask customers to show you how they use your product. 
Show the customer how to use your product and be didactic to encourage them to disagree with you.
Ongoing Customer Development
Teach everyone who talks to customers easy ways to participate in customer development. 
When customers make feature requests, ask them what they could do if they had that feature that they can’t do today. 
To understand what customers value, ask your most active or enthusiastic customers to describe your product to someone else. 
Share customer development successes with your organization, showing how things you’ve learned from customers made a positive change. 
The best signals about what’s wrong come from customer support. 
By asking an angry customer a question and listening, you can learn more about their problem. Listening is conciliatory for the customer and learning for you. 
Why you need to ask questions to find out about the real problem: customers make different suggestions to solve the same underlying problem. Many customers may offer similar suggestions, but have different underlying problems. 
Add an extra question to your email messages to customers. Frame it so you can tally the results.

Unstarred

Dunk (exclude from study)

Lean Customer Development

Review Questions

Todos

Sensemaker