building your customer development plan

Building Your Customer Development Plan

Cindy AlvarezThe Experience is the Product - http://www.cindyalvarez.com

Copyright 2010 Cindy Alvarez

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

http://www.cindyalvarez.com

http://www.cindyalvarez.com


If you don’t have a plan...



• What should I ask and how?

• Is this working? Iterate.

• What does it mean? Finding patterns.

• Devil’s advocate.

What we’ll cover



• Here’s why it’s a problem.

• Here’s how we try to deal with it now.

• Here’s who is involved.

• Here are the contexts where it’s a problem.

• Here are our constraints.

• Here’s what we’re willing to pay to solve it.

If customers could talk...



Teasing out the information

• Who, what, where, why, how

• “Other customers have told me...”

• Expectations vs. realities vs. aspirations



•High-level•Don’t mention your solution•60 seconds of silence

“Tell me about how you do _________ ...”



•Mental model of ‘how it should be’

•Listen for emotion here

•If neither of these, IS there a problem?

“What did you originally hope to do be able to do with ______?”



•Don’t put customer on the defensive.

“What’s wrong with what you’re using / doing now?”X



“Are you able to do that as often as you’d like?”

“Are you able to do that as easily as you’d like?”

“How happy are you with the results?



•How will stakeholders change with your solution?

“Who works with you on doing ____?”



•This is your competition.•Value anchoring.•Why not X?

“What other tools or processes have you tried?”



•Explicitly grant permission to ask for the impossible.

“If you could wave a magic wandand do anything with _____, what would you be able to do?”



•Remember, it’s a conversation.

“Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”



“The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.”

“You[r product] is not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”

It’s not about you



• Ask for 20 minutes (Provide suggested timeslots or Tungle.me URL)

• Emphasize no preparation needed

• Phone or face-to-face

• Let customer lead, encourage tangents

• Take notes (silence is OK)

What I do (YMMV)



other tools

how often

what do they wish they knew?

stakeholders

do they use GA?

Customer nameCompanyDate

Freeform notes

Simple notetaking



surprises / trends / (in)validates hypothesis

(most companies skip this --> fail)

Summarizing is critical



after 3 interviews

• Am I getting the information I need?

• Do interviews feel comfortable?

• Am I talking to the right people?

• Am I getting yes/no answers?

Stop! Are you learning?



1 person might be a nutcase

2 people means keep listening (and start asking others)

3 people is interesting

Watching for Trends



•People tend to agree out of politeness

•Disagreeing = emotion = validation!

“I’ve talked with other people who said [the opposite]...”



•Dig deep.

“If you could do ______, how would that make your life better?”



• About 50 KISSmetrics interviews pre-MVP

• About 20 KISSinsights interviews pre-MVP

• No surprises in last 5 interviews? MVP.

How many is enough?



More resources from my blog

• FAQ: Customer Development for Product Managers http://www.cindyalvarez.com/learning/faq-customer-development-for-product-managers

• The “Who” and “Why” of your Target Customer http://www.cindyalvarez.com/lean/the-who-and-why-of-your-target-customer

• The Plural of Anecdote IS Data http://www.cindyalvarez.com/learning/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data

• Customer Development Interviews: What you SHOULD be learning http://www.cindyalvarez.com/communication/customer-development-interviews-how-to-what-you-should-be-learning

• Customer Development Interviews: Finding People http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/customer-development-interviews-how-to-finding-people


http://www.cindyalvarez.com/lean/the-who-and-why-of-your-target-customer




http://www.cindyalvarez.com/learning/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data




http://www.cindyalvarez.com/communication/customer-development-interviews-how-to-what-you-should-be-learning




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