Customer discovery in the context of existing products
Customer discovery is the process of speaking to people to understand their problems so that you can uncover opportunities to improve your product.
How does customer research lead to real product improvements?
I’ve found customer research helps me improve product in three ways: It allows me to say no to stuff, it helps me map out the problem space, and it defines useful criteria for a solution. Saying no to stuff It’s easy to get lost when you’re building features. Grounding yourself in your user’s perspective can […]
How do you organise interview data?
When I first read the Mom Test and started doing customer interviews, it became clear that I’d be accumulating lots of notes and recordings of interviews I didn’t know what to do with. There were two of us doing interviews at the time. We would do a bunch of interviews and then share takeaways with […]
How to do an interview
I can go long stretches without doing interviews. When I jump back into them I’m always a little rusty. I have a little game I play that helps me get into the groove. I score each conversation with a simple point system. 2 negative points and 2 plus points. Easy to remember while I’m listening. […]
Customer discovery questions
The only scripted question I ask is: Tell me about why you started using [our product]? I do customer discovery work in the context of existing products and I only interviewing existing users. Traditionally, discovery work is done before you build a product. There’s lots of great writing out there about that sort of discovery […]
Speaking to people is critical to building badass products
Over the next week, I’ll be writing about customer discovery and how I approach interviewing people to build better products. The goal is to clarify my thinking around the topic and improve my current discovery process. I’ll keep things short, 300 – 400 word posts. At the end of it , I’ll put all the […]
Have you spoken to five of your most and least engaged users?
A good interview lasts about 15 minutes. I schedule half an hour just in case but I don’t ask for more than 15 minutes. “Can you tell me about how you first started using (the product)?“ This is one of my favourite opening questions. It gets straight to the heart of why they use the […]
How to find people to talk to
The only way I know how to understand how different users think about your product is to speak to them.You don’t need to speak to lots of people, nor do you need to speak to them all at once. Two or three people a week is all you need.Recent customer success wins are always a […]
Doing Your First Customer Interview
People don’t care about your product. They care about what it can do for them. Talking to the people who use your product on a regular basis helps you remember this. Listening to your users might sound simple but it’s not. Setting up interviews and speaking to customers is a delicate process. If you come […]
Listening To What People Say
I got accepted to CXL institutes’ conversion optimisation mini-degree scholarship. It claims to be one of the most thorough conversion rate optimisation training programs in the world. The program runs online and covers 74 hours and 37h minutes of content over 12 weeks. As part of the scholarship, I have to write an essay about […]