Tips for doing customer development interviews, presented at Lean Startup Machine in NYC, Dec 10, 2011

1. HOW TO TO A CUST DEV
INTERVIEW + MAKING SENSE OF
CUST DEV DATA
Lean Startup Machine
Dec 10, 2011
Josh Seiden, @jseiden

2. Focus your learning: high risk assumptions
What assumptions do you have?
…about your customers?
…that if proven false, will cause you to fail?
License: Creative Commons Attribution-
Share Alike 3.0 United States

3. Drilling into our assumptions ...
§ Who is the user? Who is the customer?
§ Where does our product fit in their work or life?
§ What problems does our product solve?
§ When and how is our product used?
§ What features are important?
§ How should our product look and behave?
License: Creative Commons Attribution-
3 Share Alike 3.0 United States

4. Get out of the building
§ Identify who do you want to talk to and what you
want to learn
In other words, what assumptions will you test?
§ Plan your interview themes as a team
§ Collect artifacts, debrief and share
§ Use your visits for multiple purposes
License: Creative Commons Attribution-
4 Share Alike 3.0 United States

5. Sample interview flow
§ Warm-up questions to set context
“Tell me a little about yourself…”
§ Talk about real events, avoid conjecture
“Tell me about a recent time when you…”
§ Show demos/sketches later in meeting
“Show me how you would use this to…”
§ Express appreciation “Thanks for your time!”
§ If the interview went well, it’s OK to ask if you can
contact them again later
License: Creative Commons Attribution-
5 Share Alike 3.0 United States

6. (Giff’s) 12 Tips for Interviews
1. What do you want to know?
2. One at a time.
3. Use the funnel.
4. Get psyched to hear things you don’t want to hear.
5. People will be polite. Help them be rude.
6. Open ended questions.
7. Stories are golden.
8. Listen, don’t talk.
9. Encourage, don’t influence.
10. Follow your nose and drill down.
11. Say it back.
12. Ask for introductions. License: Creative Commons Attribution-
Share Alike 3.0 United States

7. Making sense of what you’ve heard
Dump and sort synthesis
§ Whole team activity
§ What did we observe?
§ One observation per sticky note
§ Group into themes
§ You’re looking for patterns relating to your
business model.
§ What assumptions did we confirm? Which ones did
we disprove?
License: Creative Commons Attribution-
Share Alike 3.0 United States

8. If it gets confusing, make a model
What do you know about people? Make personas.
What do you know about how they work? Make
workflow diagrams.
Put this together: write a scenario.
License: Creative Commons Attribution-
Share Alike 3.0 United States

9. For more details
12 Tips for Interviewing
§ Thanks to Giff Constable
§
http://giffconstable.com/2011/07/12-tips-for-customer-development-interviews-revised/
Check out...
§ Slideshare: “I’m out of the Building, Now What?”
§ by Lane Halley @thinknow
License: Creative Commons Attribution-
Share Alike 3.0 United States