A guide on HOW to talk to your customers
There is a huge difference in HOW you talk to customers which can distinguish those who are making progress from those who are stuck in a loop.
As I said in my last post, don’t just ask customers what they want, ask them what they are trying to accomplish. Listen for what’s getting in the way.
A lot has been written about this topic and it can get very complicated. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get started with an initial round of customer discovery.
1. Write down your hypotheses
I’ve found many people are hesitant to write anything down. Perhaps they’re afraid of being wrong or they feel it’s hard to change once it’s inked. Think of it more like a science experiment. You’re doing this to learn; if you find out it’s wrong, that’s a good thing! You’ll move away from building things that won’t work and you’ll be on a better path forward with better hypotheses.
Here are some questions to to get you started. I’ll use an electric scooter rental throughout as an example to help clarify.
What “job” do you believe your customers are trying to accomplish?
Let’s start broad for simplicity. I’ll share other resources at the end if you want to go deeper into JTBD.
Scooter example: "Getting from point A to point B”.
Who is using your product and what problem is it solving?
Scooter example: Commuters who want a way to travel that’s inexpensive and allows them to quickly go a short distance without breaking a sweat. Tourists who want an inexpensive way to see more of the city without becoming too tired.
2. Identify your goals
Outline 3-5 goals for your interviews. As a reminder, this is not about seeing if they like a feature or asking them what they want. Focus on trying to understand what they are trying to accomplish.
Scooter example goals:
Identify what “jobs” commuters are trying to accomplish by using our product
Uncover commuters' underlying motivations, emotional needs, and experiences throughout their journey to reveal valuable insights
Understand any challenges, obstacles, or pain points commuters encountered while using the product
3. Involve stakeholders/team members
It can feel intimidating but your efforts will be more successful if people feel involved and a part of it (or at least have the option to be). It can be difficult to have them join everything but at the minimum, I’d suggest:
Getting input or feedback on hypotheses and/or interview guide
Inviting them to observe some interviews
Inviting them to a “share out” of what you learned
4. Outline who you’re going to talk to
I typically schedule around 7-10 customers each round and add on as needed. Some examples of when you need more:
If you have multiple customer types (buyers, end users, etc), you will want to expand this initial number or focus in on a specific customer type to start.
If you are just starting to talk to customers, it’s helpful to hear from customers that have different levels of engagement (brand new customers, churned customers, and very engaged customers).
If you don’t really know who is buying your product, expanding this number will give you a larger sample size to start identifying your primary audiences
If your audience is very busy or not very engaged with your brand they may not show up. I always book one or two as backup but you may need some more.
For the scooter example, let’s assume this is the first time you’ve done customer interviews but you know from past surveys customers primarily use you when commuting. I would recommend focusing on recruiting commuter audiences and get at least 5 customers from each of the following categories: new, very engaged, and churned.
5. Build an interview guide
Here’s a general outline for 45-60 min discussion. Adjust based on your product and your goals. Just make sure you aren’t asking leading questions.
Goals (from above)
I like to put the goals at the top of the guide as a reminder. It’s a good gut check when writing your guide and to review briefly before starting an interview.
Introduction
Introduce yourself and share a quick summary about why you’ve recruited them. (“We’re looking to identify ways to improve our product and want to talk to customers like you.”)
Let them know that you want them to be as honest as possible. The more honest they are, the more it will help you understand their experience.
Ask if you can record the session for internal purposes so you can be focused on the discussion and not taking notes.
Background
Start out with some simple questions to get them comfortable and learn more about them. For example, ask them about their role and the company they work for if that’s related to your product.
Then I typically segue with something like “And now I’m going to ask you some questions about your experiences generally.” so they aren’t thrown off when we don’t dive into questions that aren’t specific to your product.
Their Job to Be Done
Start with a very broad question related to the job you outlined. For example, if you are talking to the scooter commuter audience, say “Talk to me about your commute to work”.
Most will just start talking but I have some follow up questions in my guide if they are slow to start such as “How far of a commute do you have? What’s that like for you?”.
They’ll likely mention your product as part of this but what if they don’t? I know it will be tempting but DON’T mention your product yet. Don’t try to tell them about a new thing coming that will help them. This is about their story, not your product’s story.
Just listen and ask questions to dig into THEIR experience (“How do you feel about a 25 minute commute to work?”, “Is your commute typically the same or does it change?”, “Why?”)
Understand Their Journey with your Product
Now let’s dig further into different steps of their journey. If you are talking to prospects, you can use a similar approach but not related to your product, just related to how they get this “job” done.
I like to use Tony Ulwick’s Job Map as a reference to make sure I’m learning about their whole journey. Simply put, each job goes through some or all of these steps outlined (define, locate, etc). By focusing on each stage of their journey, it helps customers become more specific about what they are trying to achieve at each point. Below is an example example a script. I’ve added the [step] to show the connection. You don’t need this in your script.
[Define] Tell me about why you started using . What were you hoping to achieve? Why? How did you accomplish this before ?
[Define] Tell me about what encouraged you to look into instead of keeping with your current scenario?
[Locate] How did you find out about ?
[Locate] Were there other options you were thinking about? Talk to me about how you learned about each them. What were your reactions to these different options?
[Prepare] (if other options) How did you decide between these different options? What were the key factors for you when comparing?
[Prepare] Is there anything you needed to do or anyone you needed to check with before deciding on [ ? Tell me about this.
[Confirm] Describe the moment or scenario that encouraged you start using . What were the key factors to making this decision? Why?
[Execute] Talk to me about your first time/most recent time using .
If it’s an online product, you could ask them to walk through how they typically use your product and share their screen
Ask questions to go deeper such as “What was your reaction to ___? Why?”
I like to remind them at this point to be as honest as possible so they feel comfortable sharing the good and the bad
[Monitor/Modify] You mentioned that you want to [what they were hoping to achieve] with . Talk to me about your experience to date.
What, if anything, helped you achieve this?
What, if anything, was a barrier? What would you want to change and why?
Is there anything you changed on your own to help you achieve this goal? Why?
[Conclude] Tell me about your experience (such as completing their ride).
Ask questions if they’ve stopped using it about how they are currently completing their job and their experience. Dig into the why around the switch.
Ask questions related to how they might complete a transaction with your product or how they are preparing to complete another transaction with your product.
Wrapping Up
Thank them for their time and let them know when they should expect an incentive if you’re sending one.
You may also want to ask them if they would be open to participating in more research in the future.
6. Schedule customers
Now it’s time to get these interviews scheduled. I typically email customers (assuming the privacy policy allows) but you could also use other channels like social media depending on your audience. You may just need a screener to confirm they are customers.
Start with a small batch of emails (50-100) to see what type of response you get and expand if needed. It’s best to use an email tool like Mailchimp but if you don’t have an email tool set up, you could use this mail merge tool with caution.
If there’s any particular criteria you’re looking to recruit, you could create a screener (Google forms works great) to identify which users fit that criteria before sharing a pathway to book.
Tools like calendly are great to streamline the process with booking a time (vs the back and forth with email). It also allows you to set a max for the number of bookings.
I have calendly integrated with Zoom to automatically add a Zoom link when someone books a time. I also include any instructions on what is needed from the customer (for example, you may want to give them a heads up if you want them to share their screen). Google work too or even in person if your customers are local.
It’s nice to provide some incentive for their time. My default is $25 Amazon gift card for 30min, $50 for an hour but sometimes I need to flex up or down depending on who I was recruiting and the budget. It decreases time to find people and shows appreciation for your customers.
7. Conduct the interviews
Here are some tips when conducting the interviews:
If you are new to this, it might help to practice with a colleague or friend to help you get comfortable.
Give the customer time to talk. Don’t rush to the next question. Be ok with awkward pauses as this can sometime be right before something really insightful.
Have a place to take quick notes on what you want to dig into so you don’t forget and don’t interrupt the customer’s story.
If others are joining the call, try to limit this to 1-2 and ask them to turn off video once they are introduced. I have had scenarios where more needed to join and I set it up more as an observation room with a webinar. I let the customer know some colleagues may be listening in to learn and take notes but the webinar is set up so they don’t see the other participants.
If you feel you can juggle it, I often have a slack chat open so those observing can ask questions that I weave into the conversation.
The guide is just that, a guide. Touch on key areas but let the conversation guide you. This may take some time to get used to so if you aren’t yet comfortable, you could rely more on the guide initially but then push yourself to listen and ask questions related to what you’re hearing.
I block 15 min after my call to write down notes and themes from the call into a spreadsheet (see next step). If someone is joining, I ask them to take notes as well but I always circle back and find I have more to add.
8. Analyze the results
After you’ve completed all your interviews, it’s now time to analyze what you learned. As humans, we tend to focus on information that aligns to our beliefs (confirmation bias). You may also realize this happening with politics and the division in our country but that’s a topic for a different day.
So how do you try to avoid these biases sneaking in? Well, there’s a more methodical version of coding transcripts that could be applied. There are tools to help with this but they typically require more $. AI is helping streamline this process and I’ve used this to gut check themes I was seeing but I still find it quite labor intensive. I’m planning to try some new tools i found next round.
Manually coding can take a lot of time and transcripts aren’t always accurate. They also don’t capture the emotional response. For example, someone yelling “no!” when you’ve shared something they didn’t know was possible that helps them achieve their goal- a good thing.
I leverage a spreadsheet to do a gut check and to help me find new themes I may have missed initially. Here’s a walk through:
Add a row for each participant and label the columns (name, email, customer type, etc)
Create columns that generally follow the conversations (for example, I’ll have “Background”, and a larger “Journey” section broken down by the steps). This is what I fill in with notes in the 15 min after the call.
I’ll have a second tab with “Themes”. In this tab I start to take notes on what I’m hearing related to my goals. I’ll add some organization to the themes as they form. It’s a bit organic but the more you practice, the more natural it will become. I’ll also include the original hypotheses in this list
Be as specific as possible for the themes. Include the “why”. Not just “Wants more safety” But “Safety” could be my topic for organization and perhaps many have stated they had concerns about their safety when there were no bike lanes. So I would put “Avoid routes without bike lanes”.
Next to each theme, I’ll list out who said it. This way I can identify what themes are bubbling up to the top.
I typically go back to the videos to fill in gaps with the notes. It takes time but I use grain.co so I can speed it up, quickly skip to specific points in the transcript and quickly create highlights for the share out.
Listing out who said which theme has helped me check my biases. I may have talked to 2 people at the end who shared the same thing and so I believe it’s a common theme (recency bias) when in reality it’s only 2 out of 12 .
8. Share what you learned
You may want to discuss themes you heard with others in the interviews, pull in some related metrics, and so on, but turn this around quickly for your share out. Perfection is the enemy of action. I typically put together a quick document/deck and already have a share out on the calendar. If possible, I also share this out before if people are curious to preview so we can spend more time discussing rather than on the read out. Taking too long to share what you learned reinforces the theory that research takes too long.
Based on our goals, here’s a breakdown on what I’d suggest including:
Project Background Provide some context about this initiative including your goals and who you talked to.
Jobs/Target Audience. How did what you hear compare to your original hypotheses? Are there new jobs or sub-segments of customers that came up? Provide more details and perhaps recommend updated hypotheses.
Desired outcomes. Clarify in more detail what people are trying to achieve. What is important to them and why? For example, for the scooter, many mentioned concerns with safety and you have specific themes you can share. This paired with maybe some data about how many injuries there are can help you ideate around ways to improve and focus on this as part of your product strategy.
Barriers. What are top areas that are creating bumps or barriers in the experience. How painful are these barriers and should they be a big focus moving forward or were their larger issues?
Next Steps/Recommendations. Based on all the above, what are some recommendations to discuss with stakeholders? Are there new sub-segments of customers you want to learn more about? New key questions to answer that surfaced? Low hanging fruit improvements to be made? A discussion about a strategic shift to focus on themes that surfaced?
Pro Tip: Add video clips as examples for your themes. It’s so powerful to hear directly from the customers. This can be achieved really easily using tools such as grain.co.
The goal of this share back is to not only identify opportunities to feed into your product roadmap but to also get buy in for future rounds so this becomes a continuous habit and there’s more confidence and clarity for the path ahead. Maybe you only have capacity to do this once a quarter. That’s better than never.
Looking to go deeper?
I’m planning to write more for those who need more support making these connections to your product strategy or testing new directions for your product.
There’s a LOT of great books out there related to this topic and beyond. Here’s an initial list. Don’t get overwhelmed by it. Just pick one that speaks to you and start there.
Continuous Discovery by Teresa Torres
Jobs to be Done by Anthony W Ulwick
His earlier book: What customers want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services
Doing Discovery by Peter Cohan
Inspired by Marty Cagan
The Jobs to be Done Playbook by Jim Kalbach
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas In Just Five Days by Jake Knapp
Build what matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
The Lean Playbook by Dan Olsen
Wow…you read this far? I’m impressed. Or maybe you just skipped to the end? Either way, feel free to reach out if this speaks to you on LinkedIn or my email in the footer.
