Questions you should probably ask your customers.

Please tell me how you…

Please tell me what…

I’m trying to learn…

Please help me understand…

When does this happen?

Who is affected?

When was the last time this happened?

How often does this happen?

What did this cost you?

How do you decide?

What is the process you go through?

Give me a detailed play by play.

Can I ask why?

What do you do before/after?

Other people have to told me…

If you had a magic wand,what would you like to be able to do.

Just to clarify…

If you had this feature, how would things have been different?

How would you describe us to a colleague?

What are you trying to do? what are you looking for?

How long does it take?

Have you ever hit any problems? Any time it didn’t go as expected?

When you signed up for X, what did you expect to be able to do?

From an old note (circa-2009) on good questions to ask to really understand customers. Most of these were from Cindy Alvarez and Johanna Kollmann. I thought it was an interesting to look back and see the influence on us at Founder Centric and The Mom Test book.