The Importance of Customer Interviews
For this story to make sense, you’ll need to know a few brief facts about my past. But feel free to skip this section.
- I grew up in the Midwest, oblivious to the world of startups until college
- I moved to the Bay Area after college to chase the startup dream
- I learned about customer development (later to be coined as Lean Startup) from steve blank.
- I joined the founding team of a startup that was productizing the customer development process
Ok, great. Let’s get to the (good) stuff.
In 2014, I moved from SF to NY. Having just spent four years eating, drinking, and breathing customer development, it’s no surprise I was way past having “drank the Kool-Aid”. The principles of Lean Startup were common sense to me by that point. And how to run a lean process was embedded in my muscle memory. Steve Blank was a household name to me. He was a connection to be touted. If I mentioned that I knew the Steve Blank, I would earn immediate credibility. Then I had my first interview.
They didn’t know Steve. They didn’t know customer development. Then I mentioned the more common “Lean Startup” and the light bulbs started going off.
“Ah, yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
Of course we know about Lean Startup.
We’re a startup!
Yes, yes, we are a Lean Startup.
We do all the lean things.”
This was the first time I really felt the change in coasts. People knew the words, but had no clue what they actually meant [1]. It was a real-life example of “Startup Theatre” that shocked me.
Then I joined a startup on a mission to inject a heavy dosage of customer development into their product development process. We ended up doing 70 customer interviews in my first two months, amassing actual client stories that became the foundation for steering the product direction. More importantly, interviewing customers became an expectation and norm, not a special request.
In 2016, I think most people know the words, but don’t know the actions. They know that you need to interview customers, but they don’t know how to interview customers (properly). It’s the same problem facing companies trying to leverage their data. They know they should mine their data for insights and performing exploratory data analysis, but they don’t know how and their existing engineers might not either. Why do you think Data Engineers are in such high demand?
So I have a request for both sides of the equation.
- To Product Managers: Invest in learning proper interviewing techniques. Read anthropology literature, attend design thinking workshops, or user researchers on your team. But don’t stop at theory! Get an interviewing buddy to partner with you and give feedback as you practice [2].
- To companies: Invest in your existing PMs to help them gain these skills. If you have dedicated user researchers, pair them with your PMs. If not, send them to workshops. You’ll get a positive ROI, don’t worry. For new PMs, screen for this. Have them interview a user researcher or someone on the UX team.
The ability to observe and interview is as crucial, if not more, than any other skill for a PM—and it’s testable.
[1] This is a broad over-generalization, not applicable to many people in the East Coast startup community.
[2] Ping me if you have questions.
