Our six steps for customer development
At Poetica, we do a lot of talking to our users. One of the ways we do that is through customer development interviews: face-to-face interviews with people or teams of people we think fit our hypothesis about what a Poetica user looks like. Our goal is to better understand who our potential users are and what pain points they have.
Last week, Bethnal Green Ventures invited us along to talk to their teams about what we’ve learnt through doing this. Going and talking to users sounds straight-forward enough. But what does that actually mean? How can you do it in such a way that means you take away something truly useful from that interaction?
So, based on the dozens of customer development interviews we’ve done at Poetica, here are the six steps that we shared with BGV about how to run a really fantastic customer development process:
Step 1: What are you trying to learn?
The first thing you need to be clear on is what you’re trying to get out of this process: What are you trying to learn? This will change depending on what stage your product/service/company is at, but a simple approach is to figure out what the most significant assumption you’re making about your customers is and asking whether that is true or false.
Step 2: Who are your customers?
‘Customers’, in this process, means many different types of people. They might be people who pay you money now, people who might pay you money in the future, users who will never pay, potential strategic partners… essentially think of ‘customers’ as shorthand for any person who might shed light on the viability of your idea.
Be as specific as you can about who those people are. Try and describe them in as much detail as you can — this will help you keep focused.
Step 3: How can you find customers to ‘interview’ and who should be doing this?
Finding customers to sit down face-to-face with takes a lot of effort. But it’s worth it. A lot of communication — particularly when it might be nuanced or something you don’t want to hear — is non-verbal.
To do this well, the most useful skill to develop is being unafraid of asking people. The easiest way of finding interviewees is through introductions. Don’t under-estimate the usefulness of just putting out a call on Facebook or Twitter — you rarely know who you’re really connected to until you ask!
If you can’t find a friend of a friend of a friend, cold emailing is the second best option. Try and avoid sounding like you’re trying to sell someone something. “I’m doing some research”, “I’m working on a project” — you’d be amazed at how willing people are to help. You might also cold-approach people face-to-face — events are great for this. Or places — don’t be afraid to go to where your customers are, whether that’s a gym or the supermarket.
At Poetica, we don’t ever pay someone for their opinions — that introduces biases — but we have bought a lot of coffee and cake. We’ve found the ideal length of time to really get useful information out of people is about an hour — but if 20 minutes is all you can get, you can make that work too.
Everyone in your team should be involved in this process at some point. In our team of five, typically this is lead by two of us, but the other three try and get involved if and when they can. This means that it’s easier to talk about any big changes produced by these conversations amongst the team and it makes it easier for anyone to make a good product decision. When you’re a small team, that’s really important.
Step 4: How to run an interview
This is probably the hardest thing to get right. How do you ask the right questions to ensure you’re getting the most useful answers?
If you want to drive deep into this, check out more of our tips for running a really useful customer development interview here:
https://poetica.com/drafts/5e2eb6abf22e80fcef10e972
Step 5: Recording your interviews
During the interview, we try and avoid recording anything if possible — even on pen and paper. We’ve found recording our interviewees makes them uncomfortable — where will their words and opinions end up?!
Instead, as soon after the interview as you can, set aside 15 mins (put a limit on this otherwise it becomes a time-sink) to make notes from your interview and share those with your team. We found this a really important process in thinking through what you’ve learnt — resist the temptation to skip it!
Step 6: Developing insights and learning when to stop
So what do you do with all this data? We found that big learnings came from this process pretty organically when you keep talking it over with your team. A quick round up each week of big-picture learnings that you’ve had works great.
Customer development is something we’ve done in waves; when we realise we need to answer a big question about our users, we run a new round of these interviews. We stop when we start to hear the same thing from lots of interviewees and we can return to our original question and answer it.
But this is a tool to help you understand your users that never stops being useful!
Originally published at blog.poetica.com on July 21, 2014.
