Balancing the hypothetical with the actual
They say they will… but how do I know?
Someone says they’ll do something, and you wonder if it’ll actually ever happen.
This applies to many situations. We’re going to focus on what this means for companies running customer interviews before they build-out their full product.
Usually, these interviews should refrain from the hypothetical. They should focus on actions that people have taken, the feelings they have felt, the reasons motivating the action, and the outcomes or thoughts following the event.
Sometimes, it’s tough to stay grounded in the past. When that’s the case, interviewers may be tempted to ask about hypothetical situations such as “if you had ___, would you ___?” or “what would get you to ____?”. These types of questions come up often, and sometimes may even be necessary, but the answers may be less reliable to build your product around. Here’s why:
If it’s a truly “bleeding-edge” product, people may not know what to think. They may not even know how to envision the solution, or the real problem it would solve for them. They may struggle to think of the concerns they would have with employing your product, like safety, trust, reliability, and so on. Unfortunately, these factors will face you in the marketplace.
Many people will be tempted to say “well, yeah, that sounds nice” or “sure, I would definitely pay anything under $100 for that”, but when it comes time to use the product or to buy it, they may not be willing to cough up the money or the courage that they’d originally promised.
Even if the eventual product is not necessarily “bleeding-edge”, asking about hypotheticals ignores the journey that your customers usually take to find or purchase a solution.
Anger, Progress, and WHY > Demographic Data
I read a piece on Medium recently that asked entrepreneurs to write down every single thing that pissed them off during the day. They claimed that every great invention was born out of someone being so incredibly frustrated that they went on to build something to solve that frustration. While I’m not asking anyone to do this, there’s something to it:
Most purchases are not impulse. Most have been mulled over for some time, even without customers directly thinking about it. Why did they purchase good x? Well, it’s not because the purchaser is a 21 year-old female in Chicago. Their demographic information doesn’t tell you WHY they purchased it. There was some problem or frustration or gap that they sought to fill with that product, and for one reason or another, they pulled the trigger on buying it.
Hypotheticals take away the understanding of a customer’s journey and the frustrations that the purchaser faced, or the progress that they hoped to make through the purchase. So how do you balance the hypothetical with the actual?
Show me the money!
Well, if it’s a question of payment, you could ask the interviewee or customer to pay you then and there. Or, to put down a downpayment of some sort for the eventual product. If they’re really willing to pay $100 for the product when it’s ready in two months from now, shouldn’t some of them be willing to pre-pay $50 now in order to have first-access, plus an overall discount?
Of course, this is not always the case, but it can help an interviewer get to the truth about what someone may actually be willing to pay, and the process may get people down (or up!) to what they would really pay given what they know about the product.
More isn’t always better
If it’s a question of interest or use, ask them why they think they would be interested, or what progress or satisfaction they think the product would bring to them. Dig deeper beyond the “yeah, I think I’d like that” to understand what’s motivating that response.
Sometimes, you may find that the motivation behind the response was really just that they didn’t think through it. It may be that they were just motivated by the “more is better” rationale. Most of the time, “more is better” is not enough for someone to justify a purchasing decision, so it’s worth figuring out if you’re building something just because it can be built, or if you’re building something because people want it.
On a broader scale
I’ve learned many life-lessons in college. One of the biggest is to not take everything at face-value. Question everything, not in an annoying sense, but with an eye for truth, and an eye for when things are too-good-to-be-true.
I’m of the opinion that professionally, this helps build out your analytical skills and ability to ask the right questions at the right time. On a personal level, it can help you make sense of the world you’re living in, especially in circumstances where you’re overwhelmed with the availability of “information” (some being fact, and some not).
