3 Key Insights from Giff Constable's "Talking to Humans"

For SDSU's Lavin Entrepreneurship program, we read a couple books each semester in the product/entrepreneurship space. Below, I share my learnings from Giff Constable's "Talking to Humans" and my thoughts on how his teachings apply in the software market & product development field today.

“Talking to Humans” is a thoughtful guide to customer interviews in the product development stage of a startup, written by Giff Constable - the current Chief Product Officer at MeetUp (a WeWork company). It offers concrete examples on how to recruit candidates, conduct interviews, and find patterns in the data you gather. Tom Fishburne’s added illustrations that poke fun at marketers a bit of humor as well(if you enjoy them, his weekly newsletter the Marketoonist is great). Although I would say it focuses mostly on consumer products, Constable does touch a bit on B2B/enterprise products. 

Three insights I picked up from this workbook were 1) you are a detective, 2) you can conduct “Wizard of Oz” experiments, and 3) customer interviews should happen throughout the lifecycle of your business.

You are a detective. Constable explains that entrepreneurs far too often jump straight to “Hey my product is great, would you buy it?” in customer interviews, rather than asking what the customer about their pain point. He argues “you are looking for clues that help confirm or deny your assumptions... not to compile statistically significant answers”(Constable 12). Customer interviews should rather lay the framework for identifying certain user journeys, confirming or denying your “risky assumptions,” and further resonating with customer pain points. These insights will help guide your later stage product decisions, like your “Wizard of Oz” experiments. 

Conducting “Wizard of Oz” experiments will give you greater insight into what the customer will buy. Wizard of Oz experiments, where you use manual labor/hacks to solve the customers pain point before ~actually~ building the product, was a term originally coined by John F. Kelley, in the field of human-computer interaction. The original term described when subjects interact with a seemingly autonomous application whose unimplemented functions are actually simulated by a human operator, or known as the Wizard. 

Now, the term has been filtering into the MicroSaaS and indie makers online community. Tyler Tringas, the founding partner of Earnest Capital, a firm providing early stage funding for bootstrappers, indiehackers, and remote companies, explains “Wizard of Oz” software products, those that stitch together either your manual work or no-code platforms, are a great way to validate that a customer will pay for you to solve this pain point (He has a great blog post on it here). By repeating these journeys, you’ll inherently identify the processes that can be automated along the way. As you validate a customer is willing to pay for these experiments, then you can devote larger pools of resources to building standalone products. 

As you build standalone products, you must continue to interview your customers. I particularly liked the above graphic that Constable included above. He argued that although most entrepreneurs advocate for customer interviews in the product development phase, it must be a constant process as your product continues to evolve. Including a picture of E.M. Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation theory, Constable builds off of the theories discussed in Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High Tech Products(one of my more recent reads - definitely an interesting deep dive into taking products from early adopters to early majority to mainstream success). Moore and Constable both reinforce the idea that niches and customer-driven development are the key to building successful, growing companies.

Overall, this book is a great tactical addition to a toolbox of product development knowledge - and I would recommend reading additional books in the “Lean” ecosystem, especially any of Eric Ries’s work. I also believe these concepts also connect solidly to "Product-Led Growth," a relatively nascent go-to-market strategy, coined by OpenView Partners, that relies on product usage to drive acquisition, conversion, and expansion and encompasses companies like Shopify, Zoom, and Slack. More on product-led growth here.