The Mom Test or How to Ask Better Customer Dev Questions
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The document provides guidelines for conducting customer development conversations to obtain useful feedback rather than false positives. It advises asking open-ended questions focused on customers' specific experiences and problems rather than opinions. Customers should be asked to show or explain problems in the past rather than make hypothetical claims. The goal is to learn concrete facts about customers' lives rather than generic praise that lacks commitment.
The Mom Test or How to Ask Better Customer Dev Questions
- 1. The Mom Test - OR – Have Better Customer Dev Conversations
- 2. WHOIS Jeff Costa Senior Product Manager Akamai @cosjef jecosta@akamai.com
- 3. Loosely Based On This Book…
- 5. Everybody is lying to you
- 6. Why Do People Lie? • They don’t have a strong opinion what you are asking. • They want to get past the conversation. • They don’t want to discourage you. • They think its what you want to hear. • They don’t want to see you cry.
- 7. Good data Bad data
- 8. What’s A False Positive?
- 11. To Recap… • False positives cause you to over-invest your cash, your time, and your team. • Most customer validation meetings are a fistful of false positives. • Bad data is WORSE than no data. • Nobody is going to show us the truth. • You find it by asking good questions.
- 12. Question Guidelines • The only thing people love talking about more than themselves - is their problems. (So let them) • Get them to SHOW you the problem. • Ask about specifics in the past. • Dig beneath ideas. • Explore any strong emotional signals you encounter. • DON’T talk about your solution. • Compliments are the fools gold of customer learning. • Opinions are worthless. • “You should be terrified of at least ONE of the questions you are asking.”
- 13. Is this An “Eat your vegetables” THING - or a real problem?
- 14. Sample Questions To Get Good Data • Talk me through the last time you…. • When was the last time that happened? • What would doing X allow you to do? • Can you talk me through how you handled it? • What went wrong? • What were the consequences?
- 15. Sample Questions To Get Good Data - Part Deux • How much does this problem cost you? • How do you currently deal with this problem? How are you coping? • What sort of difficulties have come up with that solution? • What else have you tried? • What tools/processes do you use today? • Why do you bother?
- 16. Talk me through your workflow…
- 17. Who else should I talk to?
- 18. How Do I Know I Got BAD Data? • During the Meeting: • Generic claims: “I always…We usually…” • Future promises: “I would...We will” • Hypothetical maybes: “I might...We could” • No direct data about their problem. • Compliments (but no committments) • Back At the Office: • “Everybody absolutely LOVED our idea!” • The meeting “went really well.” • A pipeline of zombie leads. • No clear next steps.
- 20. How Do I Know I Had REAL Learning? • You got concrete facts about customer’s lives. • Solid (“Kickstarter-style”) commitments: • You got permission to contact again. • You got a clear next meeting. • You got an introduction to a decision-maker. • You didn’t get excited and start pitching your idea or product. • You listened more than you talked. • You discovered someone was NOT a customer. • You killed a fledgling idea before you committed heavily to it. • You saved time and money by not building something nobody will buy.
- 21. Killing ideas early stops products like this…
- 22. Test Your Knowledge • ”That’s so cool. I love it!” • “Looks great. Let me know when it launches.” • “There are a couple people I can intro you to when you’re ready.” • ”What are the next steps?” • “I would definitely buy that.” • “When can we start the trial?” • “Can I buy the prototype?” • ”When can you come back to talk to the rest of the team?” • ”How much would you pay for this?” • Fail. No commitment. • Fail. No commitment. • Mostly fail. • Success. • Fail. No commitment. • Mostly fail. • Success. • Success. • Fail.
- 23. Revisiting the Cookbook App • Mom, when was the last time you used the iPad? • Have you ever used it in the kitchen? • Have you ever bought an app? Which one? Why? • How much did you pay? • Do you use your cookbooks? • Is there anything you dislike about them? • What was the last cookbook you bought? When? Why?
- 24. Record It! • In person: use your smartphone’s voice recorder • Telephone: use a service like NoNotes.com to record and transcribe. • Get their consent. If not – STOP RECORDING! • This also gives you exact quotes you can use later in marketing language, fundraising decks, and to resolve arguments with skeptical teammates. • “It's our protocol to record these conversations to ensure we are accurate and thorough in capturing customer needs. I want to be paying attention to you, not frantically writing and miss something important. This recording won’t get shared with anyone or posted anywhere. And you can be certain we won’t ask you the same questions the next time we talk.”
- 25. Is like archeolo Learning from customer conversations…
Editor's Notes
- #2: Talking to customers is a sub-topic of Customer Development.
- #3: My contact information is below.
- #4: This talk is loosely based on a book called the Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. It’s called The Mom Test because it teaches you to ask questions that even your MOM can’t lie to you about.
- #5: YOU “Mom: I’ve got a business idea. With Christmas coming around, would you buy a cookbook app for the IPad? MOM: “Why, sure, son!. I would definitely buy that!” So a little later…after get done building it. NOBODY buys it – INCLUDING your mom. And when you go back and ask her WHY? “I have plenty of cookbooks,” “I never bought an app before. I’m really scared to enter a credit card.” “I only use the iPad to check email.” “I’m scared the iPad will get covered with butter in the kitchen.” Remember what David said about not asking family members for input?
- #6: Your own mom lied to you. And If you MOM will lie to you…what does that tell you about everybody else? Yep – everybody is lying to you! Not maliciously, but politely and nicely – and for generally good reasons.
- #7: They don’t have a strong opinion what you are asking. They want to get past the conversation. They don’t want to discourage you. They think its what you want to hear. They don’t want to see you cry.
- #8: But the problem is… When people lie - we get bad data. And when we get bad data – we convince ourselves that we are right. That bad data is called a false positive.
- #9: And it looks something like this. A test result is incorrect because it indicates that a given condition is present when it is not.
- #10: When we start believing those false positives, we get in BIG trouble. We waste time and money building things nobody wants. If you ask better questions…it helps avoid this situation. Its helps you not say things like “I wish I’d had this data 3 months ago” Better questions lead to better products.
- #11: The mental model you want to think of here is Kickstarter. You can’t lie on Kickstarter. Kickstarter forces concrete commitments from customers with absolutely NO CHANCE of being lied to. It puts people to a purchase decision. You like it? Pull out a credit card, make a commitment, and PROVE IT. And the really interesting thing: Kickstarter has various LEVELS of committments. You don’t have to just buy the product: small, medium, and large pledges give different returns. Your can get the same thing from meetings with customers – different levels of commitment.
- #12: How do we overcome this propensity to lie, and get GOOD data? The key is asking good questions.
- #13: You should be asking a question which has the potential to completely destroy your currently imagined business. When you ask people about your idea, you are just fishing for kind words. Deflect compliments. They are false positives. Ask open-ended questions.
- #14: You are trying to get at the real severity of the problem. “I know I should eat my vegetables and go to the gym twice a week…but I just don’t care.” Is this a “I-will-pay-to-solve-it” problem” or a “it-kind-of-annoying-but-I-can-deal-with-it” problem? Is this a “Yeah, that’s a problem” or a “THAT IS THE WORST PART OF MY LIFE AND I WILL PAY YOU RIGHT NOW TO FIX IT!” problem?
- #16: You are looking for ”workaround behaviors.” Are they actively searching for a replacement? If they don’t care enough to try solving their problem already, they aren’t going to look for (or buy) your solution either.
- #17: This is a good one to understand the “end-to-end” of a process. How something is being done today. You can find the pain in workflows.
- #18: I always end on this question. Who else should we talk to? You often get pointed to people inside or outside the company with the same problem. More opportunities to learn.
- #19: We don’t talk to customers to get compliments and collect gold stars.
- #20: If your meeting went this way…guess what? Your product got friend zoned!
- #21: Like Kickstarter, we can walk away from a meeting with different levels of commitments. We find out if people care about what we’re doing by never mentioning it. if you have $50k and spend $5k to learn you’re running down a dead end, that’s awesome. You want the truth, not a gold star from a customer. The major currencies are: time, reputation risk, and cash.
- #22: Killing an idea in the crib stops you doing something like this. Putting Windows 10 on a refrigerator like LG just did. Because HEY…people LOVE Windows!
- #23: I have rationalised the price outside of a real purchase decision, made a non-committal compliment, and offered a feature request to appear engaged.
- #24: Lets revisit the cookbook app now, but ask better questions.
- #26: Trying to learn from customer conversations is like excavating a delicate archaeological site. The truth is down there somewhere, but it’s fragile. Each blow with your shovel gets you closer to the truth But you are liable to smash it into a million little pieces if you use too blunt an instrument. So be careful about the questions you ask.