The Mom Test – Rob Fitzpatrick

Reference: Fitzpatrick (2013). The Mom Test

The book talks about interviewing customers in the context of building a startup or discovering the right problem to solve.

Talking to customers is hard. You have to ask the right questions to avoid bad data and discover the truth.
Rules of thumb for talking to customers to validate ideas:
- talk about their life, not your ideas
- ask about specific past behavior, not hypothetical future
- listen more than you talk
Brush off compliments ("I like your idea") and focus on how they solve their problems. Ask about the last time they encountered problem X. What did the do to solve it?
- You might discover that they didn't -> that it's not enough of a problem to solve it.

It's crucial to avoid a learning bottleneck which happens when only one person talks to customers and the knowledge stays in their head. To avoid this:
- Invite other team members to the interviews
- Take good notes
- Review notes after interviews, store in a place you can go back to and share your learnings with the rest of the team
If you're able to distribute the knowledge and learnings from customer interviews, it's a big step toward avoiding the Curse of knowledge – if the whole team shares the knowledge, it's less likely there will be misunderstandings in communication that's based on that knowledge.

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