In customer interviews, talk about their life instead of your ideas

When you're trying to evaluate a problem ("Evaluate", not "validate") by talking to customers, it's too easy to ask bad questions and get bad/misleading data.

There are some rules of thumb to uncover the truth about a problem:

• Talk about their lives. Avoid talking about your ideas.
• Ask about specific behaviors in the past. Don't discuss hypothetical future behavior.
  • Because people are notoriously bad at predicting their future behavior. Past behavior is more indicative of what they might actually do in the future.
  • Talk about the last time they encountered a problem and how they tried to solve.
• Listen more than you talk.

Tags: user research jobs-to-be-done customer interviews

ID: 2021-0319-0939

References:

• Fitzpatrick – The Mom Test (p. 30)