Category: Customer development

How to Interview Customer — field guide

To build a business, you need to clearly understand who you can create value for -your customers- and what job are these customers trying to get done.

One way to answer these seminal questions is to actually interview potential customers and enquire about the problems they have. It seems easy to do, but it is difficult to do well.

A map to structure what you are learning

When interviewing customers, my main objective is to explore their own specific behaviors and resolution mechanisms. How do they solve problems on their own? On this exploration, I have a map: the customer interview sheet. It helps structure the feedback and ensures that I am covering the key areas to research so I don’t walk out of an interview with unanswered questions.

This customer interview sheet is structured in 3 parts: questions you ask yourself before the interview, questions you ask during the interview to guide the conversation towards specific learning points and the conclusions you need to draw after the interview.

Before the interview

Before running the interview you need to have clarity on what you want to learn. This makes the interview process easier, allowing you to refocus the interview when it goes off-topic.

  • Target Customer

Who is my target customer?

Define the type of customer you want to talk to. It is a reminder of the criteria you are looking for in your target customers. If the person you’re meeting does not match your specifications, you should move on. Where to find them? Think about their habits and their daily journey, and identify where are you more likely to find them.

  • Problem/Need

Which of their problems/needs am I setting out to solve?

You are assuming that your customers are encountering problems that are irritating enough for them to seek solutions (ideally your solution). List those problems here.

During the interview

In each interview, I keep an eye on the sheet thread to make sure I steer the conversation towards my learning goals. Below, for each frame of the sheet, I added the questions I usually use to get valuable customer insights.

  • Customer info

Who is this person I am talking to? What are some of the facts that define her/him?

Try to gather as much relevant data as you can. Sometimes, you won’t have all the details but you will be able to estimate an approximate age for example. Bit by bit, you will collect valuable information and write them down in this frame.

  • Customer stories

What problems do you encounter regarding this situation? When was the last time you had this problem? Can you tell me how it happened?

The best way to understand customer behavior is to ask for stories. Stories force the customer to recall their precise actions around the event. By drilling down with questions, you can understand their motivation and why they make the choices they make.

From their stories, you can decipher their perspective on the problem and assess the energy and efforts that the customer is putting into solving that problem.

Stories will reveal bigger and unsuspected problems encountered by your customers.

  • Existing solutions

How are you solving this problem? Is it effective?

This question allows you to understand who you are competing against. You will be surprised. If your customer is not using a solution to solve that problem, then maybe the problem you are after is not that important to them. Once you know what solution is being implemented, you can start improving on it.

You can also learn how your customers are looking for solutions, this will provide insights on their journey and inform you about potential marketing channels.

  • Pains with existing solutions

How is this solution working out for you?

Ask for the story to learn about the things that seem complicated, frustrating, or unpleasant. Again, assess how much of a problem this is for your customer. Is this something they are actively trying to solve? Or are they happy to live with those frictions?

After the interview

  • Key Takeaways

What were the most important things you learned?

Share your learnings with your team, and reflect on the 3 most important learnings. Is there a bigger problem the customer is trying to solve? What don’t they like about the solutions they are using?

  • Problem Importance

How important is this problem for this customer?

You need to understand if this is worth solving. Again you assess this based on the story they told you and their perspective on the problem. Is this person aware of having the problem? Is he/she paying for a solution?

  • Problem Frequency

How often does the customer have this problem or need?

This quantifies how often your solution could bring value. If the problem is not happening very often, then your solution might not be used a lot.

  • Early Adopter

Now here comes the hard question. Is this customer an early adopter?

Is this person actively looking for a solution? If not, this customer is unlikely to be the first person to jump on your solution.

So what?

Listen actively, read between the lines and try to dig deeper. Get into the mind of your customers, understand them as much as possible. If you feel stuck at some point, it’s ok. Regroup your thoughts, broaden your perspective, look at your sheet and see what information you are missing.

Get the Customer Interview Sheet

If you want to learn more about how to think and move like a startup, contact me on Tango.

Comment Neopost innove grâce au Lean Startup

Depuis plusieurs années, l’envoi de courrier baisse. Malgré cette baisse, l’un des principaux équipementiers du secteur, Neopost (1,1 milliard de CA en 2014) continue de croître. En effet, l’entreprise a su compléter ses offres courrier par des offres autour de la communication digitale et de l’envoi de colis. Pour créer de nouvelles offres, Neopost organise entre autres un Challenge Innovation qui incite les employés à présenter de nouvelles idées de services. Cette année les participants ont été accompagnés par des experts Lean Startup.

Les 12 projets, coachés par les experts Lean Startup ont en premier décomposé leur idées en hypothèses et puis par des itérations ultra-courtes ont cherché à vérifier chacune de ces hypothèses.

Ils ont interrogé les clients pour comprendre leurs réels besoins, testé et dé-risqué leur proposition de valeur et construit leur MVP. Ces retours leur ont permis de tirer des apprentissages concrets pour faire évoluer leur idée.

Un des projets proposés visait à modifier un dérouleur de ruban adhésif pour poser simplement une poignée sur un colis. Cas typique de l’invention qui cherche son public. Le porteur du projet ayant pris conscience de l’importance de comprendre le besoin du client a vérifié sur le terrain si son idée présentait un intérêt concret pour les commerçants. C’est en interrogeant les cavistes qu’il a réalisé leur besoin de faciliter le transport des caisses pour leur clients.

Neopost-Lean-Startup

Suite a cet accompagnement, les équipes ont présenté leurs résultats au Comité de Direction, puis à l’ensemble du personnel. Par rapport aux années précédentes la différence était marquante, avec notamment :

  • des projets plus matures, plus complets et plus cohérents
  • des business cases plus solides, grâce à une validation poussée des hypothèses.

Ces améliorations a permis un engagement plus grand du management ce qui a eu un impact direct sur la mise en œuvre de certains projets. Parmi eux, un « carnet de santé numérique » qui permet de mieux planifier les interventions et mises à jour des machines sur le terrain. Cet outil s’appuie sur une infrastructure big data récemment mise en place chez Neopost. Le fameux dérouleur de poignée, quand a lui est en phase d’industrialisation. Il a été présenté au concours Lépine 2015 où il a remporté une médaille d’argent.

Laurent Farlotti, Directeur Innovation et Brevets, a observé : “Les projets sont plus matures, avec plus d’éléments business. Les participants étaient très motivées et il y a eu une très bonne réaction du management. Sans Lean Startup, ces projets seraient restés au stade de l’idée et n’auraient probablement jamais eu de suite.”

Le Lean Startup a été introduit en 2013 à Neopost par Philippe Boulanger, CTO du groupe. 80 employés ont été formés à la méthode à ce jour.

How to use surveys to learn from your customers

Too often I have seen entrepreneur trying to understand their customer need by sending them … a survey.

“Please rank those feature in order of preference”

Because surveys capture what people say – which is different from how they behave – they don’t provide insightful data.
Worst, they provides data that too is easily misinterpreted and lead wrong insights…
The most useless survey question I have ever seen:

How much will you pay for a service that does such and such…

Whatever the answer, make sure you ignore it.

no_more_surveys
I have seen 2 rare occasions of useful surveys:

  1. to (scientifically) pick the best domain name
  2. to measure the customer pain. An entrepreneur sent a very long and boring survey his potential early adopters. When the results came back, he did not look at the actual answers but at how many people actually finished the survey. A direct measure of how much trouble they are will go through to get a closer to the solution to their problem. A measure of their pain. He then identifies the most eager early adopters.

Both of those examples are about validation, not discovery.

What do you think ? Do you have other examples of survey that worked ?

Problem Interview Guide for Lean Startup Experience

A hard part of customer development doing problem interview. It’s hard because interviewing strangers is not natural and its also actually hard to do the interview right.

The good news is that practice do make perfect, get it wrong a couple of times and you quickly understand what to correct and what to keep. If you want some simple exercices to improve your problem interview skills tweet this:
What exercice can I do to get better at problem interviews? @fdebane @adamberk

In the meantime, here the problem interview guide we use:
Download the problem interview guide

It’s to print and take as a memo for interviews.
Here is a guide to print and take as a memo for interviews.
You should not read the guide while doing the interview, but can refer to it inbetween interviews.

If you have to remember just 3 rules for problem interviews here they are:

  1. Do not talk about your business idea or product
  2. Ask about past events and behaviours
  3. No leading question, learn from the customer

Download the full problem interview guide

To capture the output of the interview, you can use the problem interview template.

Problem interview template

Problem interview template

Nov-14 2014: Added entry to classify customer into early adopter or not using @Justin_Wilcox definition: someone who is actively trying to solve the problem

Talking to your customers is the starting point to understand their needs. It’s easy to do, but difficult to do well.

On each interview I try want to understand:

  1. pain level of the problem to the eye of the customer. Is this a problem worth solving for them?
  2. the frequency of the problem. How often does it happen?
  3. discover alternative solution the customer have used. How are they solving it today?
  4. understand how they have been looking for those solutions. This provide insights on their journey and is valuable to understand you marketing channels
  5. discover other potential problems related. This allow you to identify other opportunities

I don’t like using a script for interview, it breaks the natural flow of the conversation. But I found having a template to take note helps structure the feedback directly and make sure I am not missing any of the above.

Download the Problem Interview template

If you are doing problem interview with your potential customer, please try it and let me know what you think.

Put this Hammer Down – Why do Customer Discovery ?

DSC_0009

“When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” -Bernard Baruch

Here, the hammer is your solution and the nails are your customers. I am sure you have already found lots of nails for your hammer. But please take a closer look at those nails. They are screws.

Put the hammer down and look at that poor screw. If it’s actually a nail, take the hammer back and take a swing, but if it’s a screw, you will need something else.

Many entrepreneurs start by building the solution they have imagined (a hammer) and then come up with a list of potential customers that could be interested (screws that look like nails) and hit them with their solution.

And the screw says ouch. The entrepreneur don’t hear the screw and hit harder, ouch, and then try to hit another screw. But the end of the day, the entrepreneur is exhausted that the nothing has being build.

The entrepreneur should really look at the screw, understand what type of screw it is, how the head is, the thread, the length, the alloy. And then think about the tool he can use for the job.

So put the hammer down and take a close look at that screw and decide what the solution should be. Don’t hit the screw on the head.

That’s called Customer Discovery. Remember, no hammer allowed.

Getting your first customers – simplified customer development

Sometimes startups come to me with this problem: we have created this great service, how can we get our first customers.

Those startups quite often need to put a hold on product development and focus customer development.

What they don’t actually know is:
– are they addressing a real, existing problem or a burning need ?
– does their service or product actually solve the problem – to the eyes of their target customers (or to their wallets should I say).

Answering those questions with genuine insight from real people is what customer development is.

Here is how to do it. It look and sound easy can be very tricky as it’s goes against a lot of expected cultural and social behaviours.

Find 10 potential customers from the target group and understand if the problem you are solving is a big pain or they dont really care.

For each customer understand where they stand:

  1. Did they have the problem ?
  2. Did they know they have the problem ?
  3. Did they look for a solution ?
  4. Did they hack a solution ?
  5. Did they pay for a solution ?

Customer problem categorisation - customer development

Achtung! Don’t ask them those questions. Have a conversation – not an interview – about the problem you are trying to solve and understand how they are solving it today. At the end, categorize them into the buckets above.

Once this is clear, the question is, how do I find those 10 potential customers ?
Be creative, try different methods. Which ever method works best can later become one of you marketing / communication channel. Drop the one that dont work. If you can’t find those first 10 customers, how are going to find 100s of them ?

If your product solves the problem, the people that you identified as paying for a solution (the last bucket) are your potential customers. You can start selling it to them.