فصل 8

CHAPTER EIGHT

Running the process

Even if you do everything else right, you can get bad results if you don’t have the right process wrapped around your conversations. Showing up and hoping for the best, is not making a good use of anyone’s time. You need to do a little bit of work before and after the meeting to extract full value.

A common anti-pattern is for the business guy, the sales person on the founding team to go to all the meetings and to subsequently tell the rest of the team what every one should do. This is a bad idea. In this case, telling the rest of the team “What I learned from the customer” is functionally equivalent to telling them “What you will do because I command it.” In this way, owning the customer conversations creates a de-facto dictator with “The customer said so” as the ultimate trump card.

And that’s a problem because as we’ve seen, it’s really easy to misinterpret what a customer has said, to draw the wrong conclusions or to base your decisions of a bad data.

When all the customer learning is stuck inside someone’s head instead of being disseminated to the rest of the team, you’ve got a learning bottleneck. Avoid creating (or being) the learning bottleneck. To do that, the learning needs to be shared with the entire founding team, and ideally the entire team that’s making any sort of product or strategy or sales or marketing decisions. And to share with these people, it depends on taking good notes plus a bit of work before and after the meeting.

The most extreme way to bottleneck is to go to the meetings alone, take bad notes and then fail to review those notes with your team. At that point, your head has just become the ultimate repository of customer truth and everyone basically has to do what you say.

In my case, I once bottlenecked so hard that my CTO quit while saying, “We’re never going to succeed if you keep changing what we’re doing.” In my defense, all of the decisions I was making where based on real customer learning or at least I though they were, on my best understanding of the customer conversations I was having. But it didn’t matter since I hadn’t properly communicated that to the rest of the team, so I ended up loosing a key TEC person.

These sorts of bottlenecks can be creative from either end. The founder in touch with customers can do a bad job of sharing it or the rest of the team can refuse to engage with customers and not respect or spend the time on the learning, so we wanna fix both.

Some symptoms of a learning bottleneck could include some one on the team saying: “You just worry about the product. I’ll handle the customers.” Or “we’re doing it because the customers told me so!” Or a TEC person or a product person saying “I don’t have time to talk to people — I need to be coding!” Avoiding bottlenecks has three parts: prepping, reviewing, and taking good notes.

Prepping

Your most important preparation is to ensure you know your current big 3 questions. I’ve mentioned it a bunch of times cause it’s important. Spend the time to sit down with your team and figure them out. And this is not as obvious as it first appears because the questions you’re trying to answer are deeply rooted into your analysis of your own business strategy and risks. What’s scariest, what are you depend on, what is your future product decision henging on. It’s a really interesting strategy and introspective discussion to figure out what these learning goal should be.

If you’ve already learned the facts about your customer and your industry, you understand them pretty well, then you can kind of go ahead and plan which commitment and next steps you are going ask for at the end of the good meeting.

It’s easier to guide your customer conversations and stay on track if you have an existing set of beliefs that you’re updating as oppose to if you’re starting with no ideas what so ever about what the customer might care about. To get to this initial state, if you’re brand new in and industry, spend a while writing down your best guesses about what the people you’re about to talk to care about. You’ll probably be wrong, but it’s easier to keep this discussion going and to stay on the important points if you’ve at least created a skeleton and have a thesis. If you have an appropriately focused customer segment, then this wont happen terribly often because the learning you’re getting from one conversation will rarely fairy directly to the next one.

While prepping, if you come across a question which could be answered with desk research by googling it, then take a moment to just do that. You want to move past the obvious stuff so that you can use your in-person conversations to find the deep insights that the internet can give you. You wanna use your conversation time to figure out why they’re doing something. You don’t need a demographic info.

Similarly, if you’re about to meet with a business, do your basic due diligence on LinkedIn and the company website. It takes 5 minutes and will save you from borking the conversation and looking like an idiot when you ask something that was pretty obvious from their website.

Sit down with your whole founding team when you prep. You want both business and product to be represented. If you leave part of the company out of the prep, then you end up missing their concerns in the customer conversations.

Some founders react with hostility to the whole idea. They’ll say something along the lines of, “We just need to focus on the derned product,. We need to stop wasting our time talking to people. They’re all gonna lie to us anyway.” This is a reasonable reaction if they feel like there’s no good data available from customer conversations. And that could actually be the case if historically the customer conversations have been done incorrectly. So part of this is showing them that you’re changing the way you’re running the customer conversations which will lead to better value. You’re gonna ask better questions. You’re gonna avoid the biases. You’re gonna collect concrete commitments. You’re gonna take good notes. That should go a long way to at least getting them to be willing to get it a second try. However, you still need to involve them a bit more than that.

The minimum involvement is to ask your skeptical or grumpy team members to humor you and to help you pick the learning goals. And then to occasionally, once you’ve got them rolling in a friendly customers to join you as a spectator at 1 or 2 of these conversations. You never wanna bring lots of people to a meeting but bringing 2 people is totally appropriate. One of you can focus on asking the questions, probably you. And the other, probably your skeptical co-founder can focus on taking notes. You might also decide that the note taker can jump in at key points if they feel like you’re going off track to help kind of coach you and correct you if you start to ask bad questions.

It doesn’t take a lot of time before the products people and I am a products person, I’m a programmer, so I’ve experienced this for myself. It doesn’t take long before they see the value, when they’re sitting in on a good conversation. Suddenly their eyes light up and they’re thinking, “Wow, these answers that questions we’ve been arguing about in every board meetings for months.” Or, “Oh my gosh, we don’t need to build that feature that was gonna take us a month.” And once they’ve seen the value first hand, they suddenly become an evangels of the process instead of being a credit of it.

The prep conversations are not a long, involved thing. Your reaction is probably enough to what your learning should be. A little bit of prep goes a long way. Don’t bog down the team by spending hours and hours on it. But you do need to do a little bit of it and it need to return into it fairly regularly, whenever your learning changes. I always liked a weekly tempo buy if you that’s too much for your team then so be it. The one and critical question you have to answer before a group of important conversations is: what do we really want to learn from these people?

Rule of thumb: If you don’t know what you’re trying to learn, you shouldn’t bother having conversation.

Reviewing after a meeting

After a conversation, you wanna review your notes with the team and update your beliefs and then update your 3 big questions as you need to.

The goal of the note review is to move the raw data out of your head and into your entire team’s head. So what you’re not doing is telling them your conclusion. You’re not saying: Hey, I just had a bunch of meetings with these potential customers and they all love it or they all think we should do it this way. That’s telling your team the conclusion. What you wanna do is walk them through the actual words that were spoken, not the entire meeting transcript because that’s a bit tedious. But the important quats, the important exerts, say, “they got really emotional here and they said, I would do anything to never use Exell again. It is the worst part of my existence.” That’s a great quote and it’s tagged up within an motion. They hate it. And then they said, but our IT guys won’t let us use any cloud apps. It drives me crazy. Well, that’s interesting, too. That’s a great quote. That’s an obstacle. It shows why they haven’t adopted one of the competitors products already.

So by walking through these key moments in the conversation with the rest of your team, it’s as if everyone was there with you. And then you can all talk together about what this means. You can draw your conclusions from it. I like to do this once per week in a meeting where everyone on the team who has had customer contact walks through all of the important quotes and things that they learned to share us the raw data with the rest of the team. Then we essentially throw away the notes.

Some people advise doing audio recordings of every conversation or doing full transcripts and emailing them around or saving them in the dropbox. I have found that that does not work because it takes too long to review. Realistically, no one is gonna listen to an audio recording of the meeting. The meeting was probably boring enough the first time. You certainly don’t want to listen to it a second time. And if you’re not gonna listen to it, then the recording doesn’t matter. So I like the excerpts of key quotes tagged up with emotions. For me that’s the best balance of accuracy of the raw data and also being time efficient for everyone else. And I like patching them into the weekly meeting so that we’re not constantly interrupting each other, each time we finished talking to a customer.

Who should show up

Everyone on the team who’s making big decisions, including the tech decision should be involved in at least some of the customer conversations. The tech folks don’t need to learn how to lead them if they don’t want to. I personally did, and I am really glad I did, but you don’t have to. You just have to occasionally go and spectate so that you’re not completely buffered from what the customers care about.

Meetings go best when you’ve got 2 people or 1 person at them, 2 is ideal. One takes notes, as mentioned, while the other talks. If you sent more than two people, it starts to feel like a focus group or a gang and the customer gets a little bit intimidated with the audience, so they’ll tend to put their shields up and you won’t get as honest of a conversation out of them. If you’re shy and if you don’t have a cofounder what you can do is call in a favorite with a friend who is more capable or comfortable in the situation and asked a friend to take the lead. Do a little bit of prep with them, may be return the favor some way by helping them with their product, for example. Or you both go to each other’s meetings, however you want to work at. You play the more passive role of the notetaker until you’re comfortable. As you get comfortable start chiming in with the occasional question and your friend kind of knows that there gonna back down as you step up until you’re comfortable taking the lead. This is like a peer-to-peer version of sales coaching and it works really well. You can prep together. You can help each other out. If you’re a student, a freelancer, a solo entrepreneur, I’d really recommend it.

You can’t outsource or hire someone to do the customer learning for you. Maybe it works occasionally if you have the world’s most incredible consultant, who you completely trust, but in general it almost always fails. When a hired gun brings you bad news, they come in and they say, “hey, I talked a bunch of customers. It turns out no one cares at all and your entire business is doomed and you should probably shut it and go home.” Properly assimilating that feedback is really difficult and as an entrepreneur, it would almost be irresponsible to believe them. You can’t just shut down your business based on what some random consultant says, but also can you keep going in the face of that? You kind of tend to go back out into all of the learning yourself just to prove it. So why not do it yourself to begin with.

Consultants are used for kind of checkbox customer learning when you want to prove to someone that you did a process but you actually don’t care about what you’re hearing. So if the learning matters you want to do it yourself. If it feels like too much of a time cost, just refer to this book, try to bring down the time cost, make it more casual and bring up the quality of information by focusing on important questions and good data.

How to write it down

Taking good notes is the best way to keep your team and your investors and your advisors in the loop about what you’re learning from customers, plus notes make it harder to lie to yourself. And when months later you decide to adjust the business’s direction. You can return to your notes instead of having to do a whole new set of customer interviews. When possible, as mentioned, you want to write down exact quotes. I wrap my quotes in question mark, so I know it’s verbatim. I also use summaries if I need to. It’s kind of a business shorthand. You leave out all the unimportant stuff and you just grab the most crucial few words and you throw in a motion on there: a smiley face :-) a frowny face :-( so that you can remember the context.

After the meeting, you can transfer it into a more permanent storage system, if you’d like. You can go through and filter your notebook along with who you are talking to and what the date was. Or you can just talk to your team, walk them through what you wrote down and then discard it. That’s up to you.

The full set of symbols I use and I acknowledge that this is slightly silly to talk through on an audiobook when they are visual symbols but I’ll describe them anyway. I like to track a few different things. I like to track symbols about their emotional state, any background information they give me about their life and specific pieces of data and follow-up tasks. So, for each of these, I use a motto con and so I’m writing a few words in my notes plus a motto con. And combined it lets me rebuild the conversation very accurately with very little writing which lets me keep up with the conversation, even if I’m by myself.

So the emotions are things like excited, angry, embarrassed as an interesting one. For example, in industries like sustainability and security, customers know they ought to be doing a better job but they’re not and they’re embarrassed about that. And digging into their embarrassment can give you all sorts of interesting signals about why they haven’t solved the problem already and why they might not adopt your products. Some of these symbols about their life. If they mention a pain a problem or frustration, I use a little lightning bolt. If they mention what they’re trying to achieve, their goal or their job to be done, I draw a football goal. If it’s an obstacle, I draw a box. A workaround is a ben the arrow.

Our obstacle is that my goal is that I would love to be able to share documents more easily, but the obstacle is that the IT team won’t let us because they want a virus check and security check everything. And so my workaround is that I bring in my personal iPad, and I use that for my filesharing at work. If someone gives me background information about their industry, their business, I draw a little upward pointing arrow as a mountain, it’s the background of the photo. And these symbols are the bread-and-butter of my information about my customers. The pains, their goals, their obstacles, workaround some background information.

Sometimes people throw emotions in here as well. Like maybe to get real upset about the IT restrictions. Maybe they’re frustrated. Some of the follow-up specifics, I use a little checkbox if someone gives me a particular feature request or a purchasing criteria. As I draw that symbol, I’m also reminding myself: feature request, I need to dig underneath this. Why do they want it? How often would they use it? I need to ask them good follow-up questions about that. If they mention any financial figure, you can bet I’m gonna write that down exactly along with the $ sign or your choice of currency. This also can be information about their purchasing process. If they casually mention, of course, you need to talk to our lawyers and go through procurement, boom I’m writing that down. That’s super important and I’m gonna ask them more questions. Who else would I need to talk about? What’s the timeline on that sort of thing? Where would we need to get to in this deal for you to be comfortable, introduce me to them?

If someone mentions a specific person. Johnny would be pretty interested in this. I’m gonna write down Johnny and I draw a little person icon. At the end of the meeting, I’m gonna scan through my notes before I leave and I’m going to remind them about each person, you said Johnny might be relevant. When do you think would be the right time for us to get in touch with him? How does that work? This might be a great transition into asking for reputational commitment in the form of an intro. And for my own self, if there’s a follow-up task obviously just mark it with a star. Often you promise to send someone some more info or to help them out in some way. And in order to return the favor for this wonderful learning conversation that they’ve given you, you want to make sure that you make good on any promises to them.

Where to write it down

So I’ve already explained why I don’t like using audio recording. Even though customers are surprisingly happy to be recorded, it’s because no one will listen to the recordings on your team. So you need to write it down in a way that’s quick and easy to access. That’s the most important criteria. But there is some other practicalities and benefits. It’s nice if you put the note somewhere that they can be sorted, mixed and rearranged. For example, if you can look through your notes and pull out all of the problems that your customers have mentioned or all of the goals or all of the blockers.

One way to do this is to use cards, like very small index cards and to write one customer quote along with a symbol on each card. I use this for years and I love it. I had a giant shoebox full of all of my customer interviews for each project. And you can lay the notes out on the table, kind of workshop them with your team in this way. The downside is, it’s a bit weird and tedious and you need supplies. So something else you can do to get the same result is after your meetings, you transfer your notes into a spreadsheet, where you’ve got one column for who it was and the date, another column for the symbols. The emotion symbols are to show you what kind of background information it is, as we’ve just talked about. And then another column for the actual quote. This is obviously, then, easily sortable by problems or goals or obstacles, or by a particular customer conversation.

If you do end up taking your notes in nonideal places. I was once at a picnic where I found an incredible customer so I took all my notes on the back of paper plates. You just need to take the extra time afterwards to transfer them. If you’re keeping it casual and doing incognito conversations where people don’t even know that you’re talking to them about anything, then what you can do is you talk for a few minutes and then immediately afterwards, excuse yourself, go to a corner and jot down as best you can remember it. This is not ideal, but it is much better than nothing and it works well enough.

So what about taking notes on a laptop? Does that work? Well, kind of but you need to do it in a very specific way because putting a computer between yourself and your customer and glancing up and down between the two sends a very bad signal to the customer. It shows that you’re a bit distracted you not getting a connection, and it functions kind of like being on the phone. It has all the same problems where it makes the conversation feel businessy, everyone’s in a hurry to get it over with. You’re not building that personal connection. So if you’re going to use a computer, you have to be a perfect touch typist so that you never need to look at the screen. And what you’re gonna do is set the computer not in front of you between you and the customer, but set it off to the side, at a 45° angle where it’s not in the between you on the line. It’s out of the way, your shoulders are twisted, your typing off to the side and you’re able to maintain perfect eye contact with whoever you’re talking to. It still comes across as a bit weird but if it’s the only way that you can reasonably take notes then find. Just when you start doing it kind of tell the customer what’s happening, explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and ask their permission. Hey, I’m a super slow writer and what you’re saying is really important to me. Is it cool if I take some notes on my computer while we’re talking? I’m still super focused on what you’re saying. And they’ll say, yeah, I get it. That’s fine. You can do that but try to avoid ever looking down at your computer. You gotta trust in your touch typing skills to make that work properly.

Rule of thumb: Notes are useless if you don’t look at them and if you don’t share them with your team.

The process

Talking to customers is a tool, not an obligation. If it’s not gonna be helpful or if there’s some reason that you legitimately don’t think you should do it, then just skip it. I’m sure you’ve been on the receiving end of a half asked surveys sent out by some new start ups who just wants to take the box that they’ve tried to learn from customers, but there are better ways to waste your time and certainly better uses of your customers time.

You gotta start all your customer learning by figuring out what actually matters to your company. If you’re not doing that then you’re just going through the motions and you may as well not bother. So here’s some more warning signs that you’re just going through the motions instead of actually learning.

You’re talking more than your customer is. They’re complementing you or your idea and you’re accepting it. You’ve told them about your idea, you shown them the product but you don’t have clear next step or a commitment. You’ve gone to a meeting and you don’t have notes. You have notes but you haven’t looked through them or shared them with your team. You were talking to a customer and heard something that surprised you. It was an unexpected answer but it didn’t actually influence your idea at all. You went through a whole meeting and felt good about all of it and you didn’t ask a single question that was scary or with an answer that would actually threaten what you were doing. Or you’re having a conversation but you aren’t actually sure what you’re trying to learn or why it matters.

The persistent presence of any of those problems would suggest that you’re doing something wrong and wasting everybody’s time. So here are the steps I go through to keep on track. Feel free to ignore or tweak this as needed because obviously processes are very company specific and you’re gonna want to make your own. But this is as lightweight as I’ve been able to get it and hopefully it will reduce rather than increase the amount of time that you need to spend on conversations. So before a batch of conversations, these the things I do.

If I haven’t yet, I choose a focused findable customer segment by slicing it as thin as I can. Within my team, I sit down and we talk about what really matters, what are our big learning goals for this week, for right now. If we’re far enough along, we decide on the next steps and commitments that I would ask for a customer if the conversation is gone really well and it seems like they’re keen. So, for the things you’re trying to learn, if we can learn them through conversations, I would then figure out who I can talk to. Or where I can go where my customers will also be so that I can surprise people. And if any of the questions could be answered more quickly in another way, with a desk research, with an MVP, with a call to an industry expert, then I’m gonna do that first so I don’t waste my time setting up a customer meeting for it.

During the conversation itself, I’m gonna frame the conversation so that they know it’s not about sales. I’m gonna use very few wizards properly asked, vision framing weakness pedestal ask, so that they know it’s about learning and that they can really help me. Throughout the conversation as much as possible, I’m gonna keep it casual. We don’t need formality. This isn’t the big interview. It’s not a focus group. I’m just trying to talk to you about your life. I’m gonna ask good questions which pass the Mom Test. Not every question is perfect and that’s okay but I’m gonna try to always bring it back. I’m gonna deflect the complements. I’m gonna anchor the fluff. I’m gonna dig beneath your signals. When you get emotional about anything, I’m gonna ask you more. Why is that so exciting? Why does that upset you so much? Wow, this seems like a big deal. Dig beneath the signals.

I’m gonna take good notes. And if relevant, if you seem happy, I’m gonna give you the chance to accept or reject some kind of commitment, some kind of next step. I’m not being pushy. I’m not try to trick you. I’m just try to figure out, hey are you really a customer? Or you’re just an excited person as being nice to me.

After my conversations, usually at the end of the week, with my team, we’re all gonna sit down together. We’re gonna go through the notes and the key customer quotes. If it’s relevant, I’m also gonna transfer my notes into permanent storage somewhere. As a team, if the customer said anything crazy, or we’re starting to hear a lot that we’re chasing the wrong direction, we’re gonna update our beliefs and maybe we modify our plan, change our business model even, tweak our product. And in any case, now that we’ve answered some of our questions, we’re gonna have a new set of questions. So we’re gonna plan our questions for next week.

This process doesn’t take a lot of time and maximum it’s a meeting on Monday and a meeting on Friday. A preparation meeting and a review meeting. In many cases you could do the whole thing in one meeting, in a single hour. So it’s not like a massive overhead to what you’re already doing. The goal is twofold. Firstly, to ensure that you’re spending your time well by attacking the questions which really matter. And making use of the brains of the entire team and not just your own brain. The second goal is to spread any learning you get throughout your entire team as quickly and completely as possible. So it’s not just you making all the decisions, but rather it’s you making the whole team smarter so that you guys can then make your decisions together.

There you go. Now you know everything I know about how to learn from customer conversations. Use this process with the Mom Test. Keep it casual and make sure you push for advancement. And that will all help you get maximum learning in minimum time. But even if it goes wrong. Don’t worry so much. This stuff is a hands-on skill and you’ve gotta forgive yourself and give yourself the chance to make mistakes to learn how to get better at it. If you’re trying to learn how to skateboard, you wouldn’t pick up a board for the first time and go straight down a half pipe or something, right? And if you fell over, even when you are trying something simple, you wouldn’t ride skateboarding forever. You would recognize that it’s something you need to practice and get better at and you’re gonna take your falls. And running proper customer conversations is the same way. You’re gonna make mistakes. It’s cool. Try to do your best. But don’t beat yourself up when he goes wrong. There are a lot of customers in the world. Even if you completely burn a couple bridges, it’s not the end of the world. You’re gonna learn from it, you’re gonna do better and those benefits are gonna compound and really move your business forward. It’s a great career scale. This is useful for salespeople but it’s also incredibly useful for tech people. You’re going to enjoy the benefits of learning the skill for the rest of your career.

This stuff is fast. The timescales of the process are important. The point is to make your business move faster, not slower. It doesn’t make sense to spend an entire week prepping for one meeting. Rather, you want to spend an hour and then go talk to some people. If you’re spending a lot more time than that on prep, you’re probably just stalling. You also don’t want to spend months doing nothing but customer conversations. Customer conversations and building your product should happen in parallel. The customer conversations help you figure out what you should be building and what’s the dead end. And then, as you build a little bit more, it opens up the next stage of customer conversations. You can learn more. You’ve got something to show to them. You’ve got better understanding about what you’re doing cause of what you’ve built.

When you’re doing it right, customer learning could feel like a whirlwind. You’re like, man I talked to so many people this week and I learned so much and that was so fun and I have so many more leads. And it’s very exciting and motivating and thrilling. It’s not an excuse for you to stop building your company. Some people get addicted to the theory. They get addicted to the idea of 100% removing all risk whatsoever, but that never happens. Risk is a spectrum. You know, it’s crazy to build your company a larger company with zero customer evidence because then you’re just gambling. You’re blind folding yourself and jumping off a cliff. But you’re also never going to get to hundred percent certainty. In a reality and what a market wants, it’s a moving target. It changes over time. It’s gonna change while you’re building your business so you get to good enough. You talked to some people. You feel like it’s good enough but then you still need to take your scary entrepreneurial leap.

So, as mentioned, I want you to think of customer conversations as a tool, not an obligation. This isn’t something that’s meant to slow you down, it’s a weapon you use when appropriate to unlock massive learnings for your business. It should speed you up. It should make you faster. It should be fun. It should be casual. It should be easy. The biggest mistake people make, apart from the obvious stuff about asking bad questions and getting massively biased data, Mom Test 101; but when they’re actually trying to do the process and they’re trying do it properly; the biggest mistake they make is to be way too formal with everything. They try to set up formal meetings. They try to have formal interviews. They try to ask formal questions. Formality introduces biases and formality also has an enormous time cost.

So start looking for these opportunities to keep it casual. The incognito conversations and taking advantage of serendipity. Once you get into the habit of looking for those opportunities, that’s where you see the enormous time gains. And that’s where it feels like customer learning is just falling into your lap for free instead of you having to really go and spend a lot of time gathering it.

Rule of thumb: Go build your dang company already. You’re going to do great.