What approaches are the most useful? What tools work best? What resources are needed? Who should do it? How much time should it take? What should it cost?
your customers? What are their problems? What job do they need to do? How do they solve this problem now? What tools do they use? Who do they turn to for help? Product hypothesis: How could a product improve their success? How could a product reduce their pain? Jot it down!
could send out a Google Form or a SurveyMonkey... But you don’t have time for that today. You need to interview at least 5 people today - during this session. But not your fellow attendees. You’re going to get out on the streets, or onto Skype, and talk to some people. You’ll have an hour - to find them, and talk to them.
they trying to do? What gets in their way? What costs them time or money? How do they currently solve the problem? What defines success? How eager are they for a solution? Where? Depends on your product, but really anywhere - Starbucks, the mall, on the street, in a park, on a college campus. How? Together - don’t divide up the team too much. If you’re not asking questions, you’re observing, making notes, taking pictures, recording, etc.
help you stay focused - but it’s not a script. To start, you only need 8-10 questions. It serves two purposes: Start by validating your assumptions about who the customer is and how they behave. Then seek additional information that helps you make decisions about the product. After 3 people, prioritize your top 3 issues or questions. After 5 people, start asking new questions.
decisions - as a team! Are these really your customers? Is their problem really painful, or their desire really strong? Does it even exist? Are they really making decisions the way you thought? What do you need to change? What else do you need to learn?
to face or voice to voice without spending time & money to be there in person. You can also have shorter, more frequent calls; share a desktop to show stimulus; send files for them to view and vice versa; or, using Skype on a mobile device, get your participant to take you on a tour of their home or office. With 3rd party software, you can record the calls (audio and/or video) and save the calls directly to a Dropbox or other shared folder.
transform your iPhone or Android into pretty good video cameras - you can then upload your videos and photos directly from your phone to a Dropbox folder the team shares.
a notebook and then hit the mic icon to record answers after each question, or post photos of anything relevant to the interview, within the note itself. Notebooks are shareable amongst a team and searchable, making it easier to find specific themes or quotations.
and audio Transcripts of interviews Produced decks with designs based on user feedback Playlists of rough snippets in Dropbox Shared notes on Google Docs Photographed/ scanned user sketches
your decisions for you - that’s not their job. Don’t let the report be the end of your learning process - it’s just a way to memorialize what you’ve learned and provide a reference when you encounter similar issues again.
your recruitment criteria). 2pm-2:30pm: Hypothesize a solution - some features, benefits and pain relievers. 2:30-2:45pm: Write an interview guide. 2:45-3:45pm: #GOTB, talk to some people 3:45-4pm: Discuss and summarize what you’ve learned (1 thing you would change about your customer hypothesis and 1 thing you would change about your solution hypothesis) 4-4:30pm: Teams present
and early stage startups don’t usually have huge customer and prospect databases, but do need help managing and tracking their customers and deal flow. Most existing software is either too big and complicated for a small business owner or early stage startup to set up and use effectively. Those apps aimed at smaller businesses and startups focus typically focus on only one aspect of new biz - creating and tracking emails, creating group to-do lists, merging email contacts from mail & social platforms... But a lot of entrepreneurs just end up with a spreadsheet. How could we create a simple solution for these entrepreneurs?
vacation time - so they want to make it count. Today, travel sites assume you know where you want to go, when, for how long, what you want to do when you get there, and how much you want to spend. Which means people spend hours trying to figure out all of that before they can actually book their trip. How could a simple solution help these vacation planners?
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