The Mom Test is a short book on how to ask questions about your product. It is a must read for anyone who is building a product or a startup. The book is full of practical advice and is a great reference book to keep coming back to. I have tried to summarize the key points below. The key takeaway for me was the attitude shift that is needed to ask questions. We must seek understanding our users and their life and not validation of our ideas. All the advise in the book stands on this key mental shift.
Switching from pitching to learning
When we go in pitch mode, we sound desperate and people can smell it. Since most people are uncomfortable in offering bad news or criticism, they will often say things like “that’s a great idea” or “I would totally use it” or “I know someone who would love this”. These are all lies and they are not born out of malice but by our poor questions and behaviors. The zeroth law of user research is to be in the learning frame of mind.
According to Fitzpatrick, a good conversation process has the following steps
- Slice your customer base into as thin segments as possible - so you can answer who they are and where you can find them
- Write down your goals - what can be good possible next steps
- Vision-Framing-Weakness-Pedestal-Ask - this is a framing tactic. You must frame the conversation to discuss your vision about a particular problem and explain what stage you’re in. Show them your weaknesses or vulnerability about your solution and put them on a pedestal and say why you think their opinion matters. Finally, ask for help.
- Set up commital next steps - discussed in the last section
- Ask good questions - described in the next section
- Go through notes with team - all your learnings from the customers are relevant only if they are transmitted throughout your team
There are good questions and bad questions
While most of us can do with more user disussions than we already do, there are indeed some questions that we can avoid asking.
These are some bad questions.
- Do you think its a good idea? - this is loaded and makes you want to hear self indulgent noise which you can do without.
- Would you ever buy something that lets you do X? - forces them to wax lyrical about a hypothetical future.
- How much you pay for X/would you pay X for Y? - this has some benefits but it should never be framed this way.
These questions below are absolutely worth trying out.
- How do you do X or can you show me? Another version would be “talk me through the last time x happened”.
- How much does it cost you? or how much does that matter (implications) - this is a better way to understand their willingness to pay.
- Why do you care about this problem or why does it even matter? Helps understand actual customer goals and not their idea of what it solves.
- What else have you tried?
- Who else should I talk to?
- Did I miss anything or should I have asked you to anything specific?
Some things to keep in mind while coming up questions
- Ask questions that can potentially break or make the business. Don’t be afraid of scary questions or shrinking from legal issues.
- Welcome bad news. In fact seek out information that can kill your idea. The sooner you get to that, the faster you will be able to fix it or move on to the next idea.
- Spot the lukewarm response and dig deeper. Don’t let people get away with vague answers. Ask them to be specific and give examples.
- Don’t zoom in too quickly. Don’t get too feature oriented or get into stack ranking needs before you’ve mapped the overall landscape through the customer lens.
The bottom line is to keep them talking and helping you understand them well enough to build something they will love.
Spotting bad data
Conversations, especially the ones that are not run with care, can lead to bad data that makes us wrongly confident. This is how bad data comes to us.
- Complements - if any complements come your way deflect and come back on track. get suspicious as soon as you hear a complement.
- Fluff - generic ramblings. Ignore and get to specifics.
- “I always or generally do X” - ask them what/how they did last X.
- “I would definitely buy that in the future” - don’t ask would you ever instead ask “do you see yourself doing..”
- Hypothetical maybes - people generally describe who they want to be and not who they are. They also complain unnecessarily. Asking for specifics on how they deal with X, can reveal if they are indeed being honest. Be wary of “someone should definitely build X” cause more often than not, X’s exist and people don’t necessarily care about it enough to find it.
- Their ideas - handle feature requests by understanding the true motivation behind it. It can either be a generic request of the type “this seems like a killer feature” but with no way to back it up with why its so important or crucial. Or it can be based on them having employed a workaround and knowing what it costs them in time/money. The latter is a good signal to build something.
Stop fishing for compliments, fish for committments
The best way to get people to commit to something is to ask them to do something small and low risk. This is called the foot in the door technique. Once they have committed to something small, they are more likely to commit to something bigger. This is called the consistency bias. This was a key insight in the book Objections as well.
A good customer meeting or a fruitful conversation ends in clear next steps. The best meetings end in committments which can include
- Pre-orders, paid pilot, deposits, etc.
- Introductions to other people - peers, friends, bosses.
- A public testimonal - they are ready to put their name on it
- A pilot
Poor conversations or meetings end in a vague committment and compliment. “This is great, keep me posted” or “drop me a note when you launch”. If you receive any of these, ask them what else would they like to see for you to move to next steps.
How to get conversations going
There are several ways to get busy with customer conversations.
- Organise events - become the centre of attention (“Office Mangers Happy Hour”)
- Teaching - free one on one consulting/webinars
- Blogging - write about your industry and get people to comment
- I am writing a book/PhD dissertation - people will always talk to you (related to the pedestal point)
- Advisory Board - get people to join your advisory board (everyone wants to help someone else, few know how to do it)
You can even cold email people to help but cold emails are tricky. You can use the same Vision-Framing-Weakness-Pedestal-Ask framework.
- Establish you’re an entrepreneur - state your high level vision (not the specific idea)
- Frame the expectations - tell them you’re not going to sell
- Show weakness - how you’re looking to get some questions answered
- Put them on a pedestal - why you think their experience matters to you
- Ask them for help - ask the “good questions” like the ones discussed above.
I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweet about startup life and practical wisdom in books.