The Mom Test - Rob FitzpatrickNotes
- The Mom Test
- You shouldn’t ask anyone whether your business is a good idea
- The measure of usefulness of an early customer conversation is whether it gives us concrete facts about our customers’ lives and world views
- We find out if people care about what we’re doing by never mentioning it
- If you just avoid mentioning your idea, you automatically start asking better questions. Doing this is the easiest (and biggest) improvement you can make to your customer conversations
- The Mom Test
- Talk about their life instead of your idea
- Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
- Talk less and listen more
- Don’t ask “would you buy a product which did X?”
- Ask how they currently solve X, how much it costs them to do so, how much time it takes.
- Talk through what happened the last time X came up
- “What would your dream product do?”
- The value comes from understanding why they want these features. You don’t want to just collect feature requests. The motivations and constraints behind those requests are critical.
- “Talk me through the last time that happened”
- Whenever possible, you want to be shown, not told, by your customers. Learn through their actions instead of their opinions.
- “Where does the money come from”
- Must ask in B2B. Leads to a conversation about whose budget the purchase will come from and who else within their company holds the power to torpedo the deal
- Good questions
- Why do you bother
- Understand their goals
- What are the implications of that
- Some problems don’t actually matter
- Talk me through the last time that happened
- Watching someone do a task will show you where the problems and inefficiencies really are, not where the customer thinks they are
- What else have you tried
- If they haven’t looked for a way of solving it already, they aren’t going to look for or buy yours
- How are you dealing with it now?
- It’s rare they will tell you how much they will pay but they will often show you what it’s worth to them.
- Where does the money come from?
- Who else should I talk to?
- Is there anything else I should have asked?
- The questions to ask are about your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals
- You aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is and in return they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build
- Avoiding Bad Data
- There are three types of bad data
- Compliments
- Fluff
- Generic claims (I usually, I always, I never)
- Hypothetical maybes (I might, I could)
- Future-tense promises (I would, I will)
- Ideas
- When someone gives fluff, anchor them back to specifics in the past.
- Ask when it last happened or for them to talk you through it
- Ask how they solved it and what else they tried
- When you hear a request, it’s your job to understand the motivations which led to it.
- You do this by digging around the question to find the root cause.
- Why do they bother doing it this way?
- Why do they want this feature?
- How are they currently coping without the feature?
- Questions to dig into feature requests
- Why do you want that?
- What would that let you do?
- How are you coping without it?
- Do you think we should push back the launch to add that feature or is it something we could add later?
- How would that fit into your day?
- Questions to dig into emotional signals
- Tell me more about that
- That seems to really bug you - I bet there’s a story there
- What makes it so awful?
- Why haven’t you been able to fix this already?
- You seem pretty excited about that - it’s a big deal?
- Why so happy?
- Go on.
- Asking Important Questions
- You also need to search out the scary questions you’ve been unintentionally shrinking from. Imagine the company has failed and ask why that happened. Then imagine it as a huge success and ask what had to be true to get there. Find ways to learn about those critical pieces
- You can tell it’s an important question when its answer could completely change or disprove your business
- Zooming in too quickly on a super-specific problem before you understand the rest of the customer’s life can irreparably confuse your learnings.
- When it’s not clear whether a problem is a must-solve-right-now or a nice-to-have, you can get some clarity by asking cost/value questions
- The risk is in your product, not in the customer
- Product risk - can I build it? Can I grow it?
- Customer/market risk - Do they want it? Will they pay me? Are there lots of them?
- If you have heavy product risk as opposed to pure market risk, then you’re not going to be able to prove as much of your business through conversations alone. The conversations get you to a starting point, but you’ll have to start building product earlier and with less certainty than if you had pure market risk
- Pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person
- Keeping it Casual
- Learning about customers and their problems works better as a quick and casual chat than a long, formal meeting
- Beyond being a bad use of your time and setting expectations that you’re going to show them a product, over-reliance on formal meetings leads us to overlook perfectly good chances for serendipitous learnings.
- Early conversations are fast. It only takes 5 minutes to learn whether a problem exists and is important
- A bit further along, you’ll find yourself asking questions which are answered with long stories explaining their workflow, how they spend their time, and what else they’ve tried. You can usually get what you came for in 10-15 minutes
- Commitment and advancement
- If you don’t know what happens next after a product or sales meeting, the meeting was pointless
- The three major currencies of conversation are time, reputation risk, and cash
- Whenever you see deep emotion, do your utmost to keep that person close. They are the rare, precious fan who will get you through the hard times and give you your first sale.
- Once you’ve learned the facts of your industry and customers and designed the solution, start pushing for advancement and commitments to separate dead leads from real customers.
- Choosing your customers
- Making a so-so product for a bunch of audiences isn’t quite the same as making an incredible product for one
- When your customer feedback is all over the map, you can’t extract value. Once you get specific you can learn.
- If you aren’t finding consistent problems and goals, you don’t have a specific enough customer segment.
- If you’re facing a generic or varied set of customer segments, you can use Customer-Slicing to pick a concrete starting point.
- Start with a broad segment and ask
- Within this group, which type of person would want it most?
- Would everyone within this group buy/use it, or only some?
- Why does that sub-set want it? What is their specific problem?
- Does everyone in the group have that motivation or only some?
- What additional motivations are there?
- Which other types of people have these motivations?
- You’ll have two sets of answers: the first is a collection of demographic groups and the second is a set of goals/motivations
- Some may still be fairly generic. Go back through the generic ones and keep slicing.
- Running the process
- When all the customer learning is stuck in someone’s head instead of being disseminated to the rest of the team, you’ve got a learning bottleneck.
- After a conversation, just review your notes with your team and update your beliefs and big three questions as appropriate.
- I also like to talk about the meta-level of the conversation:
- Which questions worked and which didn’t?
- How can we do better next time?
- Were there any important signals or questions we missed?
- You have to actively practice to get better. It’s a valuable skill for your team to have, so it’s worth spending a bit of time improving.
- Disseminate learnings to your team as quickly and as directly as possible, using notes and exact quotes wherever you can.