What’s your system fo Customer Discovery interviews?
Hey all,
Last week, I did my first ever proper customer discovery interviews. I must admit it has been exciting and confusing at the same time.
To give you a bit of context - I'm researching how B2C startups do brand building and social media content creation.
Knowing what questions to ask and in what order was mindf@#k at first, and I quickly realised that I needed some system. So I developed this technique using Miro ( see screenshot attached ).
I created 5 key buckets that I wanted to explore:
- Find out more about the company and founder;
- On how they created their brand;
- On how they currently do content creation;
- Overall frustrations around the topic;
- Aspirations for the future.
I marked the "opening" questions in purple and "must ask" questions in red. So far, this has been working pretty well - I can organically jump from question to question, and the whole convo doesn't feel like an interrogation.
Then I rank all the answers in a similar fashion - I use the same buckets and post notes under each section (highlighting those answers that stand out).
It’s still early days, but it works.
I’m curious to know what tools and techniques do you use for your customer discoveries?
Also, if you are a startup founder and use online ads and social media content for your brand building, let me know. 😉 I would love to have a chat.
I sort of have a similar system for my startup, but I like to be more concrete. If the interviewee has to think about the response, you're probably not getting an honest answer.
My favorite question is "Describe to me X process." You can follow up about a specific detail they mentioned or left out to flesh out the picture.
After this, the hard part is analysis--a bunch of customers said some stuff, but what does it all mean?
Initially, my team just stored paraphrased notes in individual documents, but this made it extremely hard to make connections and really make sense of the customers' real problems and needs. It ended up making our decision-making discussions go in circles since each doc siloed us in one perspective.
So we moved to a clustering system using a diagramming tool online. After each interview, we would take the main pain points we saw in the customer's processes and write a little bubble for it. Each bubble had a shadow that got darker the more severe the problem was to that person. We also color-coded based on the type of person it was (since we were still narrowing down our target). As clusters built up and got visually heavy, this let us easily see customers' true needs.
For a while, we ignored the dark, heavy cluster in the middle. But we couldn't, and that's how we found our niche. It's a pretty effective system.
The only problem with it is that it's manual. Neither the method nor the software scales well, and they both fall prey to in-the-moment closed-mindedness about what relates to what, forcing you to choose a few pieces and shove everything into a bucket. It also can't handle longer form data, like interview notes.
Seeing all of what my team went through, that's actually our product, a tool that automatically finds and clusters customer discovery insights in a visual map. We're still early on and I would love to know what you think of our site.
Hope this helps!