Customer Development Flashcards
What is customer development?
A tool for determining whether you are building the right thing, what the market will accept / reject. In a nutshell: The practice of establishing and maintining a continous line of communication with your customer for validating product ideas.
Who introduced the concept.
Steve Blank. Book “The four steps to epiphany.”
What are the four types of customer interviews? PS: Of course these can be mixed together.
1) Exploratory interview
2) Validation interview
3) Satisfaction oriented interviews
4) Efficiency interview
Provide two examples of questions you could use in an exploratory interview?
What is the worst part of your commute? (It’s an open ended question fishing for some kind of pain point and to understand the hierarchy of problems they have)
When you get lost driving, what do you do? (fishing for subsitutes for solving the problem).
What is the most common out of the 4 types of interviews?
Validation interview.
What is a validation interview? And what is important to remember?
Validation interview are very sensitive to bias, therefore you do not introduce your idea or new feature until the very end. Majority of time is spent talking around the problem solved by the feature.
Begin with a broad question, then narrow down. For example. Do you ever loose things? Do you ever loose your keys?
What are the two categories of questions in a validation interview?
Pre product questions and post product question. Before and after you’ve introduced the idea of the product or feature.
What is the purpose of satisfaction oriented interviews? And what are some example questions?
Understanding what part of the product provide value to the customer which do not.
What should we stop doing?
What is one thing I could do to make this better for you?
What are the purposes of efficiency interviews? What are examples of questions?
Who uses your products, how do they use it and when do the use it.
Are you using feature X, Y, Z?
How are you using X, Y, Z?
How easy is it for you to use feature X?
If you wanted to do X, how would you do it in our product?
Why is there an enormous difference between validating a new product versus improving existing products? What do you focus on in the two different stages?
Pre-product: Potential customers (pain points identification, validation)
Post-product: Existing customers (satisfaction, usability, and probably painpoint).
What are the 3 tenets of cold emailing?
1) Be short (4 - 7 sentences)
2) Be personal
3) Be valuable
Extra tips: You are not in sales, make them feel special - give them the VIP treatment. Or “you appear to be an expert on”, “I’m not trying to sell anything, but since you have expertise… I’d love to get your input on”
Important: At the end: Schedule a time. “Are you available on Wednesday 3:30pm?”
What are ways to find potential customers to interview (if you don’t already have a customer base)?
- Authors of articles
Why do you want to ask open ended questions?
Because we want people to go on tangents.
Why is it good to ask hypothetical questions?
It is not good practice to ask hypothetical questions.
What are the two motivations for using user personas?
1) Make it more convenient to discuss user behaviour (instead of looking at always looking at data).
2) Increase empathy towards users.
