How Product Managers Can Have Better Conversations With Customers
Lessons and Insights from ‘The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers’ by Rob Fitzpatrick
“The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers…” is a practical how-to guide that allows you to properly evaluate your current or next business idea. Rob Fitzpatrick, the author, gives us all the tools we need to talk to customers, navigate through the noise, and learn what people really want. The Mom Test will basically teach you how to ask good questions, so you can prevent people from lying and throwing fake compliments about your proposed solution/feature.
The Core Idea of The Mom Test
You shouldn’t ask people whether your business idea is good. It’s a dumb question because people will lie to you. After all, they don’t want to hurt your feelings — especially your mom. Instead of talking about the concept you want to turn into a business, ask people about their lives and about their experiences. Ask questions related to the problem you are trying to solve with your idea. This way you’ll gather enough data, iterate on your business venture and create a meaningful product people will actually want to buy.
While the book is primarily targeted at individuals who are still trying to define their solution to a specific problem, much of the advice in the book can be applied to customer conversations at later stages in the company’s maturity.
Ultimately, your goal a product professional is to learn about your customers’ problems, cares, constraints, and goals.
Having an Insightful User Interview
one of the items on “The Mom Test” focuses on asking questions about specific actions in the past instead of talking in generalities. The author describes three types of “fluff” that you should avoid by anchoring them back to specifics in the past.
- Generic claims (I usually, I always, I never)
- Hypothetical maybes (I might, I could)
- Future-tense promises (I would, I will)
To redirect the conversation, the author recommends to
- Ask when it last happened or for them to talk you through it
- Ask how they solved it and what else they tried
While it’s great for the customer to describe the situation, ideally, you want the customer to perform the task in front of you so you can see where the problems and inefficiencies are and not rely on the customer’s opinions. Some user researchers recommend having an activity planned during the session to facilitate this type of conversation.
Examples of Bad and Good User Research
Bad Questions
- “Do you think it’s a good idea?” Opinions are worthless.
- “Would you buy a product which did X?” Anything involving the future is an over-optimistic lie.
- “How much would you pay for X?” People will lie to you if they think it’s what you want to hear.
- “Would you pay X for a product which did Y?” If you’re far enough along, is to literally ask for money. If you have the deposit or pre-order in hand, you know they were telling the truth.
Good Questions
- “Why do you bother?” You are shooting blind until you 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 ways of solving it already, they’re not going to look for (or buy) yours.
- “How are you dealing with it now?” While it’s rare for someone to tell you precisely what they’ll pay you, they’ll often show you what it’s worth to them.
- “Where does the money come from?” In a B2B context, it’s a must-ask. It 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.
- “Who else should I talk to?” If you’re onto something interesting and treating people well, your leads will quickly multiply via intros.
- “Is there anything else I should have asked?” People want to help you, but will rarely do so unless you give them an excuse to do so.
Again, you aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.
Finding conversations
Now you know everything about talking to your customers. But how do you find them? There are several options to find them:
- Cold calls: Cold e-mail or call random people and ask if you can talk to them.
- Use random situations: You are at a party and hear that somebody is complaining about your problem? Talk to him and ask some questions.
- Use an excuse: Be a bit sneaky and don’t talk about your goal instead find an excuse to talk about another issue and slight slowly into your conversation. Do you want to talk to an investor about your stock analyzer? Maybe ask about some stock tips.
- Go where your customers are: You want to build something for a specific group like crypto traders? Go to crypto meetups!
- Landing Pages: Launch a landing page and try to get as many conversations started as possible. If somebody is singing up talk to them!
You can do it also the other way around. Bring the customers to you:
- Organize meetups: Meetups are an easy way for finding customers & gaining instant credibility.
- Speak & Teach: If you’re a good speaker you can find many customers as well.
- Industry blogging: If you blog in that certain industry you can find a relevant audience and talk to them.
Most of these customers will be cold-called above. They often don’t know you (except for your online presence). Normally, you get way better results if you get a warm intro. Try to get introduced to many people by:
- Ask your friends. You need a certain contact, just ask if anybody knows anybody in this area.
- Industry advisors. If you have any former advisors or mentors ask them to help you.
- Universities. If you’re still a student ask your professors. Professors have endless contacts to the industry
- Investors. You can ask VCs or smaller investors for some contacts in this area.
Choosing your customers
You often find yourself having too many different options, ideas, and customers to focus on. You need to focus on specific ones. This is possible with different mechanisms:
- Customer segmentation: Segment your customers by finding consistent and common problems and goals they have.
- Customer slicing: Slice your segment into smaller groups. Look at the subsets and the commonalities and differences. If you find them put them into another sub-group.
Framing the meeting
Now you have the skills to talk to the customer and found the customer. How do you want to frame the meeting now? We already saw that we should keep it casual. But we also want to have an efficient meeting and don’t waste the time of the customer. The format Rob suggests looks like that:
Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask
- You want to solve problem X with your vision Y
- You are currently in stage XYZ (prototype on an app)
- Show your weakness and why you need help
- Show why they can help (research them before)
- Ask for explicit help
If possible do your meeting in person.
How Product Managers Can Respond
Responding to Feature Requests
Customers will always try to suggest features that they think could solve their problem and should be added to the product. When this happens, it’s your job to understand the motivations which led to it.
The author has a couple of follow-up questions to help dig into the underlying motivations behind the feature request.
- 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?
I thought these were pretty handy to have. In an organization with dedicated sales and customer service teams, it’s helpful to give them this list as well so they can provide richer feedback if they get pitched specific features.
I also thought this quote was an interesting perspective on the relationship between the customer and the researcher.
You aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is and in return they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build.
Critical Assumption Verification
It’s also important to test the critical assumptions that your business is based on. If these assumptions are wrong, the company could fail. However, if they end up being correct, the company could be a huge success.
It’s important to learn about those assumptions early and often. If you find out you are heading in the wrong direction early enough, you may have enough resources to adjust course and recover.
According to the author,
You can tell it’s an important question when its answer could completely change or disprove your business.
As the product matures and you begin to add new features or address additional user problems, these assumptions could be more narrowly focused.
Customer Risk and Product Risk
Much of this book, and user research in general, is focused on discovering the customer’s problems, cares, constraints, and goals. Often, products get built that aren’t solving a real problem or the problem isn’t actually that significant to the user. But what about when the challenge isn’t discovering the problem, it’s building the solution?
The risk is in your product, not in the customer. The author defines each as:
- 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?
There are some implications if your business has more product risk than market risk. Since you’re not going to be able to prove as much of your business through conversations alone, you’ll have to start building products earlier and with less certainty than if you had pure market risk. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to do user research, it just means you’ll rely on other techniques like rapid prototyping to try and mitigate the technical risks associated with the business idea.
Customer Segmentation
This book focuses on engaging customers to better understand their pain points and problems to ensure that the solution will be valued by the end-user. However, different users will associate different levels of importance to the same problem depending on how it impacts their daily workflow. Some customers could have different problems altogether.
In order to focus the product on solving the right problems, the business will need to focus on a subset of potential users. If you are still having trouble finding consistent problems and goals, you likely need to further segment your customers.
The authors describe a Customer-Slicing process to further refine your customer segment. 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?
At the end of this process, you will have a set of demographic groups describing your new customer segment (who) and a set of goals and motivations (what).
B2C vs B2B
While the principles of user research are the same for B2B or B2C products, there are some unique aspects to selling a product to another company.
On the user research side, the authors recommend asking, “Where does the money come from?” This is intended to lead to a conversation about how the budget is allocated, whose budget would be used to purchase the product, and who else in the company would need to be involved to approve (or disapprove) the deal.
Since businesses usually require several individuals or departments to approve a purchase, you can judge the success of a meeting based on the company's willingness to engage additional stakeholders. A good sign is if the meeting ends with the company representative saying, “When can you come back to talk to the rest of the team?” This means they are interested enough in the product to put their reputation on the line and include their colleagues in future conversations.
Have Better Conversations with Your Customers
In the end, we want to conclude the most important information for you to apply these principles for yourself — so you can conduct better talks with your customers in the future and validate your ideas better:
- The talk has to be about your customer. Not about you or your idea. The motto is “Talking less, listening more”.
- The right questions are crucial.
- Ask for problems in the past and solutions (even ones that only have been tried without success). Don’t ask if your customer likes your idea and if they would buy it in the future.
- Don’t fish (unconsciously) for compliments. If you notice one, navigate the conversation away from you back to the customer.
- Don’t make the talk a pitch.
Use your team to evaluate the collected information and to conduct decisions from this information. With the power of your team, you can prevent fallacies.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
