Every interview after the first is easier. For that reason, I recommend doing a practice interview with someone you know who is not one of your target customers.

A practice interview won’t validate your hypotheses, but it will give you the opportunity to test the process and improve your interview techniques before moving on to real subjects.

The practice interview can also be helpful if you already have a product and customers. Sometimes you’ll need greater sensitivity when talking about hypothetical ideas with people who’ve already written you a check, and it helps to walk through that in advance with someone who understands (i.e., a colleague, not the customer).^[39]

Who should you interview for this dry run? While your practice interviewee doesn’t need to meet any particular criteria, it’s a good idea to choose someone who isn’t too closely related to your idea. It can be challenging to keep a straight face if you interview your partner or best friend. A more distant coworker, or a nonstale LinkedIn connection, may be a better choice.

At Yammer, my team often tests interviews on new hires who aren’t yet familiar with the interviewer or the product. No special instructions are needed; we just tell them to answer the questions based on their own experiences or opinions. After the interview, we ask them for feedback on the interview itself. That’s a good idea, no matter who you choose for your practice interview.

You might wonder, “What about making an audio recording of my interviews?” If you’re thinking of recording, you may be worried that you can’t write or type quickly enough to capture verbatim comments, or that the conversation will feel awkward because you are writing instead of making eye contact with your interviewee.

Here are some pros and cons of recording the audio of your interviews:

Pros:

Cons:

The right approach is the one that helps you run effective interviews. You’ll probably want to try both ways to figure out which you prefer.

The format of your interviews may influence how you decide to capture notes. I conduct most of my customer development interviews over the phone, where no one can see that my eyes keep flicking back to my laptop screen. However, I don’t feel comfortable typing into a laptop during a face-to-face interview. While working on this book, I’ve discovered that I can no longer write by hand fast enough to capture verbatim quotes. I just don’t write by hand often enough to maintain that speed!

Whether you record your conversations or take manual notes, though, you’ll need to spend a few minutes after each interview synthesizing the highlights. If you leave your notes untouched and come back several days later, it won’t matter whether they’re three pages of handwriting or 30 minutes of voice recording—either will be unapproachable!

Taking notes during customer development interviews requires something that might at first seem strange. I want you to forget everything you know about note-taking from school or from meetings.

If you take notes in that style, you’re wasting your time. When you take notes in a lecture or during a meeting, you summarize. You make deliberate choices to omit some points, condense others, and translate some of what you hear into what you think the speaker was actually trying to say. If you’re taking notes in a work meeting, you may have to share them with a wider audience and sanitize or contextualize what you write accordingly.

When you’re doing customer development, you don’t know what’s important yet. You won’t know what’s important until after you’ve completed a number of interviews.

It’s critical to capture as much information as possible—in high-fidelity, with details, emotion, and exclamation points. If your interviewee says, “Using product X is literally the worst part of my entire week,” that is not the same as “Customer doesn’t like product X.”

Obviously you can’t write down every word. (You probably don’t want to, either; at some point you have to go back and read all these notes.) As a guide, remember that you’re using what you learn to validate hypotheses and find out more about your target customers’ pains. You need the most detail when the interviewee says:

When you hear any of these things, mark them emphatically in your notes. Circle them, bold them, or highlight them to ensure they stand out later. If you’re recording the audio of the interview, write down timestamps when any of these interest points occur so that you can easily reference that portion of the conversation later.

People often ask, “Why is emotion so important? What if the person is just complaining about something unrelated to my product idea?” Emotion—and by that, I mean complaining, anger, enthusiasm, disgust, skepticism, embarrassment, frustration—is prioritization. If you want to know what’s important to someone, don’t ask them for a list: you’ll hear what they intellectually think ought to be important to them. Instead, listen for emotion when they talk. Those are the areas of opportunity. Even if what they are saying seems unrelated to your product idea, it will help you flesh out a greater understanding of your target customer.

Another note-taking challenge is that every conversation flows differently. (If your interviews don’t, you aren’t letting customers drive the conversation enough.) But you’ll eventually need to be able to compare across dozens of conversations. You can make this easier by using a template for taking notes for each interview.

Your template should be flexible enough to work for a variety of conversations, but structured enough to ensure you cover the most critical three or four questions with each interviewee. I’ve also found it useful to include some reminders to myself about what to do and what not to do on my template (see Figure 5-1).

Figure 5-1. My interview template, which has a few of my most commonly asked questions, with reminders to myself on the right (because I typically do phone interviews, I can type directly into the template)

Familiarize yourself with the person you’re about to talk to. If you’re targeting someone in the workplace, look at her job title, the type of company she works for, and the industry she’s in. If you’re targeting a consumer, look at whether she’s single or married with kids, suburban or urban, tech-savvy or not. Take a minute to put yourself in her shoes and think about the types of things she’s likely to think and worry about.

During your conversation, you’re likely to make ad hoc references or give examples. Your interviewee will feel more comfortable, and be more willing to talk freely, if he can relate to those references.^[40] (For example, a single guy who lives in the city is less likely to relate to a reference about shuttling kids around in an SUV.)

Don’t forget the really mundane. Use the restroom. Get a drink of water. Have extra pens and paper on hand. Your phone should be charged and silenced. If you’re typing, remove all distractions. Close your IM client, your browsers, your email, and get rid of any other potential distractions. (I usually disable my WiFi.) Get your note-taking template in front of you and get ready to start writing or typing!

As you dial your interviewee’s number or wait for her to arrive, you probably feel a bit nervous and unsure about what to expect. So does the person you’re about to interview.

Most people have never done anything like a customer development interview before. Even if they’ve participated in usability testing or traditional marketing focus groups, those follow quite a different format. Usability testing and focus groups have more structure and moderation. Both are typically oriented around an existing product, service, or prototype. Because you kept your initial interview request brief, your interviewee isn’t entirely sure what to expect.

It’s your job, in the first minute of your conversation, to do three things:

The beginning and the end of the interview are the only times where I recommend that you rehearse what you’re going to say in advance. Having a script for the beginning of your interviews helps you to sound confident and set expectations appropriately. A good opening script for a phone interview might look like this:

Sounds pretty basic, but there are some very specific elements that make this an effective opening. Every time I’ve deviated from these, or worked with a company that has, the quality of responses goes down. Those elements include:

As long as you preserve those elements, you can (and should!) adapt your opening to fit your personal speaking style and your company.

You’ve just finished your opening script and explained how vital it is that your interviewee—the expert—share everything he knows. Here’s what will naturally happen: your interviewee doesn’t want to dominate the conversation (even though you just encouraged him to do so!). He’ll say one or two sentences and stop.

How do you convince someone to violate our ingrained social norms and keep talking?

You shut up and listen. You say your opening bit, you ask the first “Tell me about how you...” question, and you wait. Look at the clock and don’t say another word for a full 60 seconds (Figure 5-2).

Figure 5-2. Wait a full 60 seconds after you ask the first question

Sixty seconds is a long time. You will want to say something to break the silence or move to the next question. Don’t. By jumping in too quickly, you signal that the interviewee has said enough and that you’re not interested in hearing more. He will take your attempt to break the silence as an indicator that one or two sentences is the right level of detail and will start giving you short, shallow answers. That’s not what you want at all!

Instead of talking, let the silence happen.

I recently saw a tweet that suggested literally hitting the mute button on the phone to prevent yourself from talking. I actually don’t recommend this: it’s noticeable when the other end of the line goes completely silent, and it sounds like a dropped call. You don’t want your interviewee to interrupt themselves to ask, “Hello? Are you still there? Did I lose you?” Keep the subtle sounds of you breathing and listening audible.

If you remain quiet, most people will then continue to talk,^[42] and it’s usually those details—not the summary—that contain the useful insights. (If your interviewee doesn’t start talking again, or seems genuinely uncomfortable, you may need to provide a verbal nudge. Typically you won’t need to.)

Forcing him to keep the conversation going in the first exchange sets the tone. You really meant what you said; you are mostly going to listen. Now your interviewee knows that it’s OK to give long, detailed descriptions.

After the initial “tell me about how” question, your interview can be as freeform as needed.

You may find yourself asking each question on your list in turn or spending 10 minutes on a single question because your interviewee can’t stop talking about it.

The most important thing is to keep your interviewee talking and subtly encourage her to go into more detail about the things that she gets most excited about.

Keep asking questions to draw out as much detail as possible. You want to encourage longer answers. The best prompts are open-ended and don’t lend themselves to a yes-or-no response:

Asking this type of follow-up question doesn’t just keep the person talking; it can entirely change the tone of his response. Read this exchange from an early interviewee with KISSmetrics, a web analytics company:

This seems like an uninterested customer. He’s telling me he already has a solution to his pain point. He isn’t expressing frustration. He isn’t complaining about things he can’t do.

Time to move on to the next question? Not so fast. You’ll want to ask at least one follow-up question to make sure that there’s nothing interesting here:

The open-ended nature of these interviews means that your interviewee will spend some time talking about seemingly unrelated problems or situations. “Why is he talking about this instead of what I want him to be talking about?” you’ll wonder.

That’s a question worth exploring. Why is this person talking about a seemingly unrelated topic? If a person brings up a topic, it’s probably because it’s important to him. Maybe it represents a more pressing problem that you should be solving instead. It could be a necessary precondition, something he needs to worry about before he can think about your idea. It might reveal that this person is not the person you should be talking to.

Instead of redirecting the interviewee back to your question, I recommend taking at least a minute or two to explore the tangent. Some questions that may be useful are:

If it’s clear that the interviewee devotes more time and priority to the tangent, you may ask him to refer another interviewee. (Please don’t insult the interviewee by asking if there is someone better to talk with—you never know when you may want to revisit a past interviewee.) Here’s one way to make that request:

Even if you initially think that a tangent is unimportant, you won’t really know for sure until you’ve talked to enough people to start seeing patterns. When I did customer interviews for KISSmetrics, many people veered away from talking about analytics to complain about how difficult it was for them to do qualitative user research and surveys. When the first person said this, it seemed like an outlier. Once five more people talked about the same problem, and then more, it was clearly an opportunity. (One of my more popular lines in conference talks is “One person might just be a nutcase. Ten people are not all nutcases.”) That tangent was the inspiration for a whole new product! KISSinsights, now called Qualaroo, powers on-site surveys and targeted interactions for thousands of companies.

Typically a tangent will run its course after two or three minutes and you can simply ask the next question. If not, you can simply interject to apologize and say that you want to make sure that there is time to get to the next question.

Some people will evade your questions and say, “Here’s what I want.” They’ll start listing features and options; I’ve even had people start sketching mockups in coffee shop meetings!

On the surface, this sounds amazing: a prospective customer practically writing your product requirements for you. The truth is different: thousands of failed products are created based on what customers said they wanted. You’ve probably worked on at least one of them in the past.^[45]

You don’t need to learn what customers say they want; you need to learn how customers behave and what they need. In other words, focus on their problem, not their suggested solution.

What if the interviewee starts asking specific questions about your product? Especially if she is highly motivated to solve this problem, she will be eager to see what you’re building.

You may or may not have a product in progress, but in any case, it’s best not to show the interviewee your product or talk about specifics until the very end of your conversation. Better yet, schedule a separate interview for talking about solutions.

Why is it a bad idea to show your product at this stage? The reason is that images or tangible specs will taint everything that your interviewee was going to say. Instead of thinking about how she works and her frustrations, she will subconsciously tailor her answers based on your product. (This is a variation on the “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” principle.)^[47]

If an interviewee is eager to see your product or visuals first, you can explain that you’d like to hear about her experiences and frustrations first so that she’s not influenced by what already exists. You can always offer to schedule a follow-up demo in the future, but once you’ve shown something, you’ll never be able to go back and get pure feedback from this person.

If you don’t have anything to show yet, it’s OK to say so. You can say something like “We are hoping to solve the problem of people managing their personal finances, and in order to do that really well we need to first understand exactly what people are doing today and where they are struggling.”

You asked for 20 minutes of a person’s time, but sometimes you’ll find that he is still talking enthusiastically past that time. (That’s why I don’t recommend scheduling back-to-back conversations every half-hour.) Even if your interviewee seems eager to continue talking, he may have lost track of time. You don’t want to inconvenience him by inadvertently making him late to his next commitment. If you near the 30-minute mark and he is still talking, it’s a good idea to gently interrupt with “Excuse me—I’d love to continue the conversation, but I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”

I don’t recommend extending interviews much beyond the 45-minute mark, no matter how enthusiastic you both are. You’ll get diminishing returns and risk using up that person’s goodwill. A better approach is to request permission to contact him with follow-up questions.

It is tempting to try and cram as much as possible into your initial conversation. What if this is the only opportunity you get to talk to him? It’s counterintuitive, but doing one favor for you actually primes people to do a second one. Have you ever been asked for a small charitable donation, and then been hit up for a larger one later? That’s the foot-in-the-door technique, and it’s much more effective than asking you for the big bucks in the first interaction.^[48]

Offer to schedule a second interview once you’ve learned more or have some early sketches to show. Remember, some of the target customers you interview early on are likely to become your future evangelists—even if what you end up building is completely different from where you started.

Just as the first minute is critical to get someone talking, the last minute is critical to building a relationship with her. You don’t want the interviewee to regret having given you the last 20 to 30 minutes of her time.

It’s your job, in the last few minutes of your conversation, to do three things:

Whatever you say, it must be personal and genuine. This isn’t the conclusion of a business transaction; it’s the end of a conversation with someone you probably want to talk to again in the future. Here’s what I say, but make sure what you say works with your personal speaking style:

This is another application of the foot-in-the-door technique. By asking people if you can contact them again, you’re reinforcing their role as the expert. You’re asking them for a favor, but it feels like a compliment.

I frequently come back with follow-up questions, either later in the process when I think I’ve spotted a pattern and need some more data points, or once I have a minimum viable product to show the customer.

The process of interviewing should be every bit as iterative as the process of building your product. In other words, you won’t get it right the first time. You’ll need to keep assessing what you did and how well it worked, and fine-tuning the areas that didn’t work as well as you would have liked.

While the interview is still fresh in your mind, take five minutes to ask yourself or your note-taker the following questions:

If you don’t run through this checklist immediately after the interview, you will forget a lot of vivid detail. You’ll always have your notes, but that subjective feeling of what went well and poorly fades quickly.

This is also a good time to focus on the subjective qualities of your conversation. What was the dominant emotion this person expressed? Anger, giddiness, frustration, shame, curiosity, excitement? If you had to summarize the tone of the conversation in one sentence to a friend, what would it be? I’ll focus more on analyzing your notes in Chapter 6, but this isn’t about analysis—it’s about your gut feeling. Jot it down now before it fades away.

Take some time before your next scheduled interview to adjust the areas that need improvement. Then start the process all over again!

Now it’s time to stop reading. Put the book down and go talk to a customer.

We’ve covered the questions to ask, the techniques for getting people to talk, and the prompts that keep them talking. The only missing ingredient is you taking action. I’m watching you: don’t start reading Chapter 6 until you’ve done at least two interviews. Get out of the building!