Okay. So let's talk a little more nuts and bolts about how we're actually gonna get insights from talking to customers. As we said last time, you're gonna wanna ask the right questions. You're gonna wanna listen for answers that you didn't expect. You're gonna wanna think about the interviews before you do them, and do work on them after you've done them. And you're gonna want to extract the insights, that's your job. Customers don't necessarily have the insights. You're gonna have to tease them out. They don't always know them, in fact they usually don't know them and they certainly are not in a position to tell you. They may not even wanna tell you. But your job is to figure out what they know that they don't know they know. Number one tool that you have in your arsenal, if you're gonna try to get the right answers out of customers, is to ask them the right questions. There's good questions to ask, and there's bad questions to ask. The number one rule is always ask open-ended questions. An open-ended question is a question that is not a yes or no question. A question like, do you think that would be a good solution, is not an open-ended question. They're going to answer that, yes, or they'll answer it no, and that's the end of the interaction. An open-ended question is, what does a good solution look like to you? That gets them talking. That gets them thinking. That gets the trail going for you. So always ask an open-ended question. Never ask a multiple choice question. First of all, it's like a yes or no question in the sense that it's not open-ended. But second of all, it's gonna confuse them. If I asked you a question, take one of the above, A, B, C, or D, but not E. What would you do? You'd get confused, you'd stumble, you'd probably give the answer you thought I wanted to get. And the conversation would go nowhere. But never ask multiple choice questions. Big waste of time. The kinds of questions you wanna ask begin with who, what, why, and how. The old reporters questions. Reporters are always told to ask these questions, and the reason they're told to ask these questions is the same reason you should be asking these questions. It gets the story out of the people you're talking to. A who question is, who in your organization does that? Who approves that kind of purchase? Who do you have to go to to get sign off on this? Who else would like this product? Those are who questions. What questions? What does that process look like? What kinds of things do you have to do to demonstrate that the inspection is a success? What kinds of people do you have with you? What kinds of resources do you need? What, what, what, what, what? Why questions are fabulous. In fact, there's people talk about the five whys. If somebody gives you an answer to a question, you go, why? Then they give you an answer to that, you say why? Then they give you an answer again, you say why again. You can do it up to five times, and then, it gets kinda stupid. But why questions go into the heart of what people think they're doing when they're doing something. Which is exactly what you wanna get out of the customer discovery interviews. So always ask why questions and don't be afraid to ask more than one. Why do you guys do it that way? Oh, because administration has to sign off. Why does administration have to sign off on it? And then you could ask a who question. Who in administration has to sign off? Why them? Why are they the ones that are picked to do that? So, you could combine who and why, and get to the heart of the matter. And finally, how? Don't be afraid to ask a how question. People love to explain how they do things, and you don't know, you're an interviewer. How would you know the answer to these questions? How do you guys do that? So I don't understand, you buy them at ten and then sell them at eight? How do you make money on that? I don't get it. How do you get so many people in but get so few successes? How, how, how, how, how. Great question. And finally, drill down on two topics, always. Whenever anybody mentions money, drill down. That's who pays, how much, for what? So it's a who, how, and what question. So they mention that administration can only pay 500 bucks for things and you say, who decides that? How do they make that decision? What else do they spend money on? What's the rest of their budget look like? Any time there's a money question, you wanna go to the heart of that, because that's gonna lead you into the organization's inner-most secrets. That's how they do things. And whenever anybody mentions another customer type, which is something that we'll talk about next week, please follow up on that. A customer type is someone else who's involved in the decisions. So, somebody might be using a product but they might not be the one who approves it. When they say, so-and-so has to approve it, you say, oh, who are they? We have to get signoff from Fred about that. Who's Fred? What's Fred's role? Why does Fred do the signoff? Who does Fred report to? Blah, blah, blah. As you drill down into questions like money and other customer types, you get much more about the situation there. And always finish with two questions. What did I forget to ask? Because sometimes, there'll be something they're dying to tell you, and you just haven't asked it. Oh, we forgot to mention that we've had 14 accidents in the last year. And two of them were fatal. Very interesting information, and they wouldn't have mentioned it if you hadn't asked them, what did I forget to ask? And then finally, is there anyone else you think I should meet? You want to get at least two other referrals from everybody you talked to, otherwise you're gonna run out of referrals, and you'll have to get 100 customers to talk to in the next few weeks. So, always ask, is there anyone else you think I should meet? When you ask a question, sometimes the answers are not gonna be what you expect. So do not ask questions that are rhetorical. What's a rhetorical question? A rhetorical question is a question like I just asked. It's a question to which you already know the answer. Questions that begin with is, are, would, do you think, and should, tend to be rhetorical questions. And you wanna get around them. You wanna ask how questions, who questions, and go on with that. Follow the five whys, as I said before. Don't be afraid of silence. If the person answers the question, and they don't say anything, let the silence just kinda set there for a moment. Sometimes they'll say something else. They'll say, yeah, well that's what we use to do, but we haven't adopted the new system yet. Oh, what's the new system? Who brought that in? Why did you bring it in? And therefore you get more information. And always, if you can, have someone else taking notes. It's a big job actually steering the conversation, listening, paying attention, reflecting back, listening for unexpected answers, all this stuff. It's too much to ask that you can do all of that and take notes, too. Always have a partner with you taking notes if you can. And then, afterwards, how do you extract the insights? Facts are very interesting, but your goal is to uncover insights, and customers don't usually know their own insights. You have to find them. They can tell you how it feels to be them, but they can't generally tell you why. You need to discuss every interview afterwards and see what the insights are. What was he really saying there? Of course, these are the same questions that you ask them. Why did you say that? Why didn't you talk about the other stuff? What did he leave out? Why did he look a little distressed at that point in the conversation? Why did he look really happy when he talked about the new system they were gonna use? All those questions help you figure out what the insights are. You have to put them there. Interpretation of data is the core of customer discovery, and if you're not doing that, you're not gonna find out anything except what you already went in there to know. You turn data into information through pattern recognition, and that means a certain amount of statistics. One person says something, that's an observation. Two people say something, that's interesting. Three people say something, maybe you're onto something. If ten people say something, I think you're onto something deep. That's why you wanna do a lot of customer interviews simply to get to the heart of it. If you do 100 interviews and you spread them over five kinds of customers, you only get ten data points. That's not gonna help you much. If you could focus on one customer segment and get 100 interviews with all of them, that would get you a lot. That would get you some statistically significant information. So make sure you spend as much time interpreting the data as you are collecting it. And make sure that you're looking at things that are statistically or semi-statistically significant. You have to understand your own biases to do a good job as an interviewer. If you're weak on business, your tendency is gonna be to not ask business questions because you don't know anything about it. But that's the exactly wrong approach. You're exactly the person who should be asking business questions. If you're a techie, don't wallow in tech questions. They know and you know all about the tech stuff. Go and drill down on the business questions and ask them about those. That's where you're gonna get your insights. Similarly, if you're weak on tech, if you're a business kinda person, ask tech questions. You wanna find out why, how. Why do you use that process? Why don't you like it anymore? Why is it so expensive? And finally, you've gotta be aware of two kinds of biases that researchers know a lot, confirmation bias and small sample bias. Small sample bias we just talked about. It's pretty simple. If you get a small enough sample, like one person, that's not a trend. You need, [LAUGH] you need at least two to make a trend. No, you need a few to make a trend and you have to be careful how you weigh information that comes from small samples. The other confirmation bias probably deserves a little bit more discussion. Confirmation bias is simply finding what you'd expect to find. Our brains are looking for comfort in the known. It's something that we already know. So typically if you have a product, and your product you think is gonna solve a problem for a customer, you're gonna be looking for evidence that the product solves the problem for the customer, and you're gonna ignore evidence that tends to make you uncomfortable that disproves that. So you have to work hard against your own confirmation bias, cuz otherwise you're not gonna learn anything except your own preconceived notions. So these are the main points. Don't ask yes or no questions, always ask questions like, who, when, why, how, how much. Always ask open-ended questions, get your informant talking. Listen for unexpected answers, things you didn't expect to hear. And you gotta work to get the insight out, it's not there on the surface, and understand your own biases. Thanks.
