The Mom Test: Talking to Customers the Right Way
An Exciting Announcement + My Notes on The Mom Test
Hey folks,
Frank here! I have some exciting news to share: I’m starting a product management recruiting coaching practice!
I have mentored over 80 early in career professionals from diverse backgrounds in transitioning into product management, drawing from my own journey breaking into product management in Big Tech from a non-technical background. I’ve helped folks join companies like Microsoft, PayPal, and US News along with a variety of different venture backed startups and multinational firms. I’m excited to now share these learnings, strategies, and resources to an even broader audience!
If you, any friends, mentees, or colleagues who are aspiring to create impactful products from idea to production, work in a cross functional role and collaborate across teams, and solve problems from a variety of different angles, product management (and this post) is especially of interest. Click the button above to learn more.
If you’re not looking to break into product management, I’d still encourage you to read this article and share this post with others as you’ll learn some great tips on having better conversations with customers and honing you needfinding skills!
Thank you again and on to your regularly scheduled blog post!
Talking and listening to customers may be one of the hardest parts of being a product manager. When you’re not fielding questions or putting out fires, your core responsibility is truly hearing customer’s needs and ensuring that they’re getting the solutions they need. Unfortunately, we often try to “sell” customers on solutions and fail to recognize the real problems they face.
In order to improve my own customer interviewing skills, I read YC alum Rob Fitzpatrick’s book "The Mom Test". Fitzpatrick masterfully dismantles the conventional approach to customer feedback, highlighting a fundamental truth: people, especially those close to us like our mothers, often tell us what we want to hear, not what we need to hear. "The Mom Test" teaches us how to navigate these treacherous waters by asking the right questions - the ones that get you to the truth, irrespective of people's desire to spare your feelings.
You’ll find my notes attached in the button at the end but some of my biggest takeaways from the book are here:
1. Spend more time listening than talking.
In the early stages of product development, your goal should NOT be to sell a potential customer on your idea. Instead it should be to validate if the problem you think they have is true and to determine if your idea is good, bad, requires tweaking, or you need more information. Sales comes later in the process once you’ve validated that the problem exists.
2. Good questions focus on process.
You want to understand not just what issues a customer has when they try to do something but also how they’ve tried to solve it so far. If they haven’t even Googled a solution to their issue, it’s likely not that big of a problem. Other important areas to think about are: who are key decision makers for them, do they have a budget they need to follow, and asking them what are some questions you should have asked.
3. Push back on compliments, fluff, and ideas
These three topics things that can easily distract you from gathering good data. Compliments just tell you what you want to hear and fail to capture anything tangible about what the customer wants. The focus becomes you and your idea, not the customer and their problem. Fluff is when a customer says something with a very poor qualifier (i.e. “Do you do X?” “Oh yeah, I do X all the time”). Fluff is salvageable however as you can tie down an answer to something tangible (i.e. asking the customer when they did X last). Finally, ideas, although helpful, are often just nice to haves from a customer’s point of view. When you’re building a feature/startup, you want to start by executing on one thing very well. However, if a customer gives an idea with strong emotions, dig into it! It could reveal greater insights or at the least be a potential feature for the future.
4. Don’t be afraid to end a customer conversation.
If you ask someone how much they care about working out and they say very little, it doesn’t make much sense in trying to sell them a gym membership. Similarly, don’t do so for your customer conversations. If a customer doesn’t come across a problem or feel much pain from it, asking them their opinion becomes more of an ideation session than a problem discovery session.
5. Keep customer conversations casual (at first).
Don’t treat these early conversations as interviews. Instead, have your top two or three questions in mind and try to strike up a conversation with someone in your target market. Your goal is to get honest thoughts from people and interviews can overformalize these conversations. As you get a more mature idea of your product however, you may need to start having formal calls. At this point, make sure to have an itinerary, clear next steps, and an idea of what positive (“When can I buy the prototype?!?”) and negatives (“That’s so cool. I love it!”) comments are. Meetings should aim to get commitment and advancement with customers.
6. The point of cold calls is to stop having them.
Cold calling is one of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur. As such, if you can get out of the cold calling process and into the interviewing process faster it’s much much better. As such, once you get someone to respond to a cold call, leverage them to build more connections to others in your target market. Cold calls are also not the only way to get leads. Ask the folks close to you be they company advisors, friends, colleagues, etc. etc. to see if they can intro you to folks in your target market or know someone who knows someone. Even better, try to think outside of the box and bring potential customers to you. Some potential ways to do so are organizing industry networking events, knowledge exchanges, or writing industry newsletters (there are many more suggestions in the book as well).
7. If your interviews seem to conflict, get more specific with your target market.
If you’re asking great questions but getting a lot of conflicting data (i.e. mixed feedback, answers that seem to be opposites, etc.), you likely need to get more specific about your target market. For example, saying your target market is students sounds relatively straightforward. When you dig into it however, there are multiple types of students: undergraduate computer science majors who code frequently for homeworks, PhD students who need to keep their research straight, middle school students who have limited connectivity to the internet, etc. etc. Make sure to ask yourself who in this group wants to solve the problem you’ve identified most as well as if they’ll be the most profitable, easy to reach, and rewarding to build a business around.
8. Document you interviews and make sure understanding customers is a team process.
When you’re talking with customers, you likely won’t be able to capture everything. Instead focus on getting the big beats (i.e. a connection they can provide you with, a pain point, a follow up task, etc.) and the strong emotions this person has. Having two people can help this process as one person will act as the main interviewer while the other can focus on taking notes and correcting the main interviewer should they be start to ask the wrong questions.
Additionally, make sure to treasure your interviews. Even if the way you initially capture the interview is in a weird way (a napkin or a paper plate, for example) make sure to transfer them to a clear place of storage for you and your team to refer back to. Even better yet, make sure to take the key data from these interviews and align them to categories in an Excel sheet to help sort through the most important takeaways.
Finally, make sure to walk through your interviews with your team and ensure that everyone on the team talks to customers at least a few times.
9. Validate fast and continuously!
More specific to startups, when you’re trying to validate a problem don’t spend a year interviewing people before getting started or a week prepping for a single interview; spend a few weeks doing interviews, get your bearings, and get something for customers to commit to. Remember you’re growing a company, not a podcast or collection of interviews.
However, also remember that this is a process of continuous validation. As you build your product, make sure to carve out time to continue understanding your customers growing needs.
10. It’s ok to make mistakes.
Getting this process down takes time and no one’s perfect. Even the author mentions that he asks bad questions all the time. Just focus on getting better and trying to improve and results will come. Rome wasn’t built in a day and products are rarely built that quickly as well.
You can read my notes in full in by clicking this button:
Thank you so much for reading and please remember to share this article with anyone you think would find it interesting! If you’re also looking to break into Product Management, please make sure to check out my coaching site below:
Thank you again and talk soon,
Frank