Humans have different skills, motivations, and needs; they work in different industries. And also, we all have human brains - which means that the same questions are effective across a variety of contexts. These are the questions I ask in almost every interview. Use them, suggest changes, remix them. If you find a variation that works particularly well, please suggest it!
None! Though if you'd like to learn more about customer development, you can read my book Lean Customer Development: Build Products Your Customers Will Buy - not open source, though it's likely free to borrow from your local public library.
You can use one or all of these questions, as part of a formal customer interview or sprinkled into your existing customer conversations. If you have not established the practice of talking with customers regularly, some of these tips may help kickstart you.
- Tell me about how you do/think about [topic]?
- In the past [time period], how often has [problem] happened?
- Last time you did [task], what was the most frustrating part?
- What's the easiest part about [topic]?
- What other workarounds have you used to try and solve for [problem]?
- What advice would you give to a friend (peer, coworker...) getting started with [topic]?
- How high a priority is it for you to solve [problem]?
- If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about [topic] - doesn't have to be possible - what would make your life easier?
- If [problem] was magically solved already, how would it make your life better?
Some questions work better with local or jargon-specific variations. I welcome changes and variations - please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on the code of conduct and how to submit your pull requests.
- Cindy Alvarez
This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license - see LICENSE.md for details.
Thank you to O'Reilly Media for publishing Lean Customer Development and giving me a home to start writing about questions like these.
