The best part of this book was in the first sample. About how to frame your questions when trying to understand if your idea is any good. Don’t be needy and fish for compliments. Try to genuinely understand the problems.
#Things to consider
- Here’s the thing: only the market can tell if your idea is good. Everything else is just opinion. Opinions are worthless.
- People will lie to you if they think it’s what you want to hear.
- Learn through their actions instead of their opinions.
- Being walked through their full workflow answers many questions in one fell swoop: how do they spend their days, what tools do they use, and who do they talk to?
- 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.
- Compliments are the fool’s gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and worthless.
- Why do they bother doing it this way? Why do they want the feature? How are they currently coping without the feature? Dig.
- When you strip all the formality from the process, you end up with no meetings, no “interviews”, and a much easier time all around.
- Learning about a customer and their problems works better as a quick and casual chat than a long, formal meeting.
- You know how to deal with compliments by now: deflect, ignore, and get back to business.
- If you don’t know what happens next after a product or sales meeting, the meeting was pointless.
#Questions to dig into feature requests
- “Why do you want that?”
- “What would that let you do?”
- “How are you coping without it?”
- “How would that fit into your day?”