Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers

It can be helpful to visualize them as cards. For example, you could make a Trello board with different cards for each problem, and ask the customer to drag them into a new column, prioritized. I suggest doing this with customers you’ve already talked to.

“Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I learned a lot from you today. (breath) Is there anything else you think I should know?”

At a high level, the way to ask someone what they’d pay without asking them what they’d pay is to ask what they’re currently paying. They might be paying in terms of time, in terms of money, or most likely both. What we also want to find out is the frequency of those time or money payments.

A customer who cancels can be a sign that something was wrong in the marketing that attracted someone with a use case that wasn’t a fit for the product. Instead of trying to win them back, the goal of this interview is to figure out what their use case was and how they came to the product so you can stop attracting people with use cases that aren’t

My personal favorite books on user research written at a more rigorous level are Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Users, Jim Kalbach’s Jobs to Be Done Playbook, and Indi Young’s Mental Models.

For this matrix, you can chart both huge activities (buying a house), smaller activities, and even individual tasks. Let’s work through a few examples.

Badass: Making Users Awesome If I had to pick only one book to introduce people to thinking about products from a user’s perspective, this book would be it. If I were giving a gift to a new graduate who intended to work in tech, I would give them this book along with Never Split The Difference.

Try this now To start, try to notice how often you do particular tasks, and how much they annoy you or have complexity. Try to get used to working with it in your daily life, and then apply it to how you think about business.

Before we dive into the finer points of conducting an interview with someone who has canceled, I want to talk about what lies beneath them: feelings of disappointment for the customer, and in the case of founder-operators, the feeling of rejection.