Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers

I suggest Jim Kalbach’s The Jobs to Be Done Playbook as a companion to this book if you are looking for an accessible overview of the different analysis methods. The User’s Journey by Donna Lichaw and Service Design by Andy Polaine, Ben Reason & Lavrans Løvlie are also wonderful resources.

In the dozens of interviews I conducted with early readers of this book, this sample interview was consistently named one of the most helpful and unique parts of this book. You will only get a small portion of the benefit by reading the transcript, so I encourage you to find time to listen to the interview. You can find it at deployempathy.com/samp

What you want to listen for is: What is the underlying problem/need this product solved for them? How often do they experience the problem? Were they previously paying to solve that problem? What did they use? How much time does this problem take for them? How important is the problem for them? If they don’t solve it, or it’s solved poorly, what ar

First message [Person], good to connect. It's a huge ask, I know, but I'd love your expert insight and advice on a new tool our tech startup has built to generate revenue from casual readers and with it granular monetization data from audiences. Also creates a stronger pathway to subscription conversion. Hasn't been done before. Pipeline of interes

Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman’s Sales Safari course teaches people how to find digital watering holes where their potential customers are already talking about their problems and their opinions of competitors.1 Their approach is called “internet ethnography,” and many of the Sales Safari tactics have become best practices. 2

The goals of this interview: What was the journey they went through? How did they discover your product? What prompted them to switch from one provider/tool/process to yours? So far, are they satisfied with that decision?

Step 3: Check that the post you’re about to make is allowed by that subreddit or forum. Some subreddits may forbid this. Even if it isn’t explicitly forbidden, your post will want to tread lightly. Extinguish any urge to use this as a sales or marketing opportunity, and definitely avoid any promotional language.

Try to get a rough sense for the different functional/emotional/social factors that went into their decision, the overall goal they were trying to achieve by buying it, and some of the steps. 1. Answer the overall questions: What is their overall goal? What did they use before (including homemade/manual solutions)? How frequent is the problem they

For more on “valuable, usable, viable, and feasible,” see Marty Cagan’s Inspired.