Talk to the Nice People - Insight Interviews

In my previous post "What Customers Are You Creating?" we talked about creating customer persona - a picture of one representitive group of our customers - so we would start noticing these people out in the world. Isn't that good enough? Haven't we "gotten down" the people we're designing for? It's time to get to work - right?

Nope. If we're using the concepts of lean startup and UX, the next thing we want to do is "get out of the building" to test those hypothesis. In this case, we're going to have to get out and "talk to the nice people."

And when we get out to talk to them - we're not talking to them about our solution - we're asking questions to find out how these people are solving this problem WITHOUT our product. We're literally getting to know how they think and why they choose to do things a certain way.

Lizard Brain Training

First, let's acknowledge the reality of the situation. Talking to people is one of the most difficult tasks we have as we create our products and services. Even the most extraverted of people struggle to keep themselves talking to people that they aren't comfortable with or that have a different context than they do. But, if we're smart, we'll train ourselves to overcome that lizard brain reaction and begin stepping in and trying things out in this part of our world, just as we do in all the other parts of our business.

"You'd be amazed how often we create customers who we don't really like and who don't interest us. Ah, that crafty brain at work again - trying to convince us that we don't really need to go out and talk to those "annoying, stupid, frustrating, strange, scary, not us" people. But maybe, just maybe, I might want to go out and talk to a few "Michelle's." Therein lies the game."

INSIGHT INTERVIEWS

Let's say you "recognize" a person who might fit your persona as you move through the world. What do you say to them?

Most of us instinctually launch into an explanation of who we are and what our product is and how we're doing what we do and…and…and. Seeing any problems with that? Who's doing all the talking in that scenario?

90% listening
It turns out customer development is not really about TALKING to people but rather LISTENING. It's about asking the questions that allow people to tell their stories about how they navigate the world without your product, as well as what delights or disappoints them in those situations and why they do things a certain way. It's being honestly curious about those "decide" moments when they choose to buy, participate or choose another direction.

In other words, you'll be listening for their personal story, which invariably points out where your made up assumptions don't even vaguely match reality (you're wrong) - and helps find new intriguing patterns and deeper underlying motivations you didn't know about to investigate. Their stories inspire you to keep moving, thinking and trying things.

Enter kindly
I have a friend who always greets me at the door, face alight and hand out to grasp mine. Saying my name, she pulls me in the door and then quickly seats me so she can ask me a questions about how things are going. In that simple greeting - she has taught me everything I need to know about talking to the nice people.

A big part of calming both ourselves and others in our interviews is having an "entrance" that is memorized but practiced enough that it has become natural. This is one of our big tasks in the LUXr workshop on conducting quality interviews.

In the accelerator programs we work in I suggest they try a strategy of learning. "Hi, my name is Mair Dundon and I'm an entrepreneur who is just learning to do customer interviews around how people do XXXX." When working on my own product - I tend toward something a little less formal. "Hi, my name's Mair. Would you have a couple of minutes to talk about the apps that you're using on your phone? Would you like a coffee? My treat." Find a way to quickly fit in what you'd like to talk about. Comfort the person by setting a time frame. Offer a gift.

Know your focus
Each time you go out to do customer development, you need to be clear what you need to learn. Can you learn about what makes people crazy about something in the problem space you're working in? Maybe you'd like to hear more about what different types of services a person uses to download photos. Is there anything they particularly love about any of those services? Can you learn more about their particular workflow?

Last week when I was doing some customer development for my upcoming workshops, my friend Scott Tran told me that he's begun going into his interviews looking not only for stories about how people do things without his product, but also learning about that "buying moment" - why did the person decide to get that service, upgrade or change how they do things. He'd learned about that idea in another workshop and simply wrapped it right in to his practice.

Ask open "story" questions
Asking questions really is an art form. I recently read a wonderful post in which the author felt his success was because he had learned how to ask questions when he worked as a journalist. The type of questions that we'd like to ask during insight interviews are both specific and open ended. Before you head out be sure to get a set of topics that give you a good foundation for subject matter (the problem space you're working in) and then try a few of these leading questions….

"Have you ever…."
"And then what happened…"
"Why (or how) did you do that…"
"Can you say more about that…"

Noteworthy
Taking notes is one of the big challenges in doing customer development. When I'm working on my own - I tend to ask if I can record the conversation so that I can relax and listen more carefully. Always ask permission before you record any conversation. Some people take a 2nd person along just to take notes. This is interesting because both of you will hear different things. This does take practice though - as you want to keep a single focus for your customer. 

If neither of those options is available then I simple jot down quick one or two highlights of the conversation on a piece of paper and then fill it in as clearly as I can immediately following the interview. Go after the "why" and "how" moments in the conversation.

Graceful exits
What if they say, "No."? This is a good thing. Thank them for letting you know and quietly exit. AND notice two things - notice if anyone around you feels badly for that other person saying "No" to you. If you're quick you can catch them as you leave. "Did you have a few minutes to talk to me about…?" Also notice that the person saying no will almost always feel guilty even if they're annoyed with you for interrupting (you'll discover people are SOOOOO much nicer than you thought they were). If you'd like you can offer them an out - "Maybe I can catch you later" or "Can I give you my card?" are both options I've used.

Everyone has a story
Don't throw out people who don't "fit" your customer persona. I've actually seen hyper-focused entrepreneurs "drop" the human being they are speaking with when it becomes evident they aren't the "right" person. Really? As you become more practiced at talking to people you'll discover that having a conversation with almost anyone brings insights - even if it just shows you more clearly who isn't your customer.

And if they don't fit the persona  you're working with then maybe they're a different group - one you hadn't ever imagined as being your customer. Keep track of them until you begin to see a pattern emerge. As we grow our companies we all have moments where we need to democratize or move out into wider markets and new segments. Consider outliers and "not right now" people as valuable - they're the ones that can provide "ah-ha" moments and game-changing insights needed to shift our direction.

Practice

Creating offerings using customer development really turns our business on it's head. First we hypothesize that we might have a solution that customers need. Then we test that assumption by getting out and talking to them. 

As we interact with our customers we gain "insights" that translate that back into new or shifted hypothesis. And if that tells we're on a strong path, we then create the smallest experience (MVP) we can think up to test whether our solution really does solve a user need. And eventually we create a company and business model that best serves ongoing growth and innovation.

Throughout it all - we need to continue customer development. This means that we better get really good knowing who our customer is, finding them, asking good questions and then listening to them to shake out even more patterns and insights.

Join me as I begin doing live LUXr workshops on Talking to the Nice People where you can practice all of these skills. Customer insights are just one conversation away - let's get started!

What customers are you creating?

Last week I had a chance to facilitate a couple of great sessions of customer development with nine companies gathered for the TechBA Bootcamp in Seattle. Just in case you haven't heard a lot about lean startup or lean user experience (UX), customer development is a methodology developed by Steve Blank that focuses on finding out about the goals, behaviors and motivations of your customers.

In practicing customer development we ask some very basic questions:

• Who are my customers?
• Where can I find them?
• What do they really need?
• How do they behave so I can recognize them?
• Can I find a pattern and group them in some way?

Using lean methodology to try and answer these questions means that we need to have some way to make a guess (also called a hypothesis) of who our customers are so that we can then "get out of the building" and check those assumptions by interacting with live humans in their natural habitat.

But first we have to get our "guesses" down on the page so we're not running around like crazy people. Lean UX brings a variety of helpful techniques and process from traditional product development. These methodologies allow companies and teams to "learn to fish" in defining who their customers are, as well as, what problem is being solved or desire fulfilled for each group of customers.

CREATING A PERSONA

One tool that we use in customer development is to create a "persona" that provides us a snapshot or archetype for the people we think are our customers. I like to think of them as my "people prototypes." What is deeply counter-intuitive about this process is that it requires us to create a very specific fictitious person - 1 individual who is "representative" of a group of people out in the world with similar needs, behaviors and sometimes attributes.

It's also important to create an appealing person - one who stays with us and who we begin to care about in our product development.

It turns out that our brain isn't very good at understanding and recognizing abstractions and "ideas" when it comes to people. Just because we create a "group" doesn't mean we recognize them when we're moving around out in the world. It is however good at matching and grouping pictures and stories as more or less alike. It automatically creates these groupings and "rules" for you in the form of assumptions. The brain then uses these rules (habits) to choose and drive behavior - unless the rules are challenged and reorganized by conscious process and learning.

The mind is also very touchy about "strangers" in any circumstance - seeing them as dangerous. This is why all of us struggle to do customer development and actually talk to the nice people - it's so much easier if we just use our unconscious assumptions as "true" and dive right in to the "real" work.

The only problem with allowing unconscious assumptions to run the show is it increases our risk hugely - if you don't know if your assumptions about people and markets are accurate, how can you know what's working? 

Create Your First Customer Guess
A great example of how to build a clear picture of one of our customer's comes from LUXr. In the next few weeks I'll be teaching a workshop on creating these customer personas or you can learn more by working your way through LUXr's 7-workshop online offering.

A first draft of a persona for a personal growth product

Naming
LUXr takes you through the process of naming and quick sketching YOUR customer in a location that makes sense. This may seem kind of dumb at first but as your brain engages and if you can push through the confusion to choose one thing - it begins to create a human story rather than just a murky idea of what "they" might be like. At this point - you typically have no idea who your customer is - so choose one and go.

I can guarantee that talking about Ben or Michelle in your day-to-day is far more likely to bring about useful, delightful offerings than simply talking about "our users." 

The idea isn't that this sketch is realistic or right - but rather that it allows you to relate to this person who you are creating as your customer. Is Michelle happy? Sad? Frustrated? What is Michelle thinking? What in that picture makes Michelle YOUR customer? Being specific, and yet playfully sketchy to get around your internal censor, gives your brain the information that it needs to begin "seeing" and "matching" in the world around you.

Specifics
Then we move into demographics. These are just the facts about the person. We want to choose facts that are relevant for our product. This is a specific person. We might want to share Michelle's exact age, city they live in, job they have. We choose facts that support this being our customer. Again, counter-intuitive. Does that mean if we talk to someone that doesn't match this demographic exactly that they aren't "right?" No, it simply means that we're creating a clear picture of this one person so that they can become more "real" and 3-dimensional.

Behaviors
Then we dive into the really good stuff as we create behaviors that Michelle has that make her our customer. I like to say that these are the ways that I might recognize "Michelle" out in the wild. What actions does Michelle take that either put her into the problem space my product is trying to solve or predisposes her to be delighted by the additional capabilities my product provides?

Needs and Goals
And then we ask why Michelle does those actions. What are Michelle's needs and goals? These are not abstract, generic goals that we all "should" have but rather the driving forces in Michelle's life.

When your brain begins to protest, "I don't know what the heck this person needs." Keep guessing. Your brain is making these assumptions unconsciously and driving your decision process about what to design and develop in your product. Don't you think it's smarter to get it down on paper and start doing - start understanding the person you're creating this for? This isn't a one shot deal. You'll get plenty of chances to correct and tweak. For now, just make it up as accurately as you can. Tell one possible story. Guess. 

Curiouser and curiouser
When we back up and look at what we created one thing that is generally true about our first version is that the person is pretty "generic." See if you can get more specific. You may have unconsciously created someone you know - exactly. Or maybe you've created a clone of yourself - "Hey, I'm the customer of this product," you say. See if you can shift it so you're forced to find people you don't already feel like you "know." Tough to listen and learn if you're stuck in "I already know that." 

Can you make Michelle a person that you actually like? Can you tweak the description so she's interesting to you? NOT the SAME as you - just interesting. Don't make her too wacky - just interesting. Is this someone that you would want to talk to - that you would be curious about? Perfect. Now you're ready to test your assumption.

You'd be amazed how often we create customers who we don't really like and who don't interest us. Ah, that crafty brain at work again - trying to convince us that we don't really need to go out and talk to those "annoying, stupid, frustrating, strange, scary, not us" people. But maybe, just maybe, I might want to go out and talk to a few "Michelle's." Therein lies the game.

Do you begin to see? We really are creating our customers. Why not create customers that we care about, that inspire us and that we work to delight at every turn? Why not create customers that we actually want to get out and interact with all the time? What if every human we interact with was valuable and to be learned from? That would make life interesting wouldn't it?

They're your people - so make them awesome.

New Directions - Live, hands-on LUXr Lean UX Workshops

In the past couple of years a shift has started to take on a new form as I began working with the wonderful team at LUXr. A couple of months ago when LUXr came out with the second version of their online 7-workshop LUXr Core Curriculum, I jumped at the chance to present some of their process in live, hands-on workshops.

What is it about these workshops that has me so happy? Having taught live and online project-based courses for 14-years in traditional environments, as well as facilitating all kinds of process in my career - I find the "try it out" and "do to learn" nature of workshops using lean UX process a real joy.

This isn't about me standing in front of people telling them what I know - it's all of us in there figuring it out together by doing. And really, the one thing that I know clearly about this world right now, is that it's all made up - so we need to get spectacular at iterating and experimenting everywhere in our lives.

What are these workshops about? Workshop 1 - Finding Your Customer with Personas - shows you how to create a customer persona or as I like to call them a "people prototype." None of us really know who our customers are until they start buying. In lean startups we want to test our hypothesis of who these people are - but first we have to get it out of our heads and onto the page. That's what this class is all about. We explore this made-up person's behavior so we can recognize them in the world and the needs that make them our customer. But this is just a guess - we learn how to test this hypothesis in Workshop 2.

Read more about the "why" behind creating customer personas

Workshop 2, Talk to the Nice People - Insight Interviews, starts off with a bang with a process Kate Rutter from LUXr calls "The Molecule." You'll be able to start each week with a focus snapshot of customer, problem you're solving and solution those customers will use. Then we'll move right into forming topics, creating open questions and an intro that gets us into the conversation with our customer. Most important of all - we'll practice all the skills - repeatedly. Then we'll evaluate what we learned from even this small amount of practice. You'll be a little shocked at how ready you are to get out there and start talking to the nice people.

Read more about the process behind running an Insight Interview

*Attending either Workshop 1 or Workshop 2 will give you the opportunity to sign up to get a big discount on the full 7-week online LUXr Curriculum directly from LUXr, Inc. to continue your learning.

We're going to have a whole lot of fun in these workshops - come prepared to dive right in. I'd love to have you join me.

Personal Resilience - A Patchwork Quilt of Earning

Tomorrow I'll be attending Compostmodern - a design conference with resilience as it's theme this year. I wanted to share why this subject is so personal and immediate for me and why I'm so excited to be a part of the on-going conversation about how we might move from abstract "pie in the sky" concepts to day-to-day practice to gain far broader insights into the people we design with and the connections we seek to build.

Over the past few years my work life has had to be designed over and over again. Each time I thought I had found a sustainable business model, a resting place, a place/time/path to simply get to work - things would quickly degenerate and become unworkable.

I spent enormous amounts of time trying to figure out a single path through to a sustainable life, growing deeply frustrated and feeling incredibly stupid at not being able to do so. Until one day - after reading a great article on resilience by Ezio Manzini, I finally got it - a single path to a rich and financially stable life wasn't what I needed. It wasn't even possible for me because of my life circumstances. What I needed was a nimble and responsive way to earn money - I needed a patchwork quilt of earning.

"We can look to the people of the planet in two ways. We can see 7 billion people on the planet today or 9 billion people tomorrow as the biggest threat and the biggest problem, because we are a little planet. But given that those 7 billion people are you, me, my friends and the people we know, we see them not as problems but as people with capabilities, intelligent operators. So the planet is very rich with potential intelligent operators. What does it mean to enable all the potentialities of so many intelligent people?"

TALK TO THE NICE PEOPLE

Excited by that quote by Ezio Manzini from the article and relying on the design process I've been practicing more and more over the past few years - I set out to "talk to the nice people" to listen (and learn) how others in my community were creating their financial and work lives in a tough economy and rapidly changing world. I talked with friends who held 3 jobs, contractors who kept multiple projects moving, folks in "traditional" 9-5's with a side business doing things like making jewelry and selling it on Etsy or picking up weekend gigs doing odd jobs for people. I was a little shocked at how many people are cobbling together money from different sources even when they have big "full-time" salaried jobs.

Feeling heartened - as discovering a community of other humans working the same problems always does - I set out to test out my hypothesis that a nimble, broadly-based earning strategy would work for me.

TO THE WALL

Then I did a little wall work - throwing out ideas of small ways I could earn money - starting from past experience and then working into new possibilities. I thought about all of my past jobs, training and variations on those themes. I even threw in some of the different ways that I might work rather than just sticking to job names (i.e. remote, video, new work paths such as Task Rabbit or Skillshare). My stickies were filled with over 50 ideas of potential ways for me to earn.

To winnow things down I divided the ideas into a quick "4-up" grid that used like/dislike and hard/easy as it's organizing factors. This is a great way to take tons of info and winnow it down into the things that are most immediate and the least risk for you to try.

As I was sorting I had the insight that my "easy" choices were those that I could pick up and run with immediately. Things became hard, but not impossible if I were to choose to do the prep work to set myself up to pursue them. In this process though, we only use the upper-right quadrant. I chose 3 in of the like/easy category to pursue immediately - a Skillshare class, product design consulting and startup facilitation.

EXPERIMENTS IN PROGRESS

The next week I put up my 1st Skillshare class description (Creating an Awesome Twitter Community). A couple of friends appeared who needed accupressure sessions. New opportunities to do lean UX facilitation appeared via LUXr - and via a good friend - I had the chance to work with a couple of accelerators and incubators as both a facilitator and mentor to the various startups from all over the world. I began a simple pricing plan for my product design coaching - offering my knowledge base and mentoring to entrepreneurs and teams on the fly. One of the companies I worked with came 4 separate times to do 1-2 hour sessions vetting their ideas. They found a good one and are running with it. Last month I had my first non-profit contact me to do some coaching & facilitation. And I picked up a 6 week product strategy contract.

Suddenly my work life was transformed. My patchwork of earning was in full swing after only 2-months of experimenting. And as I continue laying more groundwork, it's expanding my possibilities. For example, you can watch my brand prototyping on this site and for my new lean UX workshops starting in April. It'll be wonderful to get back to teaching to learn.

LEARNING AND GAINING INSIGHTS

This is not to say that things have been easy or a happened in a straight line. I've had several big failures that had great insights and next steps buried in them. For instance, my Skillshare class was tiny. I learned that I need more lead time for marketing and that I no longer have any strong marketing channels beyond my Twitter feed. It's been six years since I taught regularly and my new brand (and name - teacher formerly known as MD Dundon) no longer have any recognition for people. I'm working on that. I've learned that I have to practice switching gears. Very different activities (accupressure/consulting) need to happen on different days. Teaching amps me up - not good to have quiet activities follow. I need blocks of time to write and design on my own. I need "wandering" time to let things percolate. I need co-working time and people to help keep me moving.

And one of the main reasons for this radical shift - my need to be up in Seattle to help out with on-going family challenges - continues to require my time and attention. Keeping all of these balls in the air has been an adventure, but again, as I lay in better architecture, community and connections - this is becoming simpler all the time. I really am becoming more resilient.

In resilient design we talk about designing with, addressing cultural issues and building social networks and communication. I'm very clear that this journey to design resiliently has to start with my own life. And I have no doubt that this will help me in my broader design practice - I can't help but become more collaborative, curious and connected with so much learning woven through my life. And if I can find ways to allow my own capabilities to shine - how much more fun will it be to allow others to do the same. Now that is a beautiful design life.

What does your patchwork quilt of earning look like? How are you being resilient in designing your life? How are you building life architecture that allows you to be nimble?