

Ask HN: What does your customer interview process looks like? - rgonzalez

How many people do you talk to on each batch before you sit down to analyze the feedback?<p>How do you go organize and go over the feedback you got?<p>How many questions (in avg.) do you do on each interview?
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mindcrime
Are you talking about a Customer Development interview? If so, it depends on
what phase of the process we're in. I'll answer relative to the very first
discovery level interviews, since those are the ones we've done the most of:

 _How many people do you talk to on each batch before you sit down to analyze
the feedback?_

We analyze feedback after each interview. After a few (say, 3-5) we would sit
down and synthesize / aggregate and look for patterns, etc.

 _How do you go organize and go over the feedback you got?_

Right now it's a pretty manual process. Notes are stored in Google Docs
documents (one per interview) and other docs are used to store the synthesized
observations and what-not. Keeping track of the process itself, scheduling
interviews, etc., is pretty adhoc... a combination of Google Calendar,
spreadsheets, various text files, etc. We've recently deployed SugarCRM,
however, for at least managing contacts and what-not. Ideally we'd like to use
a Customer Development specific tool which "knows" the CD process and
workflow, but we haven't yet bothered to find or write one.

 _How many questions (in avg.) do you do on each interview?_

We have a canned list of about 40-50 questions we _can_ use, but not every
question is used on every interview. Answers to previous questions affect
which subsequent questions get asked. On average, we probably wind up asking
about 25 meaningful questions.

~~~
monkeyspaw
I'm currently about to start CustDev interviews for the first time. Did you
pull your questions out of Steve Blank's book, or generate them yourself?

If you're open to sharing the questions, I would love to take a gander to see
what I can learn.

Thanks!

~~~
mindcrime
A combination of both. I think the vast majority (if not all) of the questions
in Steve's book are on our list, and then there are some more we added.

Shoot me an email at prhodes (at) fogbeam (dot) com and I'll be happy to share
our list of questions with you.

------
redspark
When we are coaching companies through the problem interview stages we set
some basic ground-rules.

Interview at least 30 target customers. Anyone who doesn't fit into your pre-
determined persona doesn't count.

Set the success/failure criteria before the interviews. For instance, we are
going to talk to 30 potential customers and we are going to focus our
questions about a pain point in this particular area. Of those 30, 21 will
agree they have felt pain when dealing with this area.

Typical number of questions is 10, mostly to qualify them as fitting in the
demographic. Take notes mentally, but not during the interview (taking notes
during the interview infers a test and they will try harder to get the "right"
answer). Immediately after the interview, document the interview. Make sure to
allow the interviewee to elaborate on any question, as they may reveal other
areas with pain. If they admit pain in the area you are targeting, ask them
what they are currently doing (your biggest competitor may be that they aren't
doing anything). Then subtly try to talk them out of the problem being a pain.
If you can't talk them out of it, it is indeed a pain point they want solved.

Once you have 30 look at your interview summaries, determine if you have
validated or invalidated the assumption. If invalidated, really look close at
the responses you did get, since they will reveal other problems to explore.

~~~
nayefc
Make sure you do not steer them into answering your questions; but let them
come up with the pain/conclusions on their own.

------
bbaumgar
I usually will ask the person I'm interviewing to describe their job or the
activity which I am posing a solution to. In the case of my startup, I'll ask
them to describe their experience planning and running a conference as if I
knew nothing. Their pain points will naturally emerge as they describe their
processes, and their real issues usually become obvious by the way they
describe their job (even if they don't know their issues consciously
themselves!).

I usually go for long interviews (30 minutes to an hour) and look for
commonalities between them after every batch of 5 or so.

If more than 2/3 of the people express a pain point, I know there's a real
problem there. In my case, I'm trying to craft an MVP with 3 or so main
features. Every person I've interviewed so far has expressed the same base 3
pain points (in addition to other needs which varied from person to person) so
I know what I'm going to focus on solving with my MVP.

I usually use around 5 questions an interview, but sometimes I've asked as
many as 10 or 15 depending on how talkative the person I'm interviewing is.

