Tag Archives: customer development

The Concept – Product Chasm: The End of my Lean Product Management Tool & Rediscovery of Passion’s Importance

11 February 2012

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For the past couple of months I’ve been working on ideas in the lean startup space. As explained in previous posts, it seemed logical: I have a solid background in it from my days at oneforty as well as consulting before and after and the subject is hot now with Eric Ries’s book out, Steve Blank’s book coming soon and a seeming never-ending discussion about the principles in our community.

After initially exploring the opportunity to provide tools for performing customer development, I pivoted to the broader idea of providing a tool to help with Lean Product Management. Initially, the response was great; I wrote a blog post on the concept of Lean Product Management and it was universally loved. It’s the most read blog post on my blog ever and it generated significant inbound interest.  At the same time, I talked to quite a few people that had interesting feedback on the process and where they were coming up short. I also met a number of people and companies that needed help in the areas I was looking for the product to work. However, in the end, a few major issues are leading me to place this idea on the scrap heap with the other previous 8 ideas I’ve evaluated over the past year.

The Concept – Product Chasm

The biggest problem in developing this idea was a major gap between the buy-in to the concept I wrote about and the actual execution of the concept.

In the product management world, it seems everyone has a different way of implementing it. Some people are absolutely hardcore and have impeccable wikis and project management tools (like a 1-2 punch of Jira and Confluence). Others keep it loose with simply a Google Spreadsheet and a Kanban board (both real and virtual).  Finally others have utter chaos and have absolutely destroyed their project management tool by jamming everything in there (usually Pivotal Tracker or BaseCamp).  It seems individuality is greatly valued in the world of product management…

This presents a series of problems:

1) There is no silver bullet

The difference between a Kanban board and a wiki based product management tool is significant. This would mean any tool that was valuable for one is unlikely to be interesting to the other.

2) Marketing is a nightmare

With everyone having their own ideas on how to implement product management principles, targeting and acquiring a customer would be extremely difficult. Even those that I confidently believed had problems in their process often either A) did not perceive there was a problem or B) even if they knew they had a problem, they weren’t actively seeking a solution.

3) There was no MVP

As I talked to over 40 people who owned product at their company, I found no consensus on what part of the process was broken for them; without this consensus, there was no way to build an MVP. More importantly, the lack of consensus showed no agreement on a core problem which could be used as the tip of the spear towards acquiring customers and building out a platform over time; building a Lean Product Management tool would take significant time to become a complete, full life cycle solution, but there was no clear path for doing so.

A Greater Problem – Passion?

One of the most fascinating things about my trip to Silicon Valley in December was seeing how entrepreneurs interact with one another there versus here in Boston. Specifically, I’m talking about the first questions an entrepreneur is asked about their startup/idea. There is no right or wrong here, just different.

In Boston, common questions are:

  1. What stage are you at?
  2. How will you make money?
  3. Do you have any customers?

In the Valley, common questions are:

  1. Why are you passionate about this idea?
  2. How will you acquire customers?
  3. What is the big vision for your idea?

Of all the questions, the one I found most jarring was, “Why are you passionate about this idea?”

Over the past 9 months of questing for an idea, I’ve been attacking ideas with laser focus and rigid customer development methodology. While this has likely saved me a lot of time on any of the ideas, it also was devoid of the thought of passion; was I ever really passionate about an idea in the moving industry or restaurant services? Being completely honest with myself, I don’t believe I was.

Rebooting – a Focus on Passion

Paul Graham, amongst many others, has always said, “solve the problem you wish someone would solve for you.” I actually have an Evernote full of “hack project ideas” that are just that. I plan to start looking hard at those ideas and working on approaches to test those ideas.

Jason Baptiste wrote a blog post back before Cloudomatic (which came right before he and his cofounder discovered the OnSwipe opportunity) which covered a series of ideas he was thinking about. He got a great response from people showing who also cared about the ideas. I may do the same soon.

Embracing Fate

I had a great conversation with Eric Paley after a Dart Dinner early this past fall about my struggles to find an idea. He told me, “I think founders have to believe in a little fate; the right idea will find you at the right time.”

Those words have stuck with me and ring true with my first real venture: Greenhorn Connect. I could not have had that idea come to me at a better time both personally (it was the only way for me to build credibility in the Boston startup ecosystem and land a job 4 months later at oneforty) and for the ecosystem (October 2009 was the very beginning of our ecosystem’s awesome resurgence…the perfect time for a uniting site).

More importantly, I wasn’t even looking to start something when Greenhorn Connect happened. It just grabbed me and I couldn’t not do it. As many of you who knew me then may remember, I was a man possessed to make it work. Despite all the obvious reasons not to do it, I still did it (Lean Startups principles would have definitely it shot down). I will never forget my first Mass Innovation Night after launch and Adam Marchick and Michael Cohen both giving me the proverbial “You’re crazy. Why are you doing this?” speech. Both are great converts now, but it was only the passion and a touch of fate/destiny/luck that really possessed me to so blindingly go after the idea.

After 9 months of trying to force ideas, I’m trying to get back to basics. I need to find my passions and try to let the right idea find me instead of desperately grasping in the dark for ideas or trying to force an idea through the grinder.  A quote from Drew Huston has stuck with me in this process.  He said that of all the 5 or 6 companies he’s started, only Dropbox felt like, “the wind was at our back.”  That feels telling and reminds me of the commonly discussed need of Skill, Luck and Timing to build a truly great company.

Alternate directions

It’s been 9 very long months since I left oneforty. While even today I have a runway left that most young entrepreneurs would envy, I’m realistic about my endeavor to start something; how long should you stick with it before you realize the timing isn’t right?

The great entrepreneurs say it takes Skill, Luck and Timing to build a great company. I believe I have the skill to build a great company, which is why I left oneforty. I was also inspired by this oft-tweeted blog post encouraging you to quit your job and start a company even if you don’t have an idea. However, as time continues to slip by, I ask myself if I’m making the most of my time.

That’s why I’m beginning to evaluate working opportunities for the first time since I started this process.

I’ve thought a lot about the framework of what I’m looking for; not needing the money gives me the luxury of weighting all my other priorities over compensation. I’ve realized the most important things to me are:

  1. Working on a really big idea
  2. Working with a truly great leader I can learn from
  3. Having the opportunity to further develop skills that are assets to a business founder

No Regrets

I have ZERO regrets of how I’ve spent my time since leaving oneforty. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about myself, what I need in a technical cofounder and thanks to this most recent idea, how to manage product. I’ve also continued to build my network which is filled with mentors I know I can count on for help when I need it and people I can’t wait to invite to join me in working on that great ideaI know I’m going to find.

Like Steve Jobs said in his Stanford Graduation speech, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”  If you found me 3 years ago and told me I’d have done the things I’ve accomplished thus far, I wouldn’t believe you. However, looking back I can see how critical each step was in this crazy journey. Frankly, the less logical the next step, the more it seems to have worked out for the best.

I can’t wait to see what’s next and hope you’ll stay tuned; my beliefs are unshaken: I will build a great anchor company one day.

How to Structure (and get the most out of) Customer Development Interviews

18 January 2012

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Running a startup puts a ton of responsibilities on your plate. From marketing to sales, ghetto-HR to accounting, development to project management, you’re wearing a million hats.  We all know that Lean Startups methodology and customer development are important, but *actually practicing* it can be hard (if you’re not familiar run to CustDev.com *right now* and get Brant and Patrick‘s book The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ASAP!).

As you commit yourself to “getting outside the building” to talk to your customers and truly quest for Product-Market Fit, it’s essential you make the most of those discussions. One of the hardest things for newcomers to customer development is structuring their questions for customer development, so I’d like share how I structure interviews to maximize their effectiveness.

How to Structure (and get the most out of) Customer Development Interviews

A few others have written about how they do interviews, so definitely check out Cindy Alvarez and Sachin Aggarwal’s thoughts on the subject. 

I structure my custdev interviews in 3 parts – People, Problems, and Your Solution. Depending on the person, this question flow generally takes me 30-45 minutes to go through. (Note: This structure is best suited to B2B customer development, but with a little creativity, you can definitely adapt this for B2C interviews)

1) People – Aka – Who Are You?

Before you get into anything about problems or your solution, you need to figure out who you’re actually talking to. This both warms up your interviewee with some softball questions and gives you an opportunity to build some rapport with them.

Some example questions you could ask:

  • What is your name and role at your company?
  • How do you fit into your company’s department structure? Overall in the company?
  • What is your budget like? Who has to approve your purchases?
  • How do you discover new products for work? Do you need any approval to try them?
  • Have you tried anything new recently?
  • What is a typical day like on your job?
  • How much time do you spend doing [task X]? (Task X being anything they mentioned in their typical day that stood out)

Do not shortchange this opening section of questions! You don’t need a novel on their daily life, but you *do need* enough to be able to understand their role within their company, who key players are and a general baseline of their sophistication. All of this will help you later pattern match who the user type that is most receptive to the problem you’re solving and the solution you offer.

2) Problems – Aka – What are your greatest pains?

This section is where you try to find out whether the person has the problem you believe you’re solving.  Your goal is to not lead them to your problem. The less you lead them while still hearing your problem being mentioned the more validation you have!

Some sample questions you could ask:

  • What are your top 3 challenges you face in your job?
  • What are your top 3 challenges you face in your job related to [industry X]? (Industry X being the one your startup is in)
  • If you could wave a magic wand and instantly have a solution to any of those problems…what would the solution be?
  • Dig deeper into their typical day on anything that sounds painful or expensive. (You can add some hyperbole here to get them to rant a bit by saying things like “that sounds inefficient…” or “that sounds expensive…”)
  • How have you dealt with or solved [Problem X]? (You’re looking to find out if they’ve hacked a solution together themselves. If they have…ask for a copy of it!)

People love to talk about themselves, so let them go nuts here and really rant about their problems (i.e.- Shut up and listen!).  Generally, people are terrible at proposing solutions, but you want to hear generally what they envision as solutions or see what they’ve cobbled together themselves.

Notice, you haven’t mentioned your solution or problem yet. If they don’t mention your problem specifically, then as you finish this section of questioning, you should directly ask them if what you think is a problem is a problem for them. Whether they agree it’s a problem or not, you want to then probe why it wasn’t one of their top problems.

3) Your Solution – Aka – See if your idea survives customer interaction

If in your discussions in part 2 your problem you think you’re solving comes up naturally from your interviewee you’re on the right track! Bonus points if the way they describe solving it with their “magic wand” remotely resembles what you’re doing.

No matter what happens in part 2 you should discuss with them what you thought the problem was and what your solution is. Getting validation that they wouldn’t be interested in the idea is just as helpful as finding out they love it; either they’re not a customer or you are learning what your customers want instead of it.

Some sample questions you could ask:

  • Walk them through the problems you believe your solution solves. Do they agree?
  • Does [your solution] solve any of their problems?
  • Would you be willing to pay for our solution? How much? (Don’t be afraid to probe for the pricing you know you want…”Would [X] be reasonable?”)
  • If they’re willing to pay your price and like the idea then…”Would you be willing to start right away?”

If all goes well and you really are solving a pain, then your customer should want access to the product right away. More likely, you’re going to learn a ton about what they do and do not want and your idea will begin evolving.

This basic structure can carry you a long way towards some great validated learning about your idea and the market’s desire for it.

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A few last things to remember:

1) Take Good Notes or Record Everything!

- Once you’ve interviewed 8-10 people, you should be going back over all of your notes and look for patterns. This includes especially looking for patterns in the Part 1 section to see what all the people that agree you are solving their problem have in common. You should summarize your notes then and share with your team.

2) Have other team members sit in on some interviews

- A good customer development focused company will have everyone involved in the process. Performable, pre-HubSpot acquisition, had their engineers spending 30% of their time on the phone with customers. Nothing helps someone do their job better like understanding who they’re building/selling/marketing for.

3) Be conversational

- It shouldn’t feel like an interview! They should feel like they’re just having a conversation with a friend about their problems at work. The more comfortable they feel with you, the more they will open up.

4) Go off script

- The best stuff comes when you dig a little deeper on something that strikes a chord in the discussion.  The script is there to be your roadmap, but there’s no reason you can’t return to it after a 5 minute digression about a specific pain or discovery about how the company operates.

5) If they’ve made an MVP…ask to see it!

- Nothing gives you more insight to a customer than what they’ve hacked together themselves to solve a problem. The best thing you can do is ask to see it, which will give you an idea of what they’re hoping a solution will provide. These people are also the strongest candidates to be great, helpful early adopters of your product.

6) Always follow up

- It’s just common courtesy to thank people for their time and help, but it also opens the door to follow up with them in the future if your product changes and is a fit for them or to invite them to your beta.

7) End with an ask

- Always end your interviews by thanking them and asking them for something. It may be to get a copy of their MVP or even better, ask for an intro to someone they know that might be interested in what you’re working on. In my experience, these intros have an 80-90% success rate in becoming new customer development interviews, whereas cold emails only have a 10% success rate.

8) Be open to new problems! That’s how great products are born.

- As Steve Blank has said, “No idea survives first interaction with a customer.” Don’t be afraid to shift your focus from your first idea to what you’re actually hearing customers want.  If you probe in part 2 and find a burning problem…find out how they currently solve it and what they’d pay to solve it.

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In the end, you want to find a “hair on fire” problem, not a “nice to have problem.”  Think about it this way: If my hair is on fire (literally), and you’re selling buckets of water, I’m definitely going to buy your product. But if I’m cold and wet, I’m not likely to buy your bucket of water right now, but would consider it in the future.

Find customer pain and a solution they desire and will pay for. Rinse. Repeat.

What advice do you have for entrepreneurs doing customer development interviews?

Don’t build that feature! How to use the 5 Why’s to learn what your customer really is saying

6 January 2012

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This post originally appeared on Greenhorn Connect here; I’m housing posts on my blog here as well for easy reference.

Whether you interview customers regularly, watch support requests on HelpScout or use a GetSatisfaction or UserVoice – like tool, your startup is inundated with feature requests from your customers.  It’s great to have them engaging, but can lead to the dreaded “feature creep” that leads to a bloated, unusable product. What’s a startup to do? The answer may surprise you in its simplicity: use the 5 Why’s.

Don’t build that feature! How to use the 5 Why’s to learn what your customer really is saying

In case you’re not familiar, the concept of 5 Why’s is that by asking a person a series of “why” questions, you can get to the real root cause of an issue. Commonly, the issue can be used to do analysis of technical failures as outlined in a great post by Eric Ries found here. However, this can be just as powerful when you apply it to discussions with customers about features.  The power comes from saving you from building things customers actually don’t want or need and surfacing what is really important.

This concept really crystallized for me when I had an experience talking to Chris Keller, the founder of email reminder tool, Followup.cc. I was an active user, but Chris hadn’t decided how to monetize yet. I told him I’d pay for Followup if he provided a calendar to see all my Followup reminders.

There’s just one problem – despite the fact that Chris built that feature not long after our discussion, I’ve never used the calendar even though I am a paying customer because of the core product.

Chris could have avoided building the feature if he had used the 5 Why’s. Here’s how it may have gone.

Me: I’d pay for Followup if you provided a calendar to see all my Followup reminders.

WHY #1: Chris: Why would that make you pay for it?

Me: Because I could then see all the Reminders I’ve set up.

WHY #2: Chris: Why do you want to see all the reminders you’ve set up?

Me: So that I know when I have reminders coming up.

WHY #3: Chris: Why do you want to know when you have reminders coming up?

Me: So I’m sure I know when I should expect a bunch of reminders.

WHY #4: Chris: Why do you need to know when you should expect reminders?

Me: (long pause) …So I’m sure I get all my reminders.

WHY #5: Chris: Why wouldn’t you get all your reminders?

Me: Good question. I guess I’m worried about it not always working.

Chris: Don’t worry. I’ve built Followup to be robust and reliable. Are you sure you need that calendar?

Me: Maybe not.

Your results may vary, but the point is, customers are terrible at coming up with solutions. What they are good at is sharing their problems, which you can solve. The key is to interact with them in a methodical way to get to the heart of what they really need.  Next time you hear from a customer that you need to build a new feature…ask them the 5 Why’s first!

The Lean Product Life Cycle

27 November 2011

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See my previous post to understand how I got here. The hypothesis is that product development is messy except for the most disciplined. After talking to a number of great product people, I have a theory for how great product can be developed while being customer centric (aka lean).

The Virtuous Cycle of Lean Product Development

The Product Management Funnel

I think of product management as a funnel. At the top are all of the ideas your team generates. If you’re a lean startup, that’s hopefully driven by customer interviews, website and landing page behaviors and support interactions and of course the occasional green space wild idea.

As product manager, this is the most dangerous step. Once you have more than a few employees, it’s easy to have these ideas overflowing and interfering with the whole product process. Multiple teams I spoke with have been using their project management tools to capture these ideas which leads to a huge mess (one such company had over 4,000 stories in their icebox!) and a major time suck (one vp of engineering is spending an hour + each day managing these ideas).

The problem is project management != product management. The only thing that should be in your project management tool are key bugs to fix and what you’re building now or in the very near future (ie next sprint). Everything should be clearly defined and in a language and structure preferred by your engineers. All the evolution of the product from idea to customer validation to final prioritization should be done outside the project management tool.

The Rest of the Funnel

The Full Product Funnel

Going back to the beginning, you need discipline at the top of the funnel; the best product people I spoke with are requiring a shred of data tied to an idea to make it into their coveted ideas list. They also often expect a disciplined approach to what goes in by having people state, “Feature X will move Metric Y by Amount Z” so it’s clear why the feature needs added. In earlier stages that may be in a “Hypothesis vs. Metric to Invalidate” format instead.

The key of this step is effectively managing the signal to noise ratio; for every 5-10 ideas that come in, you may only make 1 or 2. Even the less disciplined product managers I spoke with have some type of hot-lukewarm-cold system for trying to rank ideas. To avoid the 4,000 stories in your icebox (or anywhere else) you have to be disciplined on dropping stale ideas and focusing on what matters now. When you’re a growing startup, where you were 3 months ago is dramatically different from where you are now so why keep those stories cluttering your system now?

After wrangling the initial feeder of ideas under control, you need to effectively refine the ideas that make it into your system and allow the most important ones to rise to the top of your list. As planning for your next sprint begins, you need to prioritize these ideas and balance with other existing projects, bugs and other demands.

Once you’ve settled on what you’re going to have engineering build next, you need to engage your team on the ideas you want to implement; you may need copy from marketing, stories from support to describe customer complaints, links or screenshots from analytics to show present activity and relevant customer development notes. All of this feeds into the project management tool you have, but now it’s uncluttered and your engineers are much happier and efficient. Unless you’re github or heroku, chances are your engineers don’t understand the customer they’re building for perfectly so all this structure makes it easier for them to see what’s going on and then adapt it to fit the project management tool they’re using to track building.

As an added bonus, there’s transparency for your other employees as they engage in more than just the initial ideation process. It also means sprint planning no longer needs to have all hands at it as they’re already well aware of what’s going on and have had opportunities to contribute as needed to the stories now being generated in the project management tool.

Completing the Virtuous Cycle

We all know this image so well as the core of what lean startups is all about, but how often is this cycle cleanly implemented? The project management tools out today all do a great job on the build aspect, but what about measure and learn?

The funnel process I described above captures the learn aspect as you engage your team for ideas and validation. All that’s left now is to measure.

After you build something new in your project management tool, your engineers will submit it for some form of approval. Once approved, it universally ends up disappearing into the ether, because the project management tool is built to track what you are building or about to build. After building isn’t part of their process.

To close the lean loop, you need to look back and see if that feature actually moved the needle. This needs to happen within 2-4 weeks of building it; sooner wouldn’t be enough data and longer would be distorted due to other things you’ve likely built by then. This last step of learning should help you refine your instincts and feed back into what you build. This is one of the biggest challenges as Eric discusses his principle of Innovation Accounting in his book.

The amazing thing I discovered in so many of my interviews was how rare it was to do this measure step; how can you improve your accuracy without seeing if you hit the target?

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The Product – Lean Opportunity

What started as an investigation of lean startup opportunities has broadened to helping teams close the loop in managing a product lifecycle. I believe there is tremendous opportunity to build a platform to aide on both sides of the project management tool and much wider than those adopting lean concepts officially (as we all know, being customer centric is not a new concept).

Have opinions on product development? Please leave a comment or email me at evanish dot j at gmail.

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Using Customer Development on the Customer Development Process

27 November 2011

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Earlier in November, I started out on a journey to see if there was an opportunity to build a product that would help companies in being a lean startup. The thought was that with Eric Ries’s book flying off the shelves and the lean startup community exploding, there would be new problems to be solved. Thanks to a nudge from Sim Simeonov and a few consulting opportunities brought my way, I felt like there was definitely something there. Like any startup, once I got outside the building, I learned some harsh realities:

1) Most people only pay lip service to lean.

Painful, but true. In both casual conversations in our community and full blown custdev interviews I found the full spectrum from strict implementers like John Prendergast and Matt Mamet (coincidentally co organizers of the local Lean Startup Circle Boston) to people who claim to be lean and think it has anything to do with how little money they spend (names withheld to protect the innocent).

2) Lean is a hands on activity.

The key to lean really is the human interaction; knowing when to ask an interviewee “tell me more” or deciding what analytics to deep dive to match up against your anecdotal discussions can’t be productized directly. It’s also risky to outsource since it’s so core to the future of your business; no amount of meetings, notes and summaries can compare to being there and doing it yourself. There’s huge opportunities to teach companies how to become lean, but I’m passionate about building a product, not a services business and I’m not sure most companies are ready to invest in lean (see 1).

3) Small startups are more likely to be lean and less likely to need process.

Part of the challenge of the adoption curve of lean is that it has most strongly permeated the zero stage entrepreneurs; they’re the ones with time and motivation to watch the videos, read the books and stay up on all the blogs (which has come a long way in the last year or two since all we had was the Four Steps to the Epiphany to go on).

Unfortunately, those people have little to no budget and because of only having a few people on their team, there isn’t much of a need for tools. Everything can be done ad hoc when you’re that small. The most common behavior when you have 5 or less people is to remove your headphones during the work day and share your findings immediately with everyone on your team.  This is effective until you grow to the point that everyone doesn’t know everything that everyone is doing (usually around 8-15 people).

So all that meant to me was time to pivot:

I’ve known all along that customer development feeds into product management. Fittingly, this is where I did find pain:

  • Managing product while being a growing, lean startup requires significant discipline. Not all companies have product leaders with this strength.
  • Many companies build up product management debt as they grow and fail to adapt to the demands of a team that passes the “take off your headphones and talk” phase.
  • Multiple challenges arise in engaging all members of a company at the right times in the right way.

My next post explains what I’ve found. Read on to see the big picture potential for a lean focused product life cycle.