This document discusses customer development and outlines its key steps: forming a hypothesis about a customer problem; finding potential customers to interview; asking open-ended questions to understand customer frustrations, constraints, decision-making processes, and workflows; making sense of interview findings to validate or invalidate hypotheses; and using insights to build minimum viable products that test learning. It emphasizes that half of all product ideas fail and that customer development can save significant time by avoiding building the wrong products.

1. Practical
Customer
Development
Cindy Alvarez
Director of User Experience,
Yammer (a Microsoft company)

2. The “lean startup” is:
• Use of low-cost and free
software frameworks and
services
• Rapid, iterative development
• Customer development

3. Customer development
doesn’t come naturally
to builders and do-ers

4. You’re wrong
half the time
At Yammer, nearly 50% of our projects fail to
ship because they do not move the intended
metrics.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix all agree that at least half of
their feature ideas fail too.
http://ai.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/ExPThinkWeek2009Public.pdf

5. Each hour of
saves 5, 10, 20+
hours of

6. Tools:
http://bit.ly/14a30PQ

7. Customer Development
steps:
• Forming a hypothesis
• Finding potential customers to talk to
• Asking the right questions
• Making sense of the answers
• Figuring out what to build to keep learning
• Repeat as needed

8. Forming a Hypothesis:
• Problem, not product
• Testable
• Narrower is better

10. I believe [type of person]
experiences [problem]
while performing [task].

11. Your potential customer:

12. Finding potential customers:
• Use your (extended) network
• LinkedIn
• Quora
• Domain-specific websites
• Stores, clubs, and “real world”
locations

13. Templates:
http://bit.ly/16K4mhM

14. Asking the right questions:
• What is the potential customer already
doing?
• Frustrations
• Constraints
• How they decide, how they buy, how
they use

15. Getting customers to talk:
• Tell me about the last time…
• 60 seconds of silence
• No “yes/no” questions
• “Other people have told me…”
• Who / What / When / How / Why

16. Tell me about how you do _________
today…

17. Do you use any [tools/products/apps/tricks]
to help you get ________ done?

18. If you could wave a magic wand and be
able to do anything that you can’t do today,
what would it be?
(Don’t worry about if it’s possible)

19. Last time you did ___________, what were
you doing right before you got started?
Once you finished, what did you do after?

20. Is there anything else about _________
that I should have asked about?

21. You may be wondering
about:
• Compensation for interviewees
• On-site, face-to-face, phone, other?
• Should I record?
• Who needs to interview?
• What if the customer isn’t useful?

22. Making sense of what you
hear:• Validates
• Invalidates
• Surprises
• Emotion

23. What to build next:
• What is your biggest risk?
• (Use the magic wand on yourself)
• MVPs are not scalable!

24. MVPs for learning can be:
• Concierge MVP
• “Wizard of Oz” MVP
• Single use case MVP
• Pre-order (“vaporware”) MVP
• Other peoples’ products

25. Pick your metrics (for
example):• X% increase in signup conversions
• Y% decrease in time between signup
and successful task completion
• Customer reports qualitative data

26. You can ask questions anytime!
cindy@cindyalvarez.com or @cindyalvarez
(also stay tuned for Lean Customer