Beginner's guide to validate your idea with customer
If it had not been part of a Book recommendation from Book Club for Product Managers, I would have never payed attention to a book titled “THE MOM TEST” by Rob Fitzpatrick. My first thought was, what is a book about Mothers doing this in list. After reading this short and crisp book, I am really glad I paid attention to this book.
Author Rob Fitzpatrick has very clearly pointed out how a conversation could turn into a disaster for a startup founder. I am not a startup founder myself(at least yet), But I am a new entry to the “Product Management” world. This is a good read for anyone who’s job requires them to have meaningful conversation with customer.
In most organization, the leadership encourages their employees to be creative and come up with innovative ideas. As a product manager, we often come across these really cool ideas from different stake holders and teams. Most of the them are so happy with their idea that they think its an absolute success and are very sure that this is what customer wants. They want it to be immediately put in the backlog and prioritized.
If you are someone who gets too excited about the idea and immediately put it in your Team’s TO DO list. Please stop and read this book first.
A Product Manager has the responsibility to ensure that the resources spent by the Engineering team of their organization is spent in a meaningful way. One of the most important part of taking that decision is to talk to customer and validate if the feature we intend to develop is really important for them or not.
In my very first call with a customer, she explained what she is expecting from our product. It was a very polite conversation. She seemed very interested and eager about the product. I was quite most of the time, letting my seniors in team do the talking. What I thought was a great customer call, Now after applying The Mom Test, I realize it was a bad one. What we had done was just say OK to a feature request from the customer without asking any meaningful questions.
As the author takes us through different parts of the book, he covers all the important must do aspects of Customer conversation starting with Customer selection, Preparing for the talk, Keeping it Casual, Asking the right questions and Ending the meeting in meaningful way. He has several Rule of Thumb across the book which makes it very easy to understand the intention of the content. One of my favorite Rule of Thumb is “If you’ve mentioned your idea, people will try to protect your feelings”
I went through this exact same situation couple of days ago as I was explaining my next great idea to my manager. He was very polite, he gave me lot of compliments and unintentional ego boost. He might have very well did it to protect my feelings. Without this book, I might have straight gone to the Engineers with this idea. Now I will take a step back, setup a customer conversation and validate my idea.
Though I am confident now that I have this book to prep for my next customer meeting, Effective Customer conversation to validate an Idea is a skill that need to be worked upon consistently. Any conversation could get hijacked and we need to be vigilant to get back into the track to meet our conversation goals. In the end, as the Author quotes “ we are searching for the truth, not trying to be right” in customer conversations.
Here is to hoping to have better customer conversation and solving real problems!
