If you’re talking to customers and feel like you’re not getting any meaningful insight, this is for you

Any time I talk to a founder and they’re frustrated because they’re talking to customers but feel like they’re not getting anything meaningful out of the conversations, my mind always drifts to how I’ve seen founders run interviews in the past.

They’ll ask questions like “How did you find the platform?”, “What are your favorite features?”, and “What should we add to the product?”

And they’ll drill-down into the specific use cases and requirements of whatever features or requests they make.

“Well when would you actually use that feature?”

“What does it help you accomplish?”

“What if you could accomplish the same goal, but instead did it this way? Does that meet your needs?”

And then poof! The 30 minutes they had with the customer are gone. They’re off the call and they feel like they got some valuable information….

…Except when they sit down to do any kind of visioning or strategic planning for where the business should go next, all they can think of are the features they need to add and the bugs they need to squash.

Product-related interviews certainly have a time and a place, but if we’re hoping to do customer research and get valuable strategic insight from them, we’ll need to resist the urge of asking pure feature-related questions.

It’s time to start asking “why?”

Instead, we’ll need to ask questions that give us a peek into the customer’s psychology:

1. How they make choices

2. Why they choose our product over others

3. What they were doing before, during, and after choosing the product

We also have to de-couple the assumption that there’s nothing to be gained from understanding the “why” behind our customer’s decisions.

On the contrary — it’s this exact information that you want so you can adjust your marketing to get as close to that “why” for the best paying customers as possible.

Tomorrow, I’ll cover a few examples of customer interview questions you can ask that will give you incredible insights and not the same-old-same-old.

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