Customer understanding

Goal

Develop a deep understanding of a customer, how they work, their pain, where it is felt. This first customer meeting with someone is a "give-and-take", you have to give something for them to feel that it's worth a meeting. In exchange for them talking to you, you will share your problem presentation. You might carry a tape-recorder and a notebook or bring a digital camera and take pictures of the whiteboard. Your goal is NOT to pitch yor product but to validate your understanding of the problem.

Checklist

1. The most important question to ask
   1. What is the one thing that you want to buy
   2. Which leads to...
   3. How do you do it today (if at all)?
   4. How much does it cost you today?
2. How do your target customers work?
   1. Ask them how their job/life works today.
   2. Ask them to describe the workflow / design flow
   3. Listen and understand
   4. Do not sell or even expain what you are doing, the goal is to understand what they are doing
3. What is the biggest pain in how they work?
   1. If they could have a magic wand and change anything what they do, what would it be?
   2. This is the IPO question - listen carefully
   3. Ask 3 variants around this question
4. What is the organizational impact of this pain?
   1. Individual?
   2. Departmental?
   3. Corporate?
   4. Quantify the impact (dollars, time, duration, costs)?
5. What would make the customer change the current way they do things?
   1. Price?
   2. Features?
   3. New standard?
6. If they had a product like this .... (describe yours in conceptual terms)...?
   1. What percentage of their time could be spent using the product?
   2. How mission critical is it?
   3. Would it solve the pain they mentioned earlier?
   4. What would be the barriers to adopting a product like this?
7. Who do they think have similar products?
   1. Who else is an innovator in this space?
   2. Where else in their company has this been tried?
   3. Is anyone else inside their company trying to build this product?
8. How do they learn about new products?
   1. Trade shows. Do they go? Do others in their company go?
   2. Magazines. What do they read? What do they trust? What do their bosses read?
   3. Sales people, who are the best?
   4. Who are the visionaries in the press / analyst community that they read / respect?
9. Can these customers be helpful in the future?
   1. For the next round of conversation?
   2. For an advisory board?
   3. As a paying customer?
   4. Refer you to others to talk to?

Exit deliverables

• Identical to Customer problem hypthesis exit deliverables but this time with facts.
• Updated Customer and Problem Model

         o Including workflow and proces
         o Including customer pain
         o Including the organisational impact (individual, departmental, corporate)

Part of: Customer Development Checklist - Customer Discovery Part of book: The Four Steps to the Epiphany