In the summer of 1993, I did my first customer interview.
It was a disaster.
I didn't speak with another customer for six years. I avoided it like the plague. I hid in software engineering jobs where I didn’t have to.
In 2000, I pursued my first startup and I had to start doing customer interviews again. Even then, it was hit or miss and I got absolutely nowhere.
Surprise, surprise – the startup failed.
I continued fumbling through doing customer discovery over the next five years. This was followed by an eight year stint doing various B2C product manager jobs that allowed me to avoid talking to customers.
In 2013, I started a job in a small B2B company. Accountable for bringing in new revenue into the business, I made a commitment to speak with at least one customer a week with the goal of growing the existing portfolio and launching a new product.
It took six months, but I finally launched my own B2B product that some might consider “successful”.
- 20 customers signed up prior to launching the product.
- Product activations at 91% of our customer base.
- Revenue growth of 20% and net margin improvement of 29%.
To be honest, though? I cringe when I think back to how I did customer interviews then.
I hate everything about how I did customer interviews in 2013.
And in 2015. And in 2016. And so on.
That’s the cool thing about speaking with customers.
You can look backward and see yourself getting better.
I’ll probably look back at today and feel the same way. I sure hope so.
It would mean I’m getting better.
From having done 1000s of customer conversations, I've uncovered that there are certain questions that customers WISH you had asked them, but they won't tell you to ask.
I learned that these are the real questions that unlock true customer insights that can lead to breakthrough new market opportunities, fuel our product roadmaps to deliver business-impacting customer value, and - to be honest - make us look awesome as product managers.
That's why on July 25 I partnered with 30-year veteran product leader and host of the Product Leader's Journey podcast, Rahul Abhyankar, to host a free webinar called What Customers Wish We Had Asked.
We cover:
- What hard lessons have taught us what we should do before we talk to the customer.
- What hard lessons have taught us what we should do after we talk to the customer.
- What our real goal is when interviewing customers.
- How to unearth stories out of customers.
- Questions customers wish we had asked them - the ones they're really looking to answer!
- Numerous real-world customer interaction stories.
We share the customer discovery tactics we've used to grow our product businesses to $100M+!
Watch the replay now.
That's it for today.
