Lean at ITP NYU Class 2: How to Interview Users and Customers

1. Class 2 / 12
February 9, 2015
Jen van der Meer | jd1159 at nyu dot edu
Josh Knowles | chasing at spaceship dot com
LEAN
LAUNCHPAD
AT NYU ITP
Rockets Sketches borrowed from Harry Allen Design

2. 6:30 – 7:00
Guest Speaker: Chris Milne, Sacrificial Prototypes
7:00 – 8:00
5 minute business model canvas presentations
5 minute questioning of key business model hypotheses
8:00-8:15
Break
8:50 – 9:10
Discussion – Value Proposition, Research Methods
8:30–9:30
Guest Speakers:
Travis Hardman, CTO Daily Voice
TODAY:

3. .
CLASS TIMEFRAME 2015
2/2
Business Models
Customer Development
2/9
Value Proposition
Research tools
2/16
President’s Day
2/23
Customer Segments
Research Tools
3/23
Spring Break
3/9
Customer Relationships
Product Development
3/23
Resources
Activities + Costs
3/30
Product Development
UX and User Interface
Design
4/6
UI UX Part 2
4/13
Product Development
User test
4/20
Product development
4/27
Product MVP
May!
Delicious Celebration
Lessons Learned
3/2
Revenue Streams
Distribution Channels

4. 4

5. LEAN AT NYU ITP
OUR APPROACH

6. Customer research is about getting out of the building.
It must be done by you, the founding team, because:
• Key customer feedback points are random,
unpredictable, and often painful to hear.
• Employees have far less at stake, may fear reporting
bad news, and they don’t get heard adequately when
they report back.
• There are good consultants (like our UX advisors for the
class) and bad ones, who weed out the negative
commentary and who look for upsell opportunities. Learn
how to tell the good from the bad by doing the work
yourself.
CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT

7. “ONLY a founder can embrace the feedback, react to it,
and adeptly make the decisions necessary to change or
pivot key BUSINESS MODEL components?”
AGREE?

8. A Value Proposition creates value for a Customer Segment
through a distinct mix of elements catering to that
segment’s needs.
Quantitative, Qualitative.
VALUE PROPOSITION

9. A Value Proposition creates value for a Customer Segment
through a distinct mix of elements catering to that
segment’s needs.
Quantitative, Qualitative.
VALUE PROPOSITION

10. Newness
Performance
Customization
“Getting the job done”
Design
Brand/Status
Price
Cost Reduction
Risk Reduction
Accessibility
Convenience/Usability
_The Business Model Canvas
VALUES

11. GO DEEPER ON VALUE PROP:

12. VALUE PROPOSITION FIT

13. VALUE PROPOSITION FIT

14. WHERE DO YOU
FIND A VALUE
PROPOSITION?
14

15. LEAN SIMULATES ENTREPRENEURSHIP
BY REQUIRING FOUNDERS TO GET OUT OF THE
BUILDING…AND INTO YOUR CUSTOMER’S WORLD.
Customer
Discovery
Customer
Creation
Customer
Validation
Company
Building
15
Pivot

16. TALKING TO CUSTOMERS IS INTIMIDATING –
WHAT DO I SAY, WHAT DO I DO?
16
OBSERVING CUSTOMERS IS TRICKY – WHAT
DO I LOOK FOR, WHAT DO I WATCH?

17. TEAMS GET OVER THE HUMP, BUT FIND ITS VERY
HARD TO GET TO A TRUE PAIN POINT
“I think I only scratched the surface, and never really got to the
core problems.”
“I don’t know if my customers really understand what they need
enough to articulate it to me.”
“Customers said they would pay, but then they didn’t when it
came time to pay.”
17

18. CUSTOMER DISCOVERY YIELDS SURFACE LEVEL INSIGHTS

19. BUT WITHOUT DEEPER UNDERSTANDING, TEAMS
STRUGGLE TO DISCOVER THE HIDDEN, INVISIBLE, OUT
OF CONSCIOUSNESS TRUTHS. THE DEEPEST PAIN
POINTS THAT CUSTOMER WANT SOLVED.
CUSTOMER DISCOVERY YIELDS SURFACE LEVEL INSIGHTS

20. PAIN DRIVEN DESIGN
Artifacts
Behavior
Expressed Needs
Norms
Beliefs Assumptions
Values
Plans
Traditions
Attitudes

21. 21
Find the outlier
unmet needs that
inspire novel
approaches
Most startups fit the
bell curve of
sameness
AS A RESULT, MANY STARTUPS CHASE
THE SAME PAIN POINTS

22. 22
SELECTING QUICK HIGH IMPACT DESIGN RESEARCH
METHODS TO GET UNDER THE ICEBERG

23. WHAT’S DIFFERENT FROM DESIGN RESEARCH
Customer development IS different than ethnography or design research inquiry –
Founders are NOT neutral observers. While you can practice the art of neutral
observation, you, as a founder, are making contact with your first potential customers.
We’re going to start wide, and expansive, and go deep, getting to deeply unmet
needs that can drive a successful business model.
But we will be quickly moving to understand the business model that will fuel your
vision.
Customer Discovery
- test customer reactions
- is the business model scalable?
- build customer demand
Design Research
- clarify customer needs
- is the customer need significant?
- test product features

24. DESIGN RESEARCH METHODS
TO COMPLEMENT CUSTOMER DISCOVERY
24
Getting Ready Designer/Researcher Text/Source
Empathy exercises D-School D-School Bootleg
Brain Dump Steve Portigal Interviewing Users
Design Pass/Vail Tests Giff Constable Talking to Humans
Listening Methods
Create Contrasts Steve Portigal Interviewing Users
Probe for the Unsaid Steve Portigal Interviewing Users
Observing Methods
Tours or Games Ajay Revels Politemachines
AEIOU Harrington Universal Methods of
Design

25. GETTING READY
25

26. GETTING READY: DEVELOPING EMPATHY
The problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own – and you won’t
find a market until you can understand the needs that other have. Make
sure you are not just getting out of the building, but getting into the context
of your customers’ lives.
Observe: View users and their behavior in the context of their lives.
Engage: interact and interview users through scheduled and short
“intercept” encounters.
Immerse: Experience what your user experiences.
From: D-School Bootcamp Bootleg:

27. Convene a brain dump.
Get what’s in everyone’s heads out on the table. Assumptions,
expectations, closely held beliefs, perspectives, hypotheses.
Contradictions are inevitable, and become great fodder for
hypotheses to test on your business model canvas.
“Think about it as a transitional ritual of unburdening, like men emptying
their pockets of keys, change, and wallet as soon as they return home.”
– Adapted from Steve Portigal, Interviewing Users.
GETTING READY: BRAIN DUMP
27

28. Set targets now, to see if you can disprove your riskiest hypotheses.
Customer discovery is qualitative at first, but after 100 interviews, you
will start to get quantitative understanding.
What do you expect to be true?
What constitutes a pass?
A fail?
Set goals for key questions and track results. – Giff Constable, Talking
to Humans
DESIGN PASS/FAIL TESTS
28

29. LISTENING METHODS
29

30. To check against a “cover story” or get underneath the obvious truths:
Compare processes: “How is applying for preschool different than applying
for pre-k.”
Compare to others: “Do you learning habits differ from your fellow grad
students in your program”
Compare across time: “How have your shopping habits changed from the
time you lived with roommate, to living alone, to living with a partner.”
• Adapted from Interviewing Users, by Steve Portigal
LISTENING METHOD:
CREATE CONTRASTS
30

31. To get underneath to values, latent needs, reasons why:
Ask for clarification: “When you said everything changed after
September, what happened then.”
Ask about code words: “What does that acronym stand for.”
Ask about emotional cues: “Why do you laugh when you mention Seven
Eleven.”
Probe delicately: “You mentioned that changes in your organization led
to a different decision – can you tell me what that situation was.”
Probe without presuming: “Some people have strong opinions about
teaching children to read before they enter first grade, while other’s
don’t. What is your take.”
• Adapted from Interviewing Users, by Steve Portigal
LISTENING METHOD:
PROBE FOR THE UNSAID
31

32. OBSERVING METHODS

33. Tours are a form of immersive observation that allow you to experience the
whole context of the customer problem you’re interested in. Tours can be as
broad as “shopping for shoes” or as specific as sending a message to a family
member.
Games or simulations are a playful form of interactive observation that allow
you to experiment with different aspects of the customer problem.
Your mission is to capture:
Who (who are we observing)
What (what are they doing)
How (how are they doing it)
Why (are they doing it)
When (are they doing it)
Where (are they doing it)
-- Ajay Revels, Polite Machines
WATCHING METHOD:
TOURS & GAMES
33

34. WATCHING METHOD:
AEIOU
34
AEIOU is an organizational framework when you get into the natural habitat of the
person you are interviewing, and gives you a construct to look, listen, and observe
(rather than talk, and hear):
Activities: goal directed sets of actions. What are the pathways that people take
toward the things they want to accomplish, including specific actions and processes?
Environments: include the entire arena in which activities take place.
Interactions: between a person and someone, or something else, and are the
building blocks of activities.
Objects: Building blocks of the environments, key elements put to complex or even
unintended uses, possibly changing their function, meaning, and context.
Users: people whose behaviors, preferences, and needs are being observed. Who
is present? What are their roles and relationships? What are their values and biases.
From: Universal Methods of Design. Bella Harrington, Bruce Hanington.

35. DESIGN RESEARCH IS
FUN, WHEN DO WE
STOP?
35

36. HOW TO CONSTRUCT A VALUE PROPOSITION
DRIVEN BY DESIGN RESEARCH
DEVELOP EMPATHETIC
MUSCLE MEMORY
PRACTICE THROUGH
CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT
ARTICULTATE PAIN
POINTS + NEEDS
STATED, VISIBLE, AND
HIDDEN, TACIT
36

37. BUT DON’T DESIGN RESEARCH FOREVER
Customer
Discovery
Customer
Creation
Customer
Validation
Company
Building
Move forward to quantitative proof when you seek to validate your
business model, testing and iterating until you find scalability, and
repeatability.
The goal: deliver the volume to build a profitable company
Designers and Design Researchers are known, fairly or unfairly, for
“avoiding the work of the sales funnel” – but as a founder – you
have to test your ability to scale: Product, acquisition, pricing,
channel, sales plan
Iteration Execution
37

38. WHAT CAME BEFORE STEVE AND ERIC
38

39. Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights:
Steve Portigal
Universal Methods of Design: Bella Harrington, Bruce
Hanington.
DSchool Bootcamp Bootleg
Talking to Humans, Giff Constable with Frank Rimalovski
Ajay Revels Polite Machines
DESIGN RESEARCH CONTRIBUTORS
39

40. .
NEXT WEEK PREP:
Watch Customer Segments lecture.
Business Model Generation, 126-145.
The Founder’s Dilemma (HBR) and optional – The Founder’s Dilemma
Noam Wasserman (Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
Podcast)
The Lean UX Manifesto by Anthony Viviano
Talk to at least 5 potential customers. Post discovery narratives on your
team blog, or in an appendix in your presentation.

41. .
NEXT WEEK PRESENTATION:
Prepare a presentation – guidelines below:
· Cover slide
· Latest version Business Model Canvas with changes marked
· Market size (TAM, SAM, Target Market)
Total addressable: how big is the universe
Served available market: how many can I reach with my sales channel?
Target market: who will be the most likely buyers?
· Propose experiments to test your value proposition. What constitutes a
pass/fail signal for each
test?