The Customer-Driven Playbook

Chapter 3. Experimenting

In the previous chapter, we discussed how we must identify our assumptions and formulate them into hypotheses that can be validated. Once we have our hypotheses, we’ll be looking for ways that we can test them with customers.

A key component to our customer-driven strategy is maintaining an ongoing conversation with your customers. Interviews are a relatively cheap way to collect rich customer data, because you’re hearing it “right from the source.”

Interviewing best practices can be used whether you’re conducting an interview, customer visit, focus group, concept value test, or usability test. Accordingly, the bulk of this chapter focuses on exploring interviews as an experimental method.

We’ll also look at additional methods for collecting data and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.

Finally, we’ll discuss how to find customers and how to have meaningful conversations with them.

Conducting a Successful Customer Interview

One of the key characteristics to any successful interview is preparation. While it may be tempting to jump in and start asking your customers questions, you’ll be better served with a more structured approach. In Chapter 2, we talked about how you should take your hypotheses and formulate a Discussion Guide. We provide an example Discussion Guide in each of our playbooks, but let’s look at some other techniques that can help you conduct great customer interviews.

Create a Screener

Before talking with customers, it’s ...