Understanding Customer Needs to Build Better Products

How to go about asking the right questions to build a product and understand your customers better

People say you shouldn’t ask your mom whether your idea is a good one. Your mom will most definitely lie to you because she is your mom and loves you, but it’s also a bad question and invites everyone to lie to you at least a little.

This article is inspired by the book The Mom Test, and has some ideas and concepts from the book.

It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to show us the truth. It’s our responsibility to find it. We do that by asking good questions.

Steve Jobs once said - “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new”.

But being actively involved in a team that builds products and being a marketing enthusiast, the question that then comes to my mind is —

How can we build (something) for customers if we don’t know what they want?

The question is, what question(s) need to be asked…

But then again, should we then be knowing what they want? Or do we understand what they want by simply asking them the right questions?
And, can we ask them directly about what they want?

One can measure the usefulness of a customer conversation (to understand their needs) by assessing whether the outcome of the conversation gives us concrete facts about our customer's lives and needs. These, in turn, help us improve the product and value that we provide to our customers.

The problem though with asking direct and pointed questions and still not having a proper understanding could drastically impact the outcome.

For example, if you ask them what do they want then the target audience might answer that they like to cook and use iPads. Based on just these 2 inputs, there could be multiple solutions that could be offered to the target group i.e. A Recipe Book App for iPad, which may not even solve their problem.

Getting to the root cause of the problem by asking questions and listening to the users/customers

With an idea this ambiguous, we can’t answer any of the difficult questions like what recipes to include from which cuisine. Or what way would they consume the content — video, audio, guides, text, etc. Until we get specific, it will remain ambiguous and vague.

The questions you ask should lead to factual answers, not hypothetical statements based on some time in the future. Some examples of good questions:

1. Is X a problem for you on a daily basis?
2. If yes, have you tried to solve it?

If they say X is a problem, but they haven’t really done much to solve it, that means it isn’t really a problem for them. And most definitely solving it won’t be of an urgent priority to them.

But if they say that X is indeed a problem they’ve not only encountered but been trying to solve, you can follow up with questions like:

1. Why do you perceive X to be a problem?
2. What happened last time when you encountered X?
3. In what way does it pose as an impediment to you?
4. How did you resolve it? / Do you have an existing solution to X?
5. Was the entire problem hard to solve? / What part(s) of the problem do you perceive to be hard?
6. What do you not like about the current solution?

These questions talk less about the end result, rather, try to identify and get at the root of the real problem the person is facing. What we want to understand is the true nature of the problem (or if there is none at all) and the urgency for it to be solved. Most importantly, what we really want is for our customers to be truly honest with us.

Lastly, instead of quickly jumping to pitching ideas like, “What if you had a tool that solved X?” or “What if I proposed a solution Y to help you with X?”- again, hypothetical questions to nudge them towards giving solution-based answers — try to talk less and listen more (but keep asking the right set of questions to delve deeper and move towards a solution-oriented approach).

Ultimately what we want is to allow the person to talk about her/his problem, along with every other aspect they believe is connected and relevant to the problem.

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