Effective Customer Validation Interviews

Customer validation is a critical step when it comes to product development. We need it to be double-sure that we have a sustainable business model and to guide our decision-making in the right direction. It is the second of the decisive steps for building winning products as suggested by Steve Blank in the book, “The Four Steps to the Epiphany.”

With customer validation interviews, we get an opportunity to understand the problem better and whether we’re contemplating the best solution. Are we looking to solve a problem that really matters or otherwise? These interviews allow us to test our assumptions and hypotheses before deciding on a solution.

Customer validation interviews, however, may not result in awesome products if we don’t do them right. Here are some things to keep in mind when looking to conduct productive interviews.

Don’t put off too late

We should aim to carry out customer validation interviews as early as possible in the product development process. The ideal time should be before we have invested too much time and resources. This allows us to derive maximum benefits from them.

We may proceed with validation as soon as we have developed a hypothesis or have a product idea. At this point, we don’t need to worry about having something solid or correct enough. What is important is to have something sufficient to provide a starting point for our discussion with the customer.

Pay close attention to personas

All product managers don’t work on the same kind of product. Some deal with B2C products while some others have to deal with those of the B2B kind. This means then that the persona to work with may be more than one. It is critical to not miss this fact. We can have multiple user personas for B2B or enterprise products. For instance, the user persona will usually be different from the buyer persona. We should seek to understand what matters to the different personas.

The buyer persona is more important if we have to place a higher premium on one. We may succeed in building something that delights the user and still fail if we can’t win over those making the buying decisions. It is, therefore, critical to know what buyers think.

Explore in advance

Seeing how the most important decision-maker might not be the user, it will help if we started early trying to determine the right personas. But it should be noted that our focus must not entirely be on only one. We can aim to know the relative importance. It is through our research that we would know users and the persons making the buying decisions if different. This makes it easier to plan how to approach the interviews more effectively as well as the ideal questions to ask.

Interview in-person

As much as possible, we should try to conduct customer validation interviews in person. This won’t always be possible, but we should look out for such opportunities. In-person interviews give us a chance to look beyond what the customer is telling us. They enable us to better factor in the context. For example, is the body language telling us something else? The cues we get may also guide us to ask the right questions. It would be easier setting up face-to-face interviews with users than with buyers. Phone interviews and/or video conferencing are among alternatives to consider when not feasible.

Conduct as many interviews as possible

We should aim to do more than just a handful of interviews when doing customer validation. It will be hard to get a good enough picture of the situation with those. Although it is not a standard rule, we should aim to interview a minimum of 20 customers. No doubt this will improve our understanding of the problem and the minimum solution that could help to address it, compared to talking with, say, less than 10.

It helps also to ensure that interviews are long enough to enable us to get the most out of them. Building rapport, for instance, will help us set the tone nicely for an interview – that would take some time. Some valuable questions that we didn’t plan previously might also come up, increasing the need for more time.

Customer validation interviews should last at least 30 minutes. The stage of validation will determine what amount of time is sufficient.

Ask open-ended question

We must let the customer do the talking when interviewing them.  Our main aim isn’t to pitch a solution yet but to get a better understanding. So, we should give the customer the room to fully express themselves. When we say anything, it should be to probe further by asking the right questions. We ask to know the reasons for certain responses and listen more.

It will be crucial to ensure that we make our questions open-ended. They should not simply limit responses, say, to “Yes” or “No.” Our questions need be of the “What,” “Why,” or “How” nature that causes customers to speak freely.

Don’t pitch the solution too early

Continuing from the foregoing, we need to be careful to not present our proposed solution too prematurely during customer validation interviews. Failure here can make us fall into the trap of talking more than the customer. As a result, we may end up not learning enough about their pain points and aspirations or desires.

It is only after understanding the problem and the customer behavior that we should consider presenting our solution. A high-level overview of the value proposition and some important features could also be enough in this case for customers to have an idea. We can present sketchy mock-ups before later building complete prototypes for advanced validation.