Honest Customer Feedback
Gaining insights by listening to create successful products!
A common challenge for entrepreneurs and product managers is getting honest feedback on business ideas. People often give overly optimistic responses to avoid hurting feelings, and tend to offer solutions rather than clearly articulating the underlying problem. Customer conversations are hard. Being intentional and asking the right questions to uncover truthful feedback and identify the real problem is even harder.
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick is an excellent primer for having conversations that elicit genuine, actionable insights instead of false positives.
https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742/
The book is for product managers to learn how to gather honest feedback by focusing on customers’ past behaviors and real problems, maintaining casual conversations, and seeking genuine commitment rather than validation.
1. Ask About Past Behavior, Not Hypotheticals
To get valuable feedback on your ideas, avoid hypothetical questions like “Would you buy this?” Instead, focus on past behavior. Ask specific questions such as “How do you currently solve this problem?” or “When did you last encounter this issue?”
Past behaviors are a much better predictor of future actions than hypotheticals, yielding more honest, actionable insights about your idea’s potential.
2. Avoid Leading Questions
When seeking feedback, avoid leading questions that prompt agreement. For example, “Don’t you think this app would be a great way to save time?” can elicit false positives. Instead, ask neutral questions like “How do you typically manage this task?” This encourages honest responses about actual behaviors and needs, hence providing valuable insights for your idea’s development.
3. Focus on the Problem, Not the Solution
When gathering feedback, focus on understanding the problem rather than selling your solution. Ask about pain points, frustrations, and current solutions, which helps to uncover genuine needs, create solutions people will pay for, and help you avoid premature fixation on your idea to solve the problem.
At nēdl.ai, we are deeply committed and intentional to understanding our customers’ problems before building solutions. We’ve had countless conversations with enterprise and data leaders to thoroughly explore the data transformation gaps and challenges they face. This in-depth discovery phase happened before we wrote a single line of code. Our product-market-fit (PMF) approach is rooted in co-creating solutions alongside our customers, ensuring that real-world insights shape each iteration of the product lifecycle.
4. Pitching Too Early Kills the Conversation
Avoid pitching your solution too early in customer conversations. Instead, focus on learning about the customer, discussing their struggles and current alternatives and solutions. This yields more valuable information than premature selling. By understanding the customer’s perspective first, you’ll gather insights about real needs and behaviors, helping you to develop and present a solution that truly addresses their needs.
The goal is to learn, not to validate your existing idea.
5. Casual Conversations Lead to Honest Insights
Informal settings encourage more honest feedback in customer interviews. Keep conversations casual, like chatting with a friend over coffee, rather than conducting formal interviews. This relaxed approach helps people share their genuine thoughts and feelings, avoiding rehearsed or guarded responses. Creating a comfortable environment makes you more likely to uncover valuable insights about real needs and behaviors.
6. Look for Real Commitment, Not Just Compliments
Genuine commitment, not compliments, indicates product potential. Look for pre-orders, waiting list sign-ups, or follow-up meeting requests; these actions show real interest. Empty praise doesn’t translate to sales. Focus on feedback backed by tangible time, money, or resource commitments. This approach helps distinguish between polite encouragement and genuine market demand for your solution.
What people are willing to commit to matters more than what they say they like.
7. Quantity and Quality of Conversations Matter
You need more than just a couple of conversations to validate your idea. Engage with a larger sample of your target audience to identify common patterns and pain points. The key is striking a balance between quality and quantity in your interactions. Aim for enough conversations to spot trends, but ensure each discussion provides meaningful, actionable insights.
8. Seek Understanding, not Validation
Focus on comprehending the customer’s problem, their current solutions, and whether the issue is significant enough to drive action. While positive feedback feels good, the real test is whether people will change their behavior, spend money, or invest time to solve the problem. If not, your idea may need refinement.
Honest customer feedback is the art and science of listening over questioning and shifting focus from seeking agreement to understanding genuine problem significance.
