#31 Researching Customer Problems
After studying psychology in the late '90s, Cindy started her product, research, and design career. She has led many Product, Design, and Research Teams over the last decades. Next to that she wrote and published the book Lean Customer Development.
Cindy speaks in this episode, about how to best do customer research. She shares very practical examples of how to understand customer problems without interviews, and best practices to understand what customers really want and need. One of her key messages is that asking questions is not only important for customers, it also helps inside companies to better understand each other.
Cindy on the internet:
Linkedin: @cindyalvarez
Cindy's book: Lean Customer Development
Website: https://www.cindyalvarez.com
Podcast Minutes
Table of content
0:30 - Intro Cindy Alvarez
3:20 - Day-to-day business as Customer Researcher
5:05 - Doing research on Twitter, Reddit, and co.
10:25 - Building stakeholder relationships to push research
13:25 - How to get started with research in your company
16:15 - Reducing and avoiding bias
19:15 - Talking and negotiating with customers
21:50 - Understanding customer problems
24:20 - Customer research vs. user research
27:40 - Handling design critiques with founders and managers
31:15 - Stock questions to understand the “why”
36:15 - Documenting research outcomes (TL;DR)
39:25 - The biggest mistakes leaders make about research
42:25 - Debrief Christan & Alex
What is customer research at GitHub?
Cindy: Developers are the people who make software. They're making things, they see every piece of the puzzle. And so to some degree, I imagine it's a little bit like when medical students go to the doctor, and they feel like I'm learning this, or maybe I already know this better than you. And so there's a very different approach to how you ask questions in companies.
I've worked in a lot of enterprise software companies. And the only real hesitation you get is my employer. Would my employer be okay with me saying this? And I feel a lot of times like when you try to do research with developers, they're trying to research you right back.
So that makes for a really fascinating interchange. But I also think it's so important because again, these are the people who are building things, Engineers, Product Managers, all the stuff that we use is coming together because of these people and the tools that we're building for them.
So it feels like a really great responsibility and one that I'm really excited to take on.
What’s your day-to-day business in your current position?
Answer: So it's a pretty even split between the kind of what I call day-to-day research and actually really trying to democratize that and helping everyone at GitHub do that.
You're building something and you want to get a prototype in front of some customers as quickly as possible. You've got some assumptions you think to yourself this doesn't have to be super rigorous, but we just would love to hear from five people outside of these walls. So a lot of this is helping PMs, Designers, and Engineers to ask those questions on their own to just set them up so they're not asking biased questions.
And so they're directing it to the appropriate audience. There are some questions where you can throw something out on Twitter and you'll get a perfectly good “Hey, this isn't us, we've got a good counterbalance.”
And there are other things where you're really looking for a very special kind of participant. And if you're looking for an experienced security researcher to weigh in on something, you really don't want someone who's in week two of code school. And so for those, we do a lot of help with trying to recruit.
The other side is really “What are the big risks two to three to six months out?” And those are often things that I remember from my time as a Product Manager, you're incredibly busy. There are so many things going on and it's so hard to lift your head up and say, “Once this thing gets out the door, what are the bigger existential risks to it?”
And so that's an area where we really enjoyed digging into is to say “Okay, this thing works, but why would someone use it?” Or, “Why would someone not use it?” Or, “Why would someone want to use it, but find them obstacles in their way?”
We do a lot of interviewing, watching people surveying to try and figure out those questions.
Can you do customer research on Twitter?
I think there are a lot of times when, honestly, if you are a software development house and you've got strong opinions about product, as part of being a founder is having a very strong sense of this is what the world needs.
And so there's a lot of things that can't be built by committee at the same time when you've got that strong internal opinion. It is really healthy to just expose it to the air sometimes. And so it's not showing a prototype. It's just maybe saying, “Hey, we assume that the world does things this way.”
And then you can ask that and if you immediately get back 10 responses of people who don't do it that way and think it's very strange, and that's really assigned for more research, and digging deeper into the question. If you shoot that question out, and you immediately get people saying “Yeah, of course, this makes sense.”, again, you might ask a little more, but it's just that finger to the wind.
And so there's a lot of things where that can help you feel more confident. It can also shape into deeper research. I often say that it's hard to engage in a lot of research. If you don't know the questions you should be asking sometimes that Twitter post reveals the questions that you should be asking.
And that's when you can bring in that more rigor and more time and saying, “These are the people we need to be learning from, and this is how we should frame that question.”
What stakeholder relationships do Research Teams need to be in a good place?
… tune in to learn more! 🎧
