Customer Development might be a process, but conversation is a skill. Particularly, getting the information you want depends on your skill in controlling the momentum of the conversation.
When you know the rough topics you want to cover, you can direct the conversation easily with a few good Softball, Anchor and Deflection questions handy.
"Tell me about the last time you…"“How’s it going with…”
"How often does that happen?"“Who else is affected by this?”
“Can you walk me, step-by-step, though how you decided?”
“Has this ever gone off-track or been more challenging than normal?”
But often, they’ll ask for advice or insight from my research so far. After all, if I’m building a product, I must be knowledgeable. My answer is usually that I’d be happy to dig in and help them, but I’t be helpful to know a bit more about their context first.
"Sure, I can tell you all about that. To help me make sure I'm giving the best advice, can we first talk about how you…. "“Great! We should really make time to properly show you what we’re up to. To help make sure it’s relevant, what are some cases where you would have used our product in the past?”
I’d recommend the sources that helped me in this area:
I’m a new parent, and prioritising my attention on our new rhythms as a family.
Work-wise, I’m trekking along at a cozy pace, doing stuff that doesn’t require meetings :)
I have a few non-exec/advisory roles for engineering edu programs. I’m also having fun making a few apps, going deep with zero-knowledge cryptography, and have learned to be a pretty good LLM prompt engineer.
In the past, I've designed peer-learning programs for Oxford, UCL, Techstars, Microsoft Ventures, The Royal Academy Of Engineering, and Kernel, careering from startups to humanitech and engineering. I also played a role in starting the Lean Startup methodology, and the European startup ecosystem. You can read about this here.
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