Good Questions: You’re Wasting Time (and Maybe Money) by Not Knowing How to Asking Them
This post is the second of a posts series about The Mom Test and Customer Interviews. You can go through them by the following links:
- General OVERVIEW
- #1. Asking GOOD QUESTIONS <<
- COMMON MISTAKES when trying to ask good questions
- #2. Avoiding BAD DATA
- #3. Keeping It CASUAL
- #4. Pushing for COMMITMENT & ADVANCEMENT
- #5 FRAMING the meeting
- #6. Customer SEGMENTATION
- #7. PREPPING & REVIEWING
- #8. Taking NOTES
As we saw in the previous post, having good conversations with clients is one of the critical skills for asking good questions.
In the following pictures, we represent good and bad questions. Would you know how to differentiate them?
Good questions, bad questions, who cares?
Customer conversations are bad by default. It’s your job to fix them.
Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test
As Rob remarks in his book, the usual thing when we go bungee jumping is first to check the rope meticulously, without a «positive psychology» about the state of the string. With our business idea, we must do the same.
However, even when we do not admit it, every time we have an idea and want to find out if it is a good one or not, our natural impulse is to seek the approval of others, and this can be dangerous.
Usually, the person we ask wants to please us (especially if we go with «This is MY idea, what do you think?«, this is like to ask «Do you like ME?«). Even worse, it can give you a false sense of security that wastes a lot of time, effort and money.
Asking bad questions is worse than asking none. When you know you have no idea, you tend to be careful. But when you collect a handful of false positives, your security increases.
Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test
Really, the opinion of somebody doesn’t matter much, as they have no idea whether the business will work or not. Only the market knows.
From above, we draw one of the central learnings of The Mom Test:
Opinions are worthless.
Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test
Some bad questions examples are the following:
If asking for opinions is not the way, ¿what is?
You have to decide by yourself if your idea is good or not, collecting and analyzing all the necessary info.
For this, you can ask the following questions to your customers:
The previous questions help us to obtain factual information about our customers and how they see the world, and with it, to know if our idea is OK or KO. This information will help us to fit better the problem we want to address and to know if both the problem and the solution are relevant in the market.
To get this critical information, we must replace asking for opinions by asking good questions.
Asking good questions
If you look closely, you will note that while all the bad questions talk about you and your idea, good questions talk about the life of your customer and himself.
So by now, you should know the answer to the question we began this post with.
With that, we have the first of the 3 principal rules for having great customer conversations:
To improve our conversations with customers, we simply need to avoid mentioning our idea at the beginning of the conversation. With this, we will begin to ask better questions instantly.
Some examples of good questions
It will help you to know the goals and motivations of your customers
Is this a significant problem for your client?
Are they managing it? If they have not looked for ways to solve the problem, it is an indicator that there is no business here
In a B2B environment, it is an essential question, it will tell you which prospects you must talk to understand their problems and, finally, pay for your solution.
This question will give you people to talk with and keep learning.
Responsibility
As you may have realized, good questions don’t ask about what you should build, and this is so for a reason: what to build is your responsibility.
It boils down to this: you aren’t allowed to tell them (your customers) what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.
Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test
In the next post, we’ll look at some common mistakes entrepreneurs make when trying to ask good questions.
Do you have any advice/learning/question/concern that you want to share regarding this topic? I would love to hear about it. Please write a comment or email me at mariano.torres@maztories.com.
