The Ultimate List of Customer Development Questions

Personally, I push for "did" questions as opposed to "would" questions. "Did" questions ask about what happened and put you back into the mindset of the last time you had the problem. "Would" questions ask you to predict the future, what you might feel, what decisions you might make, etc. It can lead an entrepreneur down a dangerous path.

And that's because people are optimistic. They always think they'll make better decisions in the future, push harder, work smarter, be more diligent, whatever.. and we know for a fact that the vast majority of people don't.

For example, it's April.. how many people are still following their New Years' Resolutions?

This deserves greater exposure, it is extremely difficult to improve upon your list.

The only thing that this outline now requires is

a. An adherence to good interviewing principles

b. Effective note taking

c. Rigorous post-interview analysis

A fantastic resource - bookmarked and Evernote'd.

The problem I have with customer development interviews is that people often suck at verbalizing what they really need.

I much prefer Amy Hoy's "safari" approach where you silently observe and record what people do and say in their natural environment (vs. the "zoo" that is a customer development interview).

I'd be interested in hearing customer development/feature discovery stories from the HN community and how it relates to the questions on this list. I'm curious if there are other techniques or questions that have proven effective, or questions on the list that didn't work.