Customer learning is the act of taking [[Talking to customers|customer conversations]] from your [[Customer Segments|Customer segment]] and turning them into useful and actionable learnings. ## Don’t have one “business guy” You generally don’t want one “business guy” talking to customers and telling the rest of the team what to do based on “this is what the customer wants” trump card. Sometimes they may misinterpret or not fully understand what’s going on, and might create a learning bottleneck. ## Avoid the learning bottleneck To avoid the learning bottleneck, the learnings have to be shared with the entire founding team promptly and faithfully (good notes is a plus here). ### Learning bottle necks can be created in multiple ways - Founder in touch with customers can do a bad job of sharing info - Product team can refuse to engage with customers and what they say ### Symptoms of bottlenecking - “You worry about the product, I’ll handle the customers” - “Because the customers told me so!” - “I don’t have time to talk to people — I need to be coding!” ### Prepping Be sure you know your list of 3 big [[Questions]]. Figure them out with your team and make a point to face the scary questions. Spend time writing down your current beliefs of what the person you’re talking to cares about and wants. Cross check these with what you actually learned in the meeting, and ask questions to verify or disprove them. Ask yourself what you want to learn from these guys beforehand, it doesn’t take a lot, just have some idea of what you’re going into and why. **If you don’t know what you’re trying to learn, you shouldn’t bother having the conversation** ### Reviewing After the convo, review the notes with your team. Goal is to make sure learnings is on paper and in everyone’s heads instead of just 1 person’s. Talk through key quotes and main takeaways of the convo, as well as any problems you ran into. Also, do a meta-review: - Which questions worked and which didn’t? - What can we do better next time? - Where there important signals/questions we missed? Reviewing is simple and can be quick, but don’t skip it! ### How to take good notes in the conversations Good notes are super important for keeping others in the loop, and keeping the information objective and rememberable. - If writing down exact quotes, wrap them in quotation marks - Add symbols to your notes as context - :) for happy - :( sad - :| embarrassed - And so on, can use other symbols like stars etc once you have a meaning for them - Someone saying “that’s a problem” can mean two different things depending on their tone and the emotion behind it - Use the five “life” symbols - ☇ Pain or problem (symbol is a lightning bolt) - ⨅ Goal or job-to-be-done (symbol is a soccer/football goal) - ☐ Obstacle - These prevent your customer from solving their problems even if they wanted to - I.e if they would “love” to use cloud tools to make their current jobs easier, but IT prevents them from doing it - ⤴ Workaround - ^ Background or context (symbol is a distant mountain) - Specifics - ☑ Feature request or purchasing criteria - ＄ Money or budgets or purchasing process - ♀Mentioned a specific person or company - ☆ Follow-up task - Put a big star on items to follow-up on after the meeting, especially next-steps you promised Writing them down in an ideal place saves time later on for search and retrieval. For that reason a notebook usually doesn’t work very well. Audio recordings suffer the same issue. - Google docs - Notion - Index cards / post-it notes A lot of times these convos might happen out of nowhere, so you might even have to jot stuff down on napkins depending on the situation. If it’s super weird to be writing things down while talking to the person in that specific situation, after the talk immediately hide somewhere and write down the important stuff. **Notes are useless if you don’t look at them.** ### What to do _before_ a batch of conversations - If you haven’t yet, choose a focused [[Customer Segments|Customer segment]] - Decide your big [[3 learning goals]] and the [[Questions]] associated with them - If relevant, decide on ideal next steps and commitments - If conversations are the right tool, figure out who to talk to - Create a series of best guesses about what the person cares about - If a question could be answered via desk research, do that first - **Don’t spend more than 1 hour prepping for meetings - anything above an hour is stalling.**cz ### What to do _during_ the conversation - Frame the conversation - Keep it casual, not [[Formality|Formal]] - Ask good [[Questions]] which pass the mom test - Deflect compliments, anchor fluff, and dig beneath signals to forego [[bad data]] and [[false positives]] - Take good notes - If relevant, press for commitment and next steps ### What to do _after_ a batch of conversations - With your team, review your notes and key customer quotes - If relevant, transfer notes into permanent storage - Update your beliefs and plans - Decide on the next [[3 big questions]]