This weekend I read The Mom Test. What’s interesting about this book is the advice it shares is fairly easy but it’s hard to follow especially if you are not naturally gifted in some of this stuff. As someone who sucks at conversations, there were some fuzzy ideas during conversations that I knew somewhat worked and some that didn’t, and I was surprised to learn how many mistakes I’ve made in my life while having conversations.
While this is mostly a self-help, business-y book on how to speak to customers, I think a lot of these ideas are also transferable to general conversations and understanding our world deeply.
So what’s the Mom Test? It’s when having a conversation. You want to:
Focus on the other person’s life, not yours. Do not jump into pitching mode immediately.
People are much better at telling you specifics of lived experiences in the past or present than sharing future opinions.
Talk less, listen more.
I think 3) is natural if you also happen to keep to yourself during conversations. 1) and 2) are fascinating.
The problem with pitching your idea too quickly is one of two things happen:
The receiver lies. There are many reasons people lie, and some, but in this case it’s because they are conditioned to maintain social harmony, which is not necessarily malicious, but they want to avoid conflict. It’s also possible that they don’t care enough to indulge and want to move on. Especially if the speaker tells you something which is a lot of emotional investment, then they are more likely to lie to you to preserve your feelings instead of sharing how they truly feel.
As the person delivering pitch, when you pitch immediately you are directly or indirectly seeking to feel validated and reassured rather in your idea and how great you are, but it is not to be confused with validation in the market. You are hoping to hide behind emotions to get permission to execute on your idea, but in the process you escape uncomfortable realities.
The book then goes on to share a series of example conversations to keep an eye on what to look for. I think these are highly situational and probably requires some practice. Broadly speaking, you want to dig deeper on signals, ignore noise such as compliments and niceties. The specific tactics, conversations, and insights can be found in the book, but these are random ones that stood out:
A conversation is considered successful if you can get a mental model of how they think.
Evaluate product risk and market risk separately. No product risk but market risk = SISP. Product risk but no market risk = Execution risk. Games are pure product risk because you don’t need to rediscover people’s desire to play games.
People find it annoying when you cut them off to explain your world view when they are trying to help you.
Digging into problems gives you a good sense of how important the problem is to the person. It tells you whether they are just a complainer or actually serious.
You want to ask questions which has the potential to completely destroy your imagined business.
Meeting “went well” is a warning. Either it succeeds or fails. You want to keep an eye for commitment or advancement. This happens in terms of time, commitment, and/or money.
In B2B, emotional customers may not necessarily turn into leads. In B2C, keep them close.
Hard pitch for small features is fine, but avoid for big picture questions.
Plan some questions ahead of time for each given type of person.
Be careful of prematurely zooming into a problem because it could cause a lot of problems down the line.
Be wary of a single person who goes to customer calls and then becomes the information bottleneck and dictator for what product needs to be built.
Ultimately, what you build is your job. Don’t do it through customers as a committee.
Use anchor fluffs to pivot into concrete ones.
There are some complainers, but they are not necessary customers of the product.
Dig into feature requests to understand motivations and actual priority.
Some problems don’t actually matter solving.
If they haven’t tried solving the problem already, they are unlikely to use your solution.