I conducted 50 customer interviews without any insights

Just as the title says.

I conducted 50 interviews without remembering anything really valuable.

So, I started thinking about the process and what was going on. In this article, I’ll describe our situation at first to give you a bit of tangible context. Then I’ll analyse the general problem behind our situation. Based on the to-dos you have in an interview, I'll show you how I failed on delivering on them due to our situation. Then we’ll dig into how you can prep for and conduct an interview when you search for a problem worth solving.

Our situation

In my day job, I’m the Head of Innovation Consulting in an IT agency based in Bonn, Germany. We at tarent are excellent at solving complex problems with software on a large scale. But solving complex problems on its own doesn't make any money for our clients. We felt the urge to boost the value of the software by making sure we build the right things, before building them right. So, we decided to found a new business unit, which is called Innovation Consulting.

Starting with a solution

From an entrepreneur's standpoint, we started with a solution: Startup methodologies. And we've had a group of potential customers: Different roles involved in developing digital products. We didn’t expect any demand risk, as there are other innovation agencies who seem to do fine. The problem with starting the solution is, that it can solve multiple problems:

Faster Time to Market
De-risk your idea
How can I pitch my idea for a budget?
Should we pivot or persevere?
How to prioritise features by value
What is the right value proposition to sell your product (irony isn’t it?)

Our goal was to determine which of the problems are worth solving for which customers. The next step on our journey was marketing our services to them. The challenge here is the combinatorics. The more problems you potentially solve and the more different customer segments you are serving, the more possibilities you are facing.

So, why is that a problem? It sounds like a good opportunity and more of a privilege. To understand that, let’s just have a look, what jobs are involved in conducting problem interviews.

Your jobs in an interview

Problem interviews are used for discovery and the first validation with weak evidence. But to achieve that, you have to make sure that you are speaking to a potential customer. Only they can answer your questions. Therefore, you have to qualify the interviewee first, before you really can dig into the problem domain. Only then it makes sense to investigate what they already tried to solve it to get a grasp of their commitment. The schema is always the same:

Ask what their challenges are. Are they coming up with a problem you want to solve on their own?
If they don’t come up with a problem, zoom into a problem you intend to solve.
If you’ve zoomed in, make sure it’s really a challenge for them by asking what they tried to solve it. Are they a potential customer?

The goal is to conduct some interviews and get a grasp if there are enough customers, that have this problem and whether they care enough to pay you for solving it.

So, what did I do wrong?

In my interviews, I tried not to prime them and asked about their challenges openly. The problem was, that they didn’t know what I was interested in, so they were talking about general challenges and how they solved them. My problem was, that I wasn’t able to leave this altitude. I hadn’t thought through, how the different problems we could solve would manifest, in the customer's life. I must have missed so many non-obvious clues.  But to be really honest, until today, I don’t even know if they were potential customers. Where there non-obvious clues? I’ll never know. In the end, we’ve talked a little bit about their lives, but it didn’t help me to move our business forward.

How do I prep for the interviews today

I have always a list of 3 top learning goals, like Rob Fitzpatrick describes it in his book The Mom Test. If I’m just starting out with a solution in mind, I model different scenarios beforehand. I aim for narrow problems. I sort the problems out, which aren't a perfect fit for my solution. Then I think about how the customer might experience the problems and how I can link this to the underlying problem. This prepares me to catch non-obvious clues. This process already kicks out some problems. The rest gets prioritised by the team by anticipated value. In the end, I try to find a topic for these challenges. In our case: Challenges starting a new project for a digital product like an app, website, or platform.

How to navigate the problem space more quickly

When you start out with interviews, it can be overwhelming. Every so often I was so agitated, that I wasn’t able to capture all insights. And especially when you are just starting out, it can be challenging to zoom in one problem. There is always the concern to have zoomed into the wrong problem and miss the more important one.

A tool, which helps with that, is Customer Problem Stack Ranking.

With CPSR my interviews have the following structure:

I start with an open question: What is the biggest challenge starting a new project for a digital product?
I capture what they mention and dig into that.
I present my problems in no particular order and let them prioritise them.
I dig into the top problems

For me, this is the best of both worlds. I can check if this is a hair on fire problem by checking wether they come up with it on their own. After that, I'm able to challenge this by showing them the whole problem space. Did they miss an important thing? Didn't they think of it, because it didn't come to their mind, that it's solvable? Plus you have something documented you can compare easily. One downside is, that this tool can make the interview quite formal. You can't just have an informal conversation. In my opinion, it's worth it, especially when you are just starting out or don't have much interview expertise.

A great tool for customer problem stack ranking is [https://www.opinionx.co/]

Conclusion

Starting a business model from the solution is the hardest way to start a business. The more problems this solution can solve, the more are you drowning in different possibilities. The first thing you have to do in an interview is to qualify your interviewee. To be able to do that, you should have a clear understanding of the problem space you are currently trying to validate / invalidate. Start with an open question for current challenges, but be prepared to zoom in.