How many times we have heard or read about a product failure ? Or certain product not living up to the expectations of its users ? I suppose a way lot more than you would imagine and majority of these failures relate to inability of the organisation or product to be validated from its own customers/users. As a start-up or a product organisation, it is of utmost importance that your product is accepted by it users. Product-Market fit is the holy grail for such companies ! And yet we see multiple times the same mistakes being done: be it a new company, or new product or even a new feature.

Customer Validation, is one of the steps in the Steve Blank‘s theory of Customer Development Model. It is a step generally used in the initial stages of a start-up to validate its business model but can also be extended towards validation of any new product the company or the product manager is set out to launch. Customer validation process proves if the hypothesis that you have related to the product are true or not and thus helps saving a lot of time and money by not building the wrong product that customers will not like. So would you validated your solution against the customers ? Simple ask your own customers. Get out of the building (literally or virtually) and talk to the potential customers and interview them. “Customer Interviews” are one of the easy ways to validate your product. Following are the best practices that I use during my new product launch efforts and inspired from product management expert that I often follow: Sachin Rekhi

1. Preparation:

Set up meetings or calls with your existing customers or potential customers. Typically, the number should be good enough with a wide range in terms of segmentation so that you do not fall for only one set/type of your customers. Take help of whoever it takes to get your calls/meetings scheduled with the customers: be it Sales, Account Managers, Operations team, etc. Ideally it is good to schedule it for a 45-60 mins. Make sure that you set up a one on one meetings. The reason being that you are trying to find out the problems or validate your solution that matters to the specific customer and not in general. Hence, it is important to avoid group thinking and communicate in terms of individual problems and thinking. Be prepared to record your conversations so that it can be shared amongst other team members. This particular point is really important since it creates transparency in the process and the teams members also empathise with the customers. Also, make sure to have all the logistics ready to take notes that can be referred later on.

2. Overview:

Once you are in the meeting or call with your customers, start with giving an overview of the problem that you are trying to tackle. Give them a high level overview of what your product is trying to accomplish. The idea is to gauge the interest levels of the customer. Are they excited when you tell them about the product or are is there any no reaction on it. The initial reactions, many times, sets the tone for the further conversation since a high level of interest will lead to many interesting points that you might not have even thought about. Generally, we should try to look the answers for the following questions:

• Is the customer genuinely interested in the problem that you are trying to solve?
• Can the customer relate to himself ?
• Does he sound excited about the prospect of someone trying to solve his problem ?

3. Exploring Problem Space:

This is an important part of the customer interviews. In this step, we try to explore various pain points faced by the customer within the realm of the solution that we are thinking to provide them. Try to get them list down various problems and rank them in the priority of importance. The idea to make them rank their problem is that this helps us and the customer to focus on the main pain points. And for the first version of the product our focus should also be to provide solutions to the major pain points of the customer.

Secondly, try to discuss the pain points from your knowledge i.e. certain problems that you already know of after interacting with other customers. The idea is to create buckets of the problems and find out if there are certain issues that are common across all the customer base/potential customers. The more number of common problems that your product intend to solve, larger will be its adoption.

Lastly, ask them how do they currently solve their existing pain points that they just mentioned. This will help you understand the workarounds, loopholes in the current solutions and also to get an understanding of potential competitors that exists in the realm of your solution.

To summarise this step, we should get an answer to the following questions:

• What are the pain points you are currently facing related to this [..issue..]?
• Do you face these [..your known pain points..] as well ?
• Could you please stack rank your pain points? and why is that ranking ?
• How do you currently solve your pain points ? Any workarounds,other solutions ?

4. Overview of your solution:

This is the part of the interview where you present your value proposition. Here you introduce your solution to the customer and go through the various aspects of the product that you have already thought of. The idea is to discuss as much as you can possibly do in the remaining time and try to validate if the solution really solves any of the pain points that you already discussed before. Depending on what stage of the product you are in, you can showcase either the wireframes or prototype version of the product and gauge the reaction of the customers. Also it is important at this stage to get the feedback from the customer if such kind of solution will be helpful to him/her.

If the reaction is negative from majority of your customers, then you know before hand that there is a need to pivot and look at the solution with a different perspective. Thus, you save huge time and investments by NOT developing something that is not going to be adopted. This is the power of product validation with your customers. The amount of waste is drastically reduced and thus it helps to channel all your efforts towards the right solution.

If the reaction is positive, then you might also get some valuable feedback that you can loop back in the initial stages of the product conceptualisation itself.

5. Acquisition and Monetisation:

Finally, conclude your interview by asking questions around how they would like to get access to the product. If its B2B product, who are the decision makers to buy any kind of solution ? How does the organisational chart looks like and who all might find your product useful within an organisation ? Try to understand as much as possible on these aspects as it could be a valuable information to market your solutions to the right audience.

Lastly, ask them if the product was available right now , then would they be willing to pay for such a product and how much ? This will help determine if your solution really is a game changer or not. If the product that you proposed is going to make their lives easier and better then obviously they will be willing to pay and thus you can validate your revenue models surrounding the pricing of the product.

Conclusion:

These were the steps that I found useful while interviewing the customers [mainly on the B2B side of things] and I am sure that most of the steps will be common across products when it comes to validating the product. Make sure to prepare a report of each interview once the interviews are conducted. Collect all the reports together and you will recognise a pattern across all of them and thats the pattern your product should target !