Customer Development

To conduct customer development research, you must talk to people who fit your target customer profile. You only need a few respondents, but around 5-10 participants per customer segment can provide valuable insights. For example, you can find respondents through personal and professional networks, online platforms, or offering incentives. It’s essential to ensure that the participants represent your target market to get accurate and reliable research results.

When doing customer development interviews, the analyst puts together customized questionnaires or guidelines for each group of respondents. They’ll ask different questions depending on whether or not the person has used the product before.

Plus, the questions they ask will vary based on the specific product being researched and the study’s goals. For instance, some studies focus more on how users engage with the product, while others hone in on the difficulties users face and how they solve them.

Basically, before conducting any customer development interviews, the analyst puts together a set of questions or an "interview guide." He/She customises these questions for each group of people being interviewed based on their history with the product. For example, if we're dealing with a B2B product, the questions we'd ask the end-users would differ from those we'd ask the purchasers.

It's crucial to focus on people's past experiences rather than their plans. That's because people can only speculate about what's to come, whereas their previous behaviour tells us a lot about how they're likely to act in the future. So the questions are carefully crafted to avoid steering the interviewee toward a particular response. For example, we wouldn't ask questions like "Do you like our product?" or "Do you think Problem X is important?" as they're likely to elicit positive answers, even if they're not entirely honest.

There are five key stages:

• Defining your tasks and objectives: Setting clear goals for your research and determining what you want to achieve through your customer development efforts.

• Identifying your research tools: You'll need to decide what tools to gather your data. For example, it could involve conducting interviews, focus groups, or other types of research.

• Developing hypotheses: Based on your research goals, you'll need to develop ideas or theories about what you expect to find during your research.

• Conducting your research: This is the fieldwork stage, where you'll research using your chosen tools and techniques.

• Analyzing your data and reporting your findings: Finally, you'll need to analyze the collected data and use it to develop a report outlining your key findings and insights.

When conducting customer development, it's essential to ask the right questions. For instance, we don't ask the respondent about the future because the future is always uncertain, but we can understand behavioral patterns based on past experiences. Additionally, you should formulate questions that don't push the person toward a "correct" answer. Examples of poor questions include "How do you like our product?" and "Do you think problem X is important?" Almost everyone will respond positively to the first question and agree that problem X is important and needs to be solved.

Another common mistake in customer development is using a small sample size for interviews, such as 2 or 3. We recommend conducting 4-5 interviews per audience segment and at least 20 interviews for the entire study. This way, the data will be representative, and conclusions can be drawn for the business.

It's common for companies to outsource complex services like branding and website creation since these tasks require a specific set of skills that are only sometimes necessary in-house. Likewise, delegating research tasks yields a different result.

On the other hand, when companies attempt to conduct customer development interviews themselves, they often need help to overcome a roadblock. Despite running a few interviews, they need help to make sense of the information gathered. Unfortunately, this approach wastes time and resources, and even revisiting the task every few months doesn't help move the needle.