Identify your bullseye customer in one day | Michael Margolis (UX Research Partner at GV)

you have done 30 years of work and iteration and refinement you're here just to tell us here's the most important thing you need to know and here's how to do it based on all that time I've spent help us understand what is a bullseye customer every ambitious founder wants to build a product for everybody but it doesn't start there Amazon started just selling books or Facebook was just profiles for college students so a bullseye customer is the very specific subset of your target market who initially is most likely to adopt your product or service why

this of all the things that you can focus of a startup Journey it helps you get really deep in understanding who are those people and understanding what they need it helps you prioritize the feedback you're getting and it just gets everybody as a team much more aligned on what are we doing and what are we doing first you have this Bullseye customer Sprint that your book describes you basically give people a plan for how to figure this out in a day which sounds like a dream the basic formula the way I think about it is

is five and three in one so it's five Bullseye customers and three very simple prototypes and and then we conduct those interviews in one day while the whole team is watching and debriefing and kind of thinking about what are the key big takeaways at the end of that where do he start so Step One is today my guest is Michael Margolis Michael has been a ux researcher at Google Ventures for almost 15 years where he's worked with over 300 companies to help them get unstuck move faster and build something that people want he helped develop

the design Sprint method made famous by the book Sprint and more recently wrote a book called learn more faster how to find your Bullseye customer and their perfect product which essentially helps you identify and refine your ideal customer profile in a single day I've said many times on this podcast that one of the biggest mistakes Founders make and product teams make is not being very clear and very narrow with their initial target market and I've been looking for a book and a guide to help people figure this out this book is that and also this

book is completely free and available online as a PDF Michael is not looking to sell books or drive leads to Google Ventures he genuinely simply wants people to avoid pain and avoid wasting time building something that nobody needs in this episode we go step by step for how to identify your Bullseye customer how to interview people how to recruit people and how to refine your idea to build something that people actually want this episode is both for Founders and also for product teams at larger companies who want to avoid building something that nobody cares about

if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Michael Margolis Michael thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast thank you so much I'm thrilled to be here so we're going to be going really really deep on how to very clearly and also just very quickly identify your Bullseye customer which some people refer to as ideal customer profile or ICP there's differences there

we're going to touch on that but you wrote a whole book about this very specific topic I have it right here it's called learn more faster and the subtitle is important how to find your Bullseye customer and find their perfect product and interestingly this topic has actually come up a bunch on recent podcast episode so I've been like telling guests hey we're gonna have a whole podcast episode about this very specific topic which I'm very excited about so Michael again thank you for being here thank you ATT 10 this episode is brought to you by

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rooted in because it's based on a lot of Hands-On work with startups and Founders so just talk about the work that you have done that has led you to this process and framework yeah so I've been doing this kind product in ux work for over 30 years so the work that I'm going to describe here is kind of the culmination or the synthesis of about 30 plus years of that and so there are a lot of different pieces that I've picked up along the way and recombined and adapted for this so started out studying anthropology

my first job was working at educational software as an editor so it was kind of introduction to ux my introduction to usability testing and went from there to uh working at a boutique product design in Innovation uh studio so basically Consulting with big companies like Alcoa and Dupont and Ericson and so learning really deep ethnographic research techniques very big long expensive projects Consulting projects um and then from there I went to walmart.com so going from there to walmart.com was really learning to take the those techniques and compress them and accelerate them Walmart is really all

about execution about scale about um everyday low cost and speed and so I had to really compress those techniques and make them much much faster and learned to combine deep ethnographic Discovery work with usability work and getting lots and lots of reps from there I went to Google so I was embedded in the Gmail team early on in 2006 and so what we did there was then combining these also at scale doing this kind of innovation at speed um you can see kind of this trend of getting faster and faster one of the things we

did a lot there was the way I would do the research is with watch parties so teams would be able to see it Google had invested in lots of video conferencing streaming from the labs oneway mirrors a lot of things early on so the teams were involved and they were seeing and watching this stuff so a lot of those techniques I brought then to uh GV to Google Ventures when I joined in 2010 so I was the first uh ux research partner in Venture Capital um at the time still I think maybe there's one other

person in this role and so took a lot of those techniques and recombined them and have adapted them and experimented over the last 14 years working with hundreds of different kinds of startups so we have a very broad variety of Founders and product people that we're working with so over the past 14 years where we've really experiment gotten to experiment and gotten to work with them and be kind of a small piece of the journey that they're on to learn and and answer these fundamental questions that they have about their products and their people how

many companies founders have you worked with this point just to give people a sense of the scale it's hundreds so I've conducted at this point over 300 Hands-On research Sprints with them um so we also work with many many others where we're just doing tons of office hours and so it's everything from just to give you a sense it's anything from biotech to healthc care to security food I've worked with Farmers you know it's it's really all over the place what I love about this podcast and guests like you is you have done 30 years

of work uh and iteration and refinement and then you're here just to tell us here's every here's the most important thing you need to know and here's how to do it based on all that time I've spent perfect what what Roi we you're providing here okay so your book and your process is about finding a bullseye customer help help us understand what is a bullseye customer and in particular how is there any difference from how most people think of the ICP ideal customer profile so a bullseye customer is the very specific subset of your target

market who initially is most likely to adopt your product or service and so compared to when we talk to Founders about their ICP or the personas that they come with this tends to be more specific even than they usually have gotten um and the reason that this this concept that Bullseye customers become so important to us is we've seen this is really key to accelerating teams so everybody every ambitious founder wants to build a product for everybody and we're we're investors so at GV at we want them to be successful and to have these huge

markets but it doesn't start there so to build successfully usually you have to be much more focused and much more specific so you can look at lots of companies right Amazon started just selling books or Facebook was just profiles for college students etc etc so helping Founders be very specific about who are you going to start with who is the that very distinct group that is most likely initially to adopt um helps streamline a huge number of things so it helps you prioritize what are you building it helps you get really deep in understanding who

are those people and understanding what they need it helps you prioritize the feedback you're getting you're often getting just a ton of input from investors from friends and family if you're talking to them from lots of people who kind of seem like they're in your target market but it helps you kind of win away some of that stuff and be like which which parts of this are important like we'll get to you it's not that we're not going to eventually serve you but initially here's where we're going to focus and it just gets everybody as

a team much more aligned on what are we doing and and what are we doing first I love that the incentives as you just referred to of a of a VC like Google Ventures are so aligned with help figure out what most will help a startup like I love that this is a good filter for what have you seen most cause trouble for a early stage startup and it's interesting that this is where you ended up going so let me actually let's spend a little more time here and just like why the bullseye customer IP

is so important why is this the thing of all the things that you guys have seen along the early stage of a startup Journey you have decided this is where we need to focus and help people having them focus on the bullseye customer is a way to help them focus and prioritize what they're thinking about building what the questions are that they're asking and who it is that they need to Target and build for um and so all of those things once we can help them narrow that down and decide who are we really focused

on and who are we setting aside until later it helps helps them prioritize their road map it helps them prioritize the feedback that they're getting and gets the whole team aligned um and moving together much faster yeah makes sense basically everything trickles down from who the heck are you selling to because it's the pains you're sing for them how do you find them so I love that uh and I totally agree and again this has come up a bunch on recent podcast episodes just how essential this is and how underappreciated this often is the other

thing I love about what you're describing is you're focused on speed like I love that you're as you move through your career it's like how do we do this faster and faster and what especially love about your approach is it's a you basically give people a plan for how to figure this out in a day which sounds like a dream what a dream come true in a day you can change the trajectory of your startup by getting very clear on who you're selling to and your Bullseye customer awesome okay so let's start getting into it

so describe the Sprint so you have this Bullseye customer Sprint that your book describes and by the way this book is freely available you can download the PDF we're not trying to sell books here this is just like use this you'll be you'll be better off yeah there's at learnmore faster.com there's the book there's all kinds of resources and spr and and templates and yeah please grab it okay cool so describe the Sprint high level how how it's laid out and the kind of the four pieces of it yeah so the the basic formula the

way I think about it is is five and three in one so it's five Bullseye customers and three very simple prototypes and then we conduct those interviews in one day um while the whole team is watching and debriefing and kind of thinking about what are the key big takeaways um at the end of that and so that's all um as a team and you mentioned a few of these kind of key ingredients and I think things that people may be surprised about spefic specifically you don't need to talk to a ton of potential customers you

build a number of prototypes which is interesting versus like iterating on a single prototype there's a few other elements so can you just share some of like the key insights the key unique ingredients to this framework in spr so one is Bullseye customer so we talked about that right so again Bullseye customer is that very specific subset of your target market who's initially most likely to adopt your product or service so we want to recruit that group of people and one of the reasons that we do that is if the whole team is in agreement

I have five people who match that and everybody's like yeah yeah those those people those are the ones that if they saw this we're pretty sure like they'd be into this they'd want this like we're all we agree and so that way after we do the interviews depending on what the feedback is they can't really dismiss it like well we all thought that and it's fine if it didn't if they didn't want it or they reacted in certain ways that's what we wanted to learn but up front we were able to like identify and say

yes yes those really really we think are the right people that's our hypothesis so first is five Bullseye customers the next part is about um qualitative interviews so there are lots and lots of different kinds of research methods but what I found over doing this for many years is that the biggest bang for your buck is doing these kind of deep qualitative interviews where I can dig in and understand people's stories understand their motivations understand past experiences why did you do this in the past what have you done in the past what's worked what hasn't

worked and having the whole team watch that and understand and build that kind of empathy and understanding and hear those stories is very powerful but then we do those in small batches so rather than do an interview on Monday and then one on Wednesday and then a couple on Friday we Clump them so ideally it's in that one day so I bang out five interviews one hour interviews in one day while the whole team's watching um sometimes we do it across two days Depending on time zones and things like that but the idea is that

they're clumped together and the reason for that is if you do them in a clump like that then the patterns are just much more obvious you after at the end of the day it's just really clear what were the big takeaways it's not going to answer every question that you ever had about your product or your customers but the big things that you said out to answer it's pretty clear like did it work did it not work which parts were good or bad all these kinds of things and the whole team has watched it and

so they have that sense and that idea of just doing five of them you hit what's called Data sat auration and so this is a thing in qualitative research um where kind of the the the common version of this is everybody after four or five is like oh for God's sakes please don't let me sit through any more of these like I get it I'm hearing the same things over and over like I understand like let's let's move on and do something different change the change the customer change the prototypes whatever so qualitative interviews and

small clumps and then we compare prototypes um and so this kind of comes from that time I had at Walmart where I sort of see the whole world as a shopping process and so there's something very valuable just the way any of you have shopped for anything right you don't look at just one thing if I showed you just one thing you'd have some feedback and you'd have an opinion about it like let's shop for a couch I like the color the cushions are uncomfortable I like the fabric or not and that's helpful and that's

interesting to hear but as you start looking at two or three then you start having this different reference points and and when you're testing with customers it's not up to them to come up with these different possibilities of what could be and so if I'm presenting those you're like oh that's interesting so I like the way this one has cushions that are made out of down but this other one is really interesting because they deliver it oh but this I like this because it's a style that I like and they actually take away my old

couch right so then I can like compare and contrast across these different possibilities these different distinct value proposition um and I'm not looking for a winner but this comparison the other big benefit of having multiple prototypes is it helps teams avoid getting too wed to one specific idea and so you can get a little overcommitted there's a risk that you get overcommitted to one idea you're polishing that you're working on it you're too committed to that and this pushes teams to think of new different possibilities and you can be a little bit more neutral a

little bit more objective if you're not all so bought into one thing so comparing prototypes becomes very powerful and then the other thing is making this a team sport so um the watch parties are a key example of this so I'm conducting these interviews and the whole team is and I'm live streaming it so the whole team is all watching it these days typically people are pretty distributed so I'm doing it over zoom and they're watching the live stream independently and then uh one of my partners so Kate Arana or Vanessa Cho it's amazing design

Partners I get to work with are often facilitating kind of that back room and so what they're doing is they're helping the team we have a structured process for taking notes and then in between each interview they're debriefing so I have kind of this spreadsheet that I use like these are the key things we wanted to get out of this and so they're they're going through and just capturing that like what just happened in this interview like let's make sure we have the high level and at the end of the day we have a way

to kind of all capture like what were our big takeaways what happened but the magic of all watching it and and processing It And discussing it and debating it through the course of the day is that everybody is aligned we've all seen it I don't write a report I haven't written a report in I don't know 10 years because we've at the end when we capture those big takeaways that's the team has captured it right we end up we do it through a Google form it shows up in the spreadsheet and we kind of discuss

it and then everybody's just like raring to go do the next thing and everybody's aligned and there's this incredible amount of momentum from the team after that and they're like let's go do the next thing like it's clear what we need to do and what we learned and sometimes the next thing is do this again and adjust so we can build more confidence um but the make it a team sport is just is been this very powerful um tool for building consensus building alignment especially as teams are growing and people are in a startup running

in different directions it's like a chance to come together and make sure like oh where are we what are we doing awesome that was really helpful so just to summarize kind of the key elements of approach there's a bullseye customer concept of just like a very narrow uh people a wedge of who would most want this thing and we'll talk more about that making a qualitative versus surveys or things like that uh comparing prototypes and making a team sport okay so we're GNA actually go into more detail of each of these steps just so folks

can basically what I'm hoping to do is they listen you folks listening to this can do this tomorrow or next week There's a little prep time before we get into each step when when do you recommend people do this when in the stage of a journey can you do it like many times any just context there before we dive in um you can do it many times um the key times to do it is at a high level it's before hopefully you've invested a lot of time into building something a lot of energy and um

the team's energy and money that goes into the building so it's usually before you build something maybe if you're expanding into a new group of customers so you were killing it in the UK and now you're trying to get into the US market and that's different or you're worry it's different or you're not sure it's a good time to check um or maybe you were selling to Enterprise you're doing very like white glove High touch sales to Enterprise and now you're you're going to shift down to maybe a different tier of customers and you're trying

to set up some more of a self- serve kind of a sales motion you need to understand that another common time is when you're selling but it's like not something's not going quite as well as maybe you hoped it was going you've already launched and you w to you want to just kind of troubleshoot like what's going on like we clearly this is we have some traction maybe but it's not what we wanted or we're getting that kind of very polite encouraging feedback which is kind of a sounds good but it's really no yeah um

let's go dive in and find out so those are kind of the big key things of the times of when to do it okay let's actually get into the steps uh I believe there's six kind of core steps to the process yeah okay cool what's where do you start what's step one yeah so Step One is what I do is I plan um about a 45 minute meeting with the team um so again it's really important to have that core team together and have this conversation about what are the key questions basically what do you

wish you could you would know about your product about your customers what's what's getting in the way one of the most common ways that we ask this is basically what keeps you up at night because Founders and product people have there's a bazillion things that they're kind of bubbling in their head that they're worrying about but that often gets them to kind of Step back and be like oh what I'm really unsure is you know this right what what's going to happen like will people how will people respond to this fundamental concept or this idea

or how will they use it right and so that's kind of the the I have a set of questions that I'll go through with them to to help prompt and and elicit what are those big things that you wish you knew right what what would have to be true for this to succeed right um what are kind of your hypothesis and what are your assumptions about the product about the customer you know who do you think this is or not and why uh kind of what are those nagging debates on the team those kinds of

things that keep coming up over and over you like oh for God's sakes let's go get some information and answer the question right so with some of these things so we we have that initial meeting to kind of detail like what do we need to answer awesome and this informs other I imagine all the things you do next and so in the PDF we link to in the show notes you can see all these questions and run through them yourself Okay cool so that's step one what's step two so step two is based on what

you want to learn now let's figure out who is the bullseye customer that we need to talk to to answer that question and and it all starts with those key questions that you have because if the question is about let's say big questions about onboarding well if the questions are about onboarding flow then you're going to want to talk to new customers right somebody who's fresh to this to see how do they get through or how do they understand what this is um whereas if you're talking about something that's a new feature that's already in

your product then you know you'd be talking to existing customers so that's an example where if I if I understand what the questions are I can kind of work backwards um to understand who do I need to talk to and then based on that once what I do is run what I call a bullseye exercise so it's again essentially another kind of interview get the team together and we I pepper them with a lot of questions to figure out like exactly who is this Bullseye customer that we've been talking about and the reason this is

I love doing this as a as a team is that what happens invariably is is having that conversation before we've even gotten to any interviews is super clarifying for a team because they tend to get a shorthand about who their customers are and this is a way and I just keep asking questions like well what do you mean by that right so when you say you're building a delivery service for people who get um specialty medications delivered especially um prescription medications like who exactly is that right it's not everybody like and so we start narrowing

down so they start having those conversations debates arguments about who it is and just having that is really clarifying for the team like oh well I hadn't thought about that yeah I guess it's true maybe it's not everybody who has that it's only people who have this kind of condition or this set of conditions or these needs and to follow that thread real quick I imagine People's Natural inclination is not to narrow it too much because there's always like why would we exclude this big market opport like why would it have to be like so

narrow you just speak a little bit just like why it's so important to get very very narrow someone once described Andy John's on a newsletter post I just I wrote once he describe it as it should feel comically narrow do that resonate I love that yeah I hadn't heard that phrase but I love that yeah um comically narrow is exactly what it is and there are times that teams will just be like oh for God's sakes Mar goas like just like this is too much the reason that I do that is I'm pushing them to

identify a person who they all would agree this person if if we present this value prop that we think we're going to build and this problem we think we're solving we are all convinced or or it's our best guess like it's fine if you're not sure but we're pretty convinced that that's the person who will say yeah I mean like I need this thing and so it's a way I'm kind of running an experiment right so it's a way to reduce variables for me um and then to get that specific and then I recruit a

bunch of the people who match that very particular characteristics set of characteristics and they're still G to they're people so there's still some variation but it's a way for us to to test that right and if there's too much variation then what happens at the end of the day you're like that was kind of a mush like I don't I'm not really sure what we learned like I was it because it was just people had mixed feelings or was it because there was just not enough consistency like we had too many variables there like I

don't know what we learned here so I think what's nice about this is this list this initial list you're making of Bullseye potential customers and attributes is not exactly going to be who you go after once you figure this out it's you want to be very confident this group will absolutely love what you're presenting because you're trying to learn as much as you can from the people that most love it and then from that you can get a little less narrow to actually pit your producct right and and most often what happens is we do

this we Define it our best right it's it's our hypothesis it's our best guest the team is always very expert I'm not right I'm always showing up as the noob in whatever this business is and so the team is expert and so this is very informed it's not like we're guessing but we go through this and by the time after we've done these interviews the goal is to figure out was this right or not or in what ways do we need to adjust like that's the a big piece of the outcome is adjusting that definition

of your Bullseye customer and often what happens is through the course of that Bullseye customer Sprint you learn oh it turns out like there's actually this other distinguishing characteristic we didn't realize or maybe maybe it validates what we knew but often we didn't quite realize that like this other thing is popping up where we're seeing heat from people like oh well that's interesting like let's dive in a little more I mean I can walk through an example if you want yeah that'd be awesome yeah yeah and I think even just like what are some examples

of attributes like what's the list of attributes you should be thinking about let me just give you an example I think a lot of the stuff we're talking it starts to get a little abstract so um I was working with a company that um was developing a a new delivery service for people who have uh specialty prescriptions medications so these are the kinds of medications that are expensive and for very like uh specialized like chronic diseases so this is not the kind of thing you're getting at Right Aid um and so uh and there's something

kind of very special about this company and I can mention that afterwards but the fundamental thing for them to figure out was before they can build out the logistics of this they're trying to figure out like do we need to Target something that is for delivery like ASAP right these are really important medications for very serious diseases is it like oh my gosh I need the next pill like get it to me like as fast as you can or is it like well I can wait till day or two but I need it between like

2 and 2:15 p.m. like if I knew that and then who exactly is this Bullseye customer we want to know like what is what's really the fundamental issue or problem that we're solving here and so they wanted to to answer those questions and so we go through this process and so those are the key questions and then the the customers that they're after I know like okay well it's not going to be everybody with specialty medications and so as we start teasing through that and thinking about it I want to think about what are examples

of other products that somebody has used that would make them more likely so a good example there is have you had other things delivered food have you had you like gone through this kind of process before where you've used like Uber Eats like because if you have never had anything delivered like that before that's like going to be too many humps to get over to get the person to accept their medications coming by delivery right so they've probably used Uber Eats or or something like that and they've been on the medication for a certain amount

of time so it's somebody who this is kind of a chronic thing it's not like a a a one-off acute situation they needed to find people who had a certain kind of density so was how rural were they living how how Urban was it because of the way they were going to do the deliveries somebody who was responsible for their own medication so we don't want somebody who's in some kind of a healthc care setting where somebody else is taking care of it or maybe their spouse or partner is kind of managing their prescriptions so

these are the kinds of things that we're starting to look for we and another typical exclusion criteria is I don't want somebody who knows too much so your your core Bullseye customer I want somebody who's pretty typical so in this case like if I were to find out that somebody was a pharmacist or worked in healthcare I'm like oh yeah that's probably not like a typical customer if I just have these five precious interview slots I probably don't want that so I'm going to exclude those people so we went through and did this and then

generated um these different prototypes to to express kind of a a range of different recipes of of value props of what this might be right so the range is things from it can be delivered in an hour or you know or it can be delivered over a 4H hour window or it can be delivered it'll take you know we'll get it there as soon as we can get it there but we're not quite sure when it'll become you just have to be home and available right these kinds of things so went through this exercise and

what what Rose to the surface as we were doing these is that there were certain customers for whom this was a much much bigger issue for whom they needed to be there and know when this thing was showing up so it turned out having that distinct window a narrow window of when a predictable narrow window of when this was going to arrive was much much important than ASAP these are important medications they're not waiting until like the last pill is gone like that's not what's happening here but knowing when it was arriving and it turned

out that the scenarios where that was critical was things like it's a refrigerated medication this can't be sitting out on my stoop right it's cold chain or there's for some reason an issue where I'm especially worried about theft or something like because of what the medication is or where I'm living or WEA so there are these very particular scenario so then going back to this idea of the bullseye customer realize oh wait so it's a subset of customers who have like refrigerated meds like that seems like a a much higher value problem that we're solving

here and so we ended up running this again so we you know I re-recruited with people who were had that subset of kinds of medications and issues and also were disatisfied with the status quo of their existing service and were not available to just kind of be around right so they they were busy and whatever and they needed this window and so we ran it again like oh yeah there it is right so that second group of people you just start building this confidence of of of in in the match between what you're building what

the problem is you're solving and who exactly you're building it for and in that case you could see oh yeah that is the right Bullseye that's why there's this very narrow specific group who's much more likely to adopt this than like everybody who has specialty medications because the need is just much more accute I love this example and like intuitively it all just makes sense as you describe what you landed on and like this is what people call product Market fit way you're describing where somebody has a pain that you are solving and they need

it badly what do you what does it look like when you find that group of like what ises it what do you notice qualitatively just like this tells you this is it this is the poll that people talk about when you say product Market fit I avoid the phrase product Market fit with this stuff and we can talk about that because I think that's that's kind of interesting when you find this m match what happens in the qualitative interviews is that you can sense the energy and the excitement and the enthusiasm it comes across um

especially as you do a bunch of these you can tell there's a difference and so that's what you're looking for is people who are then start like wait is this available can I is this a thing like can I can I sign up for this like it's that kind of thing or they're they're really leaning into it and you can just qualitatively you can just see it one of the things I thought was very interesting was I was recently speaking to a Founder um who I'm doing another round of this with a new set of

Concepts we had done a project a while ago and actually killed the project so through going through Bullseye customer Sprint with something that he was doing we did three rounds of it and finally he was like yeah I this is not I'm going to focus on the other part of my business and he said we killed the project and what he told me was two things that were really interesting to me one was was this saved me a huge amount of pain like we ran through this like we had to do some work to the

bullseye customer Sprint but the product that he was going to build it was Hardware it was software it was this whole subscription like it was going to be a big complicated thing to build we had mocked up a bunch of prototypes and I'd used some free prototypes when we interviewed like it killed the project that was super valuable to him he saved a huge amount of time and effort the other thing that he's mentioned to me was that through going through the process he learned what no looked like so he he could see oh like

I'm getting kind of this neutral like positive encouraging feedback and as we did this he he really he's like oh that's they don't they don't want this right it's not that big of a deal to them it's not that and and it was by doing this and you see it enough times and he felt like that was one of the most valuable outcomes for him is like now I know what no looks like that makes so much sense like it feels like that's almost you could Al almost argue this the biggest value of this is

just waste avoid wasting time building something nobody wants totally and and as a as a researcher and as a VC like if I can save a company and a founder and a product team like from going down some path or too far down a path that's huge for everybody right they have so much energy to do that go do the other thing yeah yeah and again this is another reminder why it's so important to go so narrow because if you can't find anyone that is thrilled this exists like you're you're in trouble this is your

chance to find the most thrilled people the most specifically pained and if you can't find that that's a problem yeah in in the same way we Define this Bullseye and then when I go recruit and try to find them if I can't find them I usually take that as a sign of something also like I don't I don't know if these people exist and it could be sometimes like well we went too narrow I'm like okay let's let's go back and and like we'll see which of these are are flexible you know how do we

soften some of these requirements but if in fact I just can't like I can't find these people these people that you're imagining exist who want this thing I'm not sure how you're going to sell to them like not that I'm like the final Arbiter of like whether these people exist but it's something you should go check yeah okay so to give people a little bit of a framework of how to help them identify these narrow set of attributes share some of like a list of attributes to think about to help them narrow and how many

how many like narrowing attributes would you recommend is it like roughly her istically is like three is it five is it seven it's probably gets down to yeah it's more like seven rough I mean that's you know roughly it depends um what I the way I think about it is kind of in these three groups so there are inclusion criteria there are exclusion criteria and then there are what we found is very important are triggers so by inclusion criteria this is usually pretty easy because the team is like yeah these are the people we want

in the group right it's people who are taking specialty medications um you know for these particular conditions like we can build that out the exclusion criteria I find are is a place to dwell and help a company really think that through a bit more to brainstorm that because as we talked about it's harder for teams to set people aside right and so it's thinking about like what are reasons why somebody maybe is not the best customer here not yet and that could be things that we talked about was maybe they have too much expert knowledge

here they're not really a typical person that's not who I want to talk to maybe they're using a competitive product and they're already like locked into that like I don't need to talk to them or they've had some other personal past experience that's going to just make them not a good candidate like I'm working on fintech and this person is in bankruptcy or has had identity stolen like that's I want to help them but that's not like our first place to start so these incl exclusion criteria are critical and then um these triggers are specific

events or situations that somebody's been in that makes them particularly ready or ripe for the solution so sometimes the way that looks sometimes the the examples of that can be um you're selling a new cyber security um platform for something and it there's a new CSO has come in you know there's a new sheriff in town and they're looking to revamp things and rethink and so it's a time when somebody's open to considering new options or something's gone wrong right somebody's in a situation where something's gone sideways and they they need a new solution for

that kind of thing there's um or we were working for an insurance tech company um and they were targeting Millennials so the idea was that people who are in this particular um demographic in this time of life they would be building like buying life insurance and what we found was everybody was saying like well we we should buy Life yeah it's one of those things like I should take care of that yeah I should take care of that oh yeah I really need to get life insurance but people who had the trigger was oh you

just had a baby or you just got married and now people like oh this is actually on my to-do list like I I need to I need to go get this done and so I'm in a completely different mindset that's the person who now is your Bullseye it's a an an example of a trigger that somebody's like oh yeah like now I need to go do this thing awesome uh I know the jobs to be done framework there's a term for that that's like the like it kicks off the vector to get them to do

something and like I forget there's a term in that framework so I have your book up uh in my hands right now and I'm looking at the list of attributes and questions that you ask to help narrow down so let me just read this because I think it might be helpful just people to hear like if I'm trying to narrow how do I narrow them so it's like uh are they newer an existing user of your product what sector industry are they in what's the size of their organization have they used the competitive product is

there disqualifying personal experiences as you described is there dis disqualifying professional experiences what's their title role and responsibility what's their geography are they the buyer or they the end user are they distributed how's their team organized their budget and income uh their life and work settings trigger events as you described uh are they a VIP like what is what is that one real quick yeah so um I was having this conversation yesterday with a company I met with them and and so what I asked them was what makes one customer another more valuable to you

oh okay y yeah got it so it's like are they like yeah what are especially important yeah is there something about it's it was for them it was this really interesting again kind of way to start thinking about distinguishing characters like yeah what what is a valuable customer to us like we're we're they're at an early stage and they were attracting a lot of people in different kinds of personas and they're trying to figure out what's the pattern here like who matters more to you or not awesome so you basically you answer all these questions

you see which are sevenish attributes seem to be most right and that's your bills that customer you start with right awesome okay uh should we move on to the next step sure let's do it what comes next so once I have that set of criteria and the team is all aligned and agreed on what that is they're like yeah yeah those are our people so then I start thinking about how do I recruit them so to do that for most people unless I'm looking for something that's very very Specialized or or hard to find what

I do is I create a screener questionnaire so I translate these criteria into essentially a set of questions that will help me filter out people to know if people respond to this questionnaire who are the bullseyes in there and so part of the trick there is to write a questionnaire in a way that I'm not telegraphing the right answers um and so that I kind of I'm in the in the control seat so I can pick out and identify the people so what I mean by that is if I were to to say I will

pay $125 to anybody who you know is a product manager who listens to Lenny's podcast and all of a sudden I'm going to get a bazillion people who is like I will take that $125 and like well I don't know do you actually listen to the podcast like I don't know hopefully you do everybody does but if I can ask the question in a different way in terms of um you know what are some of the podcasts you listen to you know what are the kinds of people you follow these kinds of things and then

see like where does that show up or even ask it as an open-ended question right like where do you get um your your most trusted information as a product manager and start to see and then be able to pick those people out um because what I've wanted to do one of the key things in those Bullseye um criteria are that they're very concrete and very measurable things it's not just oh this person is is an active Shopper like that's not very helpful to me because I need to translate it into this questionnaire so I need

to know what is active Shopper that means somebody who is purchasing certain kind of item whatever we Define three times a week like yeah that's that's active right so we have some very particular very measurable concrete things so then I'm writing this questionnaire um and typically what I do is I Rely pretty heavily actually on user interviews um respondent is another one of these kind of services um so I can post that questionnaire and get responses depending on what I'm looking for pretty fast so I can recruit in a matter of three four days typically

depending on what I'm looking for um and I've been able to get surprisingly specific people um that way and so that that um is a huge shortcut for me to be able to recruit that way this episode is brought to you by interpret interpret unifies all your customer interactions from gong calls to zenes tickets to Twitter threads to App Store reviews and makes it available for analysis it's trusted by Leading product ORS like canva notion Loom linear monday.com and Strava to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process helping you build best-in-class

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and linear visit n p.com / Lenny to connect with the team and to get two free months when you sign up for an annual plan this is a limited time offer that's interpret. comom Lenny where do you find these people how do you how do you contact them where are they uh so through user interviews they work with panel and they basically user interview.com yeah userinterviews.com oh amazing that's uh very easy so it's not like it's not like LinkedIn cold email cold pings not Twitter DMS things like that no I mean in in previous I

used to use Craigslist and I did a lot of some pretty crazy Rec recruiting people through Craigslist um I had people once you know meeting me at a hotel room to test a robot and through Craigslist but um no user interviews is much more legit and very fast um and there are other services like this now yeah um but it's been one of the big changes that that speeds a lot of this stuff up that's way too easy and how many people do you reach out to to go through a screener roughly to get to

five uh so it will depend on on what I post and how much response I get so there are times it's has been somewhat hard for me to predict there are times I do it and I'll just they just um the responses just start rolling in so there times I get like 400 responses basically download it into a spreadsheet and just start sifting through as a reference I have my criteria and then I'm just trying to find who matches who doesn't Okay so it goes to hundreds it can be hundreds sometimes if I'm looking like

I did one recently I was looking for a very particular group of AI engineers that was did not get 400 responses that was a very hard one to find that was an example where there was this very particular group that we were looking for and I was like are do these exist like this thing that you're solving for I don't know I'm not this is pretty hard to find these people I'm not sure they're existing yeah and to your point that's a sign like I think there's a a Nuance here of if this group is

hard not only hard to find but hard to reach and get them to talk to you at all that's already going to make your life hard building this company the caveat there is there are times when you need to talk to somebody who's just very hard to find or hard they're not going to be on user interviews so like I've done a lot of work in the past with oncologists with flat iron health so oncologists are not on user interviews they don't care about my $125 like they're they're busy doing something more important and so

if I'm doing that I need to find a different way to approach that so then I'm thinking about where do these people kind of cluster online or in person that I might be able to Target them there's certain forums or certain conferences these kinds of things or I'm doing snowball recruiting if you're building a product for oncologist you hopefully probably have some contacts with oncologists and you can kind of have work through their Network have find one person they can recommend another person you still want to filter them and make sure that they are matching

your core criteria but that it requires different kinds of techniques to find those kinds of folks professional associations I almost want to go down that track CU I feel like there's a lot to learn there but I want to I'm going to stay focused and keep going through our steps but let me take a quick tangent so as you were talking I actually wrote a post in the past on how to identify your ICP and I put together uh a table of the very first ICP for some of the biggest B2B SAS companies that I

pulled up here so let me just give a few examples of how narrow some of these companies were when they went out to sell their product so let me do a few uh so gong which is one of the biggest B2B SAS companies their first uh Bullseye customer as they describ it was look how an ER this is software company their customers were ideal customers were software company selling in English selling via video conferencing selling software that cost $1,000 to $100,000 uh linear their focus was two to 5% startups using GitHub and Google o at

a Founder driven Product Company and and let's see one more austa was really funny companies with less than five employees in California who have no contractors see what's interesting to me about those is that I would go even deeper and more specific because some of those things like are I mean and and that's fine like I don't know internally how they actually describe the the details of it but like some of those you want very concrete measurable things to be able to tease apart like well how founder Le art like you know like how are

you behaving what other products are you using in your stack you know that this fits or doesn't fit these kind yeah so it's interesting because when people saw this initially they're like that's crazy how narrow they're getting and I love that you're like that is not narrow at all you should go so much more narrow because if I had to recruit those people it's too yeah it's too broad and I think that's an important Point here is like this exercise you get more narrow to do this research but that's not like your actual ICP as

you described okay so I I understand what you're what you're saying now more and more of like the difference between Bullseye customer and ICP the bullseye customer is for research to help you identify broader ICP your business targets yeah and I think this is actually touches on another important point which is that this is a learning exercise so that's what I'm describing is how do we learn more faster um and this is different from selling right so what I hear a lot is people are like I'm on customer calls we're selling all the time and

obviously you can learn a ton from selling um and pitching and meeting with companies and potential people who seem like maybe they are customers but that mode is very very different from what I'm describing which is to learn to kind of run these experiments as fast as you can and there there's something just even a mindset and how you approach the conversations that's fundamentally different so there's this term that I love that edge shine um coin which is humble inquiry and so it's he frames it as um humble inquiry is the gentle art of asking

instead of telling and so to me that's like this fundamental way that I think about even just conducting these interviews so if you're in a selling mode and I I encountered this over and over with heads of product and Founders is that if you're in they're very they're very good at and they're very used to and they're required to just sell all the time and they're pitching their VCS they're pitching their customers but that's very different from learning and being in Humble inquiry you basically have to be vulnerable and I can always do it because

I'm not the founder and I don't like I I've always present myself as like I don't know the space and I I'm an idiot and like can you explain it but asking questions and being vulnerable and giving the person you're asking the higher status is a difficult thing to do as a Founder when you're selling right because you you don't want to be vulnerable and and express that you don't know or or and people are always I come across they're very nervous about that so there's something that's very distinct here about learning mode versus a

selling mode selling and telling versus kind of this idea of humble inquiry so I think that's actually an important distinction here I love that and I think it helps that you're finding randos on user interviews that you don't have to worry as much about versus like finding great in shows through VCS that you do worry about right awesome okay so we're talking we've been talking about the step of recruiting your Bullseye customers uh so you find these folks you filter the screeners you pick five and you schedule them for the same day is there anything

else in that step that is important to cover you have to make sure they show up make sure you're compensating them sufficiently um this is something where I'm not giving $20 Starbucks cards because somebody's going to blow you off like when I have those five sessions and the whole team queued up to watch I want people to show up so I'm making sure I'm reminding people I'm making sure that they're kind of responsive to me when I'm asking them to eign an NDA ahead of time like am I hearing back from them and I'm paying

for most like typical kind of consumer things like 125 bucks an hour for them to show up and do this so um it's it's worth spending the money if I'm recently did something where I was talking to attorneys I was paying their hourly rate I was paying like 400 bucks an hour for them to show up but I I need them to show up yeah good point good point uh and I love that it's 125 not 100 is there like you've seen a difference there that's it's like something more than 100 I think that that's

based on what whatever the policy that is at alphabet that somebody said um so that's the standard that I'm uh I see I'm going with funny and also and it also has just seemed to work people are showing up for that so if people weren't then I would adjust and do you backup people just in case someone doesn't show up or it's just like all right I guess we have four whenever does happen um I actually don't so user interviews by working with them and by doing some of these other things along the way where

I'm making sure people are kind of responding to me during the course of the week leading up to it did you sign my NDA like I send a reminder are you responding like I can tell if they're engaged if I'm getting if somebody's essentially ghes to me I'm getting nothing I'll just swap them out but I don't use alternates and I have very very high um follow through great okay uh what's the next step so then the next step is to figure out your prototypes and so what I want to do with those is I

want to create again these three distinct examples three distinct recipes of um the possible features and um distinct variables that we want to present in these in these um interviews and so as I said before ideally I can find produ uh competitors products and use those as free prototypes like that I love doing that it's it's surprising to me that often people don't do more of this and I think that there's sometimes a sense that like it's cheating or they're worried they're going to copy it or something I'm like whatever if you haven't studied your

competitor's products and not just gone through it but like seen how people respond to them you're just missing something right so what we do is work out um the details of of the variables that we're going to spread across these prototypes so there are certain features and then certain variables across that I kind of Imagine spread across uh these different things so um for example we were talking about delivery of specialty medications so imagine um one of the ATT rutes is uh who's delivering it so maybe one version is a pharmacist is going to come

one is a um uh it's just a a delivery um Courier guy and then another one in this case actually it was a drone company so a drone is dropping this thing off and so we could talk more about what it was like to test that but there are different variables here um the other option is say um the size of the window of the delivery window right so this is it'll come in two days but you can narrow down in a 15 a window this one is like as soon as possible you just have

to be home to wait this kind of thing so we're we're developing this range and then creating these prototypes that are very simple they're just PDFs really it's very flat there's no functionality it's a lot of it is really a a writing exercise to articulate what's the distinct value prop and what's the brand promise and the problem you're solving for each of these prototypes um so you want to make it look as real as possible so it looks like a homepage for the product so you're right it's the Box around this thing so you don't

have to build anything you're just describing it and putting whatever you need to illustrate and convey that but they need to stand alone I'm not going to pitch them or narrate them and just create those so that I can present those three distinct recipes and these are these calls are usually over zoom in your experience at this point cool so these are kind of just like uh inigma or exported just images you're showing people exactly right sweet uh more and more on this podcast people are sharing wayte just how AI is making prototypes like actual

product prototypes so much easier to create so imagine people are going to move to like functional prototypes more and more yeah they may I I think the thing that's important is to not get distracted by that so here there is a the benefit to keeping it simple is that you're not too wed and too committed to anything so keep it build only as much as you actually need to answer the question you're trying to answer that's a great point so it's like even if you can create an awesome prototype don't do that probably just keep

it flat designed awesome means very crisply describing the distinct value proposition and problem you're solving in a way that people get it they're like oh I understand what this one is and then I can compare it to these other ones and I understand what the features are and I can have that conversation it's about the value prop it's about making sure that they understand what it is it's not this kind of marketing speak where you're like wait what you just have to be super blunt this is kind of what it is and why this is

awesome and why this one is awesome and then they're shopping I love that so basically as you said it's a writing exercise it's like the headline the positioning seems to be the most important part to nail versus like the design of it right awesome and and I I designed them enough that they look different from each other so it's not version a version B version C because in the course of the convers with all the observers I want it to be clear which prototype somebody is talking about so awesome the green one versus the blue

one versus the red one right so then when the observers can keep track otherwise you're like wait what which one are they talking about I don't know what's happening awesome okay anything else that is important to note on the Prototype step um proof read it carefully people get stuck on errors and then it undermines the validity The credibility of the Prototype so proof read it and make sure because otherwise people like oh that's not right yeah that's such a good tip uh so just have someone else read it like someone else that hasn't been working

on check them carefully anything wrong cool uh okay so what's the next step so you have these prototypes you've got the schedules interviewed right so you have people coming yeah so you're scheduled so people are showing up on Thursday we're going to start doing interviews you have to draft your interview guide and so what these interviews are going to look like in in the course of that watch party it's um five one-hour interviews each interview is a two-part interview so the first part of the interview is this discovery interview where I'm asking people about their

existing and past experiences and attitudes and opinions about whatever this part of their life is how did you previously get your medications delivered what worked what didn't work tell me about a time when it totally went sideways tell me about a time it worked perfectly so we go through that and have that about half way through that interview I shift to comparing and contrasting these prototypes so the comparing and contrasting is I'm presenting each prototype and people are kind of responding to that and like telling me what they see what this is and then the're

responding to what each of these prototypes says what it what they like what they don't like what's important what's not important some parts that they don't comment on is fine like if that just doesn't even register that's good to know and then I'm having them compare and contrast so by having three different prototypes it's enough for them to then sort of step back and not pick a winner but be able to say like oh I like this aspect of this one I like the fact that this one's being delivered by a pharmacist but I really

prefer that this other one is a 15-minute window for example and so they're kind of teasing out what are the the best pieces of each of these and that's really what I'm looking for through the course of this conversation is I want to like grab the best bits and pieces the best Lego pieces so I can then go construct the ideal version version next right because none of these again I'm not going to build probably any one of those I'm looking for the best pieces and through the Arc of that conversation by doing the first

half where I've had the discovery conversation it gives me a huge amount of context to understand their feedback about the prototypes because there will be times when they'll say things or tell us something and because we heard the first part they'll tell us something about the Prototype and because of what we heard in the first part we'll understand why like oh it's because they had that other experience in the past where that thing went totally haywire when something like that happened and they don't have trust in that like and now I know why that's the

situation and it's very very very common that when teams are watching this they're always like for great for Christ's sake Margo would you just like get to the prototypes like why are you just talking to them about all this other stuff and you're just like chitchatting with them like GH show them prototypes and so we always have to remind people like no this is really important partly you're also just learning a lot you hear those stories which is what you want to get but it provides a lot of context for understanding their reaction to the

prototypes I love all that context that you shared this is the step I think where everyone gets kind of scared or afraid or thinking they're doing this wrong they're biasing people so in the book that we link to you you give them a guide for how to write out this whole interview guide I have the book here and I'm just like looking at an example where it's like I like it's like there's the warmup there's the introduction and then it's like your current experience with this problem cost depends on the problem space but I love

like in the warm up big smile hi thanks for helping me with this uh thanks for signing the NDA uh where have I I'm dialing in from Seattle where have I reached you and then it's like how's the weather where you are so it's all these like nice little questions you can ask to keep it light and then it's and then just a few examples of questions you like you ask in this example where it's about the medication it's like do you currently have prescription medication that you have to order and refill how many if

I may ask what are they and when was the last time you fill the prescription and on and on so it's kind of this whole set of questions just to help understand the the their worldview around this problem and the the context around it and the way that I think about it is that I'm building an arc in that conversation and so it starts like you said this just chitchat about the weather and where you are and whatever like do I care like what the weather like I don't care what the weather is like but

what I'm trying to do is build some Rapport fast with somebody um again it gets back to this idea of humble inquiry where I'm trying to build a connection with the person I'm trying to make them feel comfortable um because they usually are showing up they're like they want to make you happy but they don't really understand like it's awkward it's super weird like there this I'm gonna talk to this weird dude he's paying me to tell him like what turns out to be a bunch of personal stuff and we're never going to talk again

but like am I doing a good job like it's it's it's odd and so I'm trying to put them at ease and trying to encourage them and make it clear like they're the expert in this situation but they don't really know what's going to happen and so I'm building this Arc slowly hopefully not too slowly to get them talking so one of the most important things is when you're doing that interview smile you have to start with the big smile even if you're on the phone it totally changes the way your voice sounds and what

I'm often looking for in those first few minutes is are they smiling back can I get the person to smile back at me and then I'm like okay we're good like I'm getting them responsive and getting them talking I love that tip and again I think a lot of people that aren't us researchers are just going to like H I don't know I'm like I'm not this feels weird something that should be reassuring is mostly you're just asking questions right like it's just it's on them like you're just asking questions and your job is not

to not to say anything almost just keep asking questions yeah and to be really genuinely curious like I think that's really again it's to this mindset difference between selling I'm I have to genuinely want to understand and see the world and my product through their eyes and you're going to hear stuff that is wrong you know doesn't make sense or you're like that's weird what is that and you just have to not dismiss that but dig in and try to understand like why why do you think that and and what gives you that impression that's

what you're trying to learn right and just smile genuine curiosity and focus on that person in front of you is will get you pretty far any other tips on this step for folks that are like okay I'm going to try this myself I'm gonna stop start interviewing folks any other tips anything else important you think is worth mentioning yeah practice it makes a difference it's it's a hard skill it seems like oh everybody talks to everybody but it it's different when I do these and I've done interviewed thousands of people at this point um I

have a different character mode that I put my head in and so I literally before I start an interview I stop I take a deep breath and I kind of put on that smile and I put on my listener character where I I'm embodying these things this extreme curiosity this focus on the person um this engagement which is quite different from my normal kind of more cynical skeptical you know personality to the point where if my kids like have overheard like who is that dude because that does not sound like Dad whoever is talking to

that person um but it's a different mode in my head where I'm in interviewer mode and so you might maybe that's just me but you you might develop kind of that other character especially if you're a Founder used to pitching you can have your your listener character okay that was an awesome tip okay and so I think then the next step is the final step which is the watch party where you actually do this yeah so this is awesome so this is like our it's like our magic hack for for banging all the stuff together

right so everything is coming together in this watch party so in this watch party we have again I'm I'm conducting the interview so I'm I'm off on Zoom 101 conducting these interviews in the watch party um Vanessa Cho konowitz my amazing design Partners often are facilitating the group there and so what they're having the team do is take notes and do go through these debrief set in between each interview and so we have a very particular way that we structure all of that and it's very important that the team is all in there and watching

and doing this together so I'm in Zoom I have it set up so it's live streaming to them so they're not in my zoom it's not like 20 of us with a bunch of heads watching the person right it's really important to me that's just me and the and the customer that I'm talking to directly so they're all live streaming it um they're on they're taking notes they're in a Google doc or notion or doc whatever you want collaboratively doing that and so people are assigned roles so take turns taking notes because it's pretty intense

we have people manually taking notes and not using AI to take notes um the reason for this is what we found is we want people to lean in to this experience we want you to focus and engage and pay a lot of attention and if you know somebody else is taking notes it tends to maybe make you lean out a little bit or maybe you checked your slack or you're looking at email or something and so it's about keep keeping you really engaged and working so it's a it's a it's a working watch party so

we take turns we've assigned roles so people know okay interview to Lenny and Margolis are going to be taking notes that's fine and then there's also a slack Channel usually the background because there's other chatter like wait what did they say they're talking about this they mentioned that product has anybody heard of that so that's really important kind of going in the background Vanessa orate also monitors that so it's a that's the way that somebody can pass me notes to answer to ask specific other questions I can't I can't do the interview and track the

notes and slack like my brain doesn't can't handle that so they're in there and then I have a a chat window open just with Kate or Vanessa and so they'll pop me questions as they come up they we usually ask teams to be pretty judicious about that because if I get a question like that it could go a certain way as you know right you ask a question you don't know where it's going to go um and so if it's really important or you see something where clearly I've misunderstood something like clarify it so they're

taking notes this debrief is in a spreadsheet that I've set up so that there're key things that we wanted to learn and so those are specified in that spreadsheet for each interiew each study that I'm doing like these were the key things and so those are not the questions that I'm asking the inter in the interview but they're the things again these key questions that we wanted to learn which is different from what I'm asking and so we're just capturing in that half hour the deci whoever is kind of owns the product or the founder

is leading that right because they're the the decider and they're they're leading getting input from everybody and filling in and answering those questions so then you can imagine you have that first column is that set of questions and then you know so those are the rows are the questions and then each participant is another column so we're doing participant one we're capturing it after the second one so we end up with a detailed notes we have the recording of my interview like those are the thickest deepest levels of this then we're we're distilling it down

into this deep brief sheet for each one so then you have a spreadsheet that's like the high level stuff you can look across it at the end of the day at the very last thing at the end of the day after the final debrief we do a big takeaways form so I create a Google form and it just it's basically like how many interviews did you watch just to check and then um what's your first big takeaway second third how would you adjust your definition of the bullseye customer here and kind of what do you

think are the next steps or what are your big questions open questions concerns and so each person then takes 5 10 minutes independently separately individually quietly you just everybody mutes their video and fills that out and it's a way to grab a snapshot from the whole team of like what did we really learn you know this was the important things that we had set out to do and what did we learn and it captures that so then again that fills out a big spreadsheet and we then review that the the deci kind of goes through

it and talks about what are the key patterns what are the things that we've learned here as a team and there's there's this remarkable amount usually of consensus of alignment about like what is this what do we need to do next what I love seeing is that quite frankly one of the most common things across all of these businesses all these sites all the all these um studies is that one of the things that people say we need to do next is more research and so people it just even though these are all teams who've

said like we talk to our customers all the time we go through this and they're always like oh yeah this looks really different than what we were doing and we didn't know this stuff one of the other things I want to mention is we do this thing before the watch party where we get everybody to predict what they think they're going to learn oh I love that and this is really valuable for a bunch of different reasons so it's a way to capture a snapshot before we do the interviews of like what do you actually

think is going to happen and and and we have to push people to be specific it's not oh we'll find out how they what they think of our concept like yeah yeah I know we're going to learn that but like what do you actually think is going to be the the outcome people will prefer you know ASAP delivery of their medications and you know like whatever what like what is your hypothesis of what's going to happen here um and and that helps me do a couple things one is it helps me make sure that I'm

tailoring the interview guy and everything the right way because it's a it's another check like am I my I'm understanding what you want to get out of this it's a snapshot of what we wanted to learn and then what happens is after we go through the big takeaways at the end of the whole study it's very valuable to go back and say how does what we learned compare to what you thought because there's this any researchers out there listening to this who will be familiar with this idea there's this hindsight bias that happens which is

as you've gone through the process it's very difficult to remember what you didn't you know that you didn't already know this right and so after you've gone through a research study very often people like well that we that seems obvious we kind of knew that that was going to happen like no no like let's look back at a day ago what we all thought and we actually have have learned a lot which is awesome like that's the goal we've learned it an enormous amount and it's not to catch anybody out right but it's it's really

valuable to have the snapshot and to quite frankly just help show the value of the research like we learned things or maybe didn't maybe you were all right which is awesome and now we know we can move forward twice as fast the point you made about how most people after this are like wow we need this is not what I expected and I want to do this more I know that feeling so well every time you're like no I don't need to talk to customers I get I understand what we need to build and then

you do you're like holy why are we doing this all the time what what are we doing yeah that's such a powerful feeling yeah there's this other thing that I think is worth mentioning that I've come across which be when we do this set of predictions so again it's across all different kinds of businesses all different kinds of domains there's certain patterns that I've noticed that show up over and over about mispredictions like there's a there's a pattern of the kinds of things that show up over and over that are I think it was kind

of these common blind spots and I think it's attributed I can attribute it to this there's this concept of the curse of knowledge so I'm working with lots of teams who are deep experts in their space right I'm not I'm always like showing up as the new like okay what is your business what are we doing but they have deep expertise and when somebody has deep expertise it's very difficult to imagine that other people don't know what you know it's very hard to to kind of put yourself in their shoes right and you just think

well doesn't everybody know this or maybe even you know yeah doesn't everybody know this and so what that leads to is these key blind spots that are very common which is there's an overestimation of how much your customer knows about the thing maybe how how big a problem they even perceive it to be how much they're willing to pay for it which is connected and kind of where they are on their journey to be ready to buy this thing like oh wait they're they're not they don't they're not ready yet like wait I right they're

not there there yet or or we haven't figured out who the right people are who are the bullseye but people overestimate those kinds of things and it's really common um blind spots that we find over and over across a lot of businesses with expert teams that makes sense like most startups realize what they're trying to build is not nobody really cares about so I get why that happens often uh okay is there anything else in this step of the interview that you think is really important to mention otherwise I I want to hear what you

find or some common pitfalls and mistakes people make couple things I guess about the watch party that I would make sure the team needs to be there and they need to show up and this is the whole team like the whole like all the engineers designers I mean so the way I like the what we found because sometimes we do this and at a maximum we had 40 people show up that's still our record and which is awesome like the more the marry like I want the whole team to see this because part of the

shortcut of the watch party is I'm not doing a report I don't I don't need to go persuade or explain people what happened like you all saw it and we went through it together and everybody's aligned and gets what's happened but it can make some of these other aspects of the process a little unwieldy so what becomes important is to Define like who's who's the core product team everybody's welcome but there's a core product team who's probably taking notes and and like also for us as The Outsiders we know like those are the opinions like

that's who's really building this thing who's making the decisions and is's going to have to own this and have to build it or do whatever's do all the work so distinguishing about like who is that core product team they need to really be there for all of it other people if if there's some other engineer on another project and they want to come in and see one or two awesome love it but everybody else the core team you need to be there for all of it where do you find people often make a big mistake

waste time have common or blind spots maybe along this process the time that it doesn't work as well there are times I get through a and you're just like G that that just didn't work well it's because for one reason or another we did not select specifically we didn't recruit specifically enough and weren't picky enough about Bullseye customers and so if you end up with a combination of people who was a little mushy like you you let the bullseye bleed a little too much in the end you're like yeah I don't I'm not sure what

the conclusions are to draw here if just feels mushy and so whenever that happens I always kick myself and like g i i the team like took control of the recruiting because it was you know their customers and I I just wasn't picky enough or we didn't narrow it enough or they included some people who are like experts that they already know and they talk to all the time like G didn't like get what we wanted and that can be frustrating so you just have to really be disciplined and picky about about having the right

people in there which comes back to where we started just uh like seven attributes I really like that just giving people a heuristic there's like sevenish narrowing attributes of who you're recruiting to get a really specific and ideally you get through through going through this process what I want to do is get to a point where somebody can N A Team can narrow down to a point where like actually there's one or two attributes that you realize later like that's the thing oh it's people on specialty medications that are refrigerated cold chain all the other

stuff maybe not as important like you figure out that's the distinguishing characteristic and so now if I have some giant funnel or a set of leads or all these things I need to prioritize I can streamline all this other sales motion or something else that I'm doing I'm like that's for now like we'll expand it but for now that's how I'm going to prioritize people there's some rubric or some couple questions or or characteristics that are really the key ones but this reminds me of actually with linear something smart they did is they had a

wait list when they first launched and the wait list was their uh questionnaire what you what do you the what do you call it the screener so basically the weit list was a screener survey it's like what do you use for o what do you use for hosting your code and then they pick those people that most match what they actually can do that day that's brilliant yeah so there's a lot of overlap with this exercise and then how you actually launch uh any other blind spots or pitfalls anything else you think people often run

into other than not getting narrow enough put more weight on past experiences than on people's predictions of what they would do classic classic user researcher advice yeah say more I described I do these two-part interviews so that first part is having people describe and explain past experiences what they've done what's important to them Etc I put much more weight in that as like building the trajectory of what will this person accept or value or void what do they think are barriers to then showing a prototype like oh I would totally do this like that does

not sound at all consistent with what you just described to me so I'm going to be somewhat skeptical of of your prediction of what you would do or what you think might happen we're all terrible at that's not about the customer like we're all terrible at this predicting what we're going to do and so I just put much more weight in like what has this person shown and demonstrated in the past as their behavior and their attitudes and opinions um and so I I really try to get teams to Anchor more on that I love

that and what I think like I think everyone always hears this and then they still fall for this because it's like oh great they're going to use this awesome let's build it they told us they would use this immediately so what I think back to is your advice of like look for extreme excitement like that's more of a signal that maybe they actually will and the other thing that you alluded to is confirmation bias right you want to and and we encourage people in the watch party we give people kind of rules about how to

listen and we kind of encourage people to make it okay to kind of police each other a little bit and jokingly like oh it sounds like you're you know confirming your own bias that people would do this thing that you thought they would do you know try to like keep each other honest about what you're actually hearing and try to be as neutral and objective about what you're hearing I love that uh to the uh signal that they're excited it reminds me someone's quote once was look for their pupils to dilate to sense how excited

they are about something you can just see it you do a bunch of this and and you you'll know and if you don't know like it's probably a no which is how everyone always describes what product Market fit feels like you just you know it if you don't feel if it's not obvious then you don't have it okay Michael we did a lot of good work here we've gone through the entire process solved everyone's problems uh I'm going to skip the lightning round just to keep this episode shorter is there anything else that you want

to leave listeners with before we wrap up one thing I've been thinking about and and and recently getting to experiment with which I'm pretty excited about is to how to apply these methods in biotech so um Mo a big piece of the GV portfolio is in biotech developing new therapies new treatments that's a very different looking kind of business than a lot of digital Enterprise consumer kind of products that I work with with what I think is really interesting is as I work more with those people and and so those are years right and they're

doing science so nobody's calling me when they're doing science like they don't need that help they get to a point where there is some productization of it you need to figure out like oh actually how is this going to fit into a physician's workflow how will patients react to this relative to some other possible treatment or other things that are out there how do we encourage more people to acrew onto a clinical trial how do we think about a clinical trial as a product and and streamline that and make sure we're targeting the right people

and increasing the number of people are getting on there so what's been interesting is as I work with teams I mean talk about expert teams as I talk to people who come kind of from that tradition I don't know how else to describe it is they don't they're doing similar work but they don't seem to describe themselves as product managers they have other kinds of titles they come from like patient education so they have these other titles but they're doing similar kinds of work and so but they come kind of from this other place and

so it's really and they they talk about tpps Target product profiles right it's like this different language and this different world to me but it's the same like the same things the same methods and the same stuff so the idea of bringing some of these methods there as I've I've been getting to do more recently is really exciting to me because it feels like there's a uh partly it feels a little green field and partly it just feels like the impact there is huge right for some of those things so so that's something that I've

just been thinking a lot about recently is is just kind of excited about those kind of opportunities and also just kind of curious I don't know to hear from some of your listeners if they're doing some of this in those spaces this is a good segue to two final questions I ask everyone so perfect uh one is just share where people can find your book if they want to go deeper they want to practice the themselves and also do you like do they reach out if they want to work with you on this sort of

thing so just share what folks can do if they want to learn more and then uh coming back to what you just said how can listeners be useful to you maybe share cool cool biotech stuff so learn more faster.com um you can go grab a free copy of the book um there's all kinds of demo videos of me doing interviews there's all kinds of worksheets and resources they're us a really nerdy researcher playlist there so please just go grab stuff it's all free like again I'm not selling anything I'm just really eager to get people

to try this um and and use it and please tell me in terms of how you could help me tell me your stories try it let me know what works how you adapt it um how it applies even to places that aren't early stage startups I assume some of this is is relevant there um so please let me know um ways you can reach me to let me know is Michael learnmore faster.com um you can just directly send me a note there I don't can't guarantee I'll reply to everybody but I'll read it all um

and I'm on LinkedIn is probably a really great place to reach me and it sounds like you also answer that last question how can folks be helpful just like share their experience with yeah totally just tell me your your stories how did you use this what did you use it on what worked what didn't how should we fix it feels like we I'm excited that we were able to open open source this that GV was able to do that and so part of that is help me update it and fix it awesome and just to

clarify if folks want to like go really deep do you work with companies just like at Haw how does that work just so people know I work with GV portfolio companies so okay got it so go work with G okay there we go yeah my full-time job is ux research partner at GV awesome Michael thank you so much for being here thank you a ton I've Loved this this has been super fun awesome I love to hear that bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the

show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode