Chapter Five: Continuous Interviewing
Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
— Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs
“Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Steve Jobs, the founder and former CEO of Apple, often discounted market research. He argued, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Jobs was right. Customers don’t always know what they want. Most aren’t well-versed in technology. Nor do they have time to dream up what’s possible. That’s our job. That’s what Jobs meant when he said, “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” We are the inventors, not our customers.
However, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be talking to our customers. In this chapter, you will learn why interviewing on a regular cadence is critical to the success of any product trio and how to build a habit of interviewing weekly.
The purpose of customer interviewing is not to ask your customers what you should build. Instead, the purpose of an interview is to discover and explore opportunities. Remember, opportunities are customer needs, pain points, and desires. They are opportunities to intervene in your customers’ lives in a positive way.
Steve Jobs knew the importance of discovering opportunities better than most. He and the rest of the Apple team were masters at uncovering unmet needs. When the first iPhone was released in 2007, it wasn’t the first smartphone on the market. People resisted the idea of an on-screen keyboard. There were no third-party apps. But even though Apple wasn’t first to the market and they launched with a limited feature set, the first iPhone solved several customer needs that other smartphones didn’t.
If you are too young to remember the first iPhone, one of the big features at release was visual voicemail. Visual voicemail is so familiar today, it’s hard to remember what voicemail used to be like. Here’s how Ars Technica described visual voicemail in their 2007 review:
Instead of requiring the user to dial up the carrier’s voicemail number and listen to his or her voicemails in the order that they were received, visual voicemail lists each message out in visual format on the iPhone, almost like e-mail. It displays who the voicemail is from (and if it doesn’t recognize the number, it will analyze the area code and tell you what geographical area it’s from, which is helpful), and the user can tap whichever one in the list that he or she wants, no matter its position in the list. When the voicemail is playing, the user can pause it, scrub back and forth in the message, or skip.21
Now, if you had interviewed customers before the original iPhone was released, nobody would have asked for visual voicemail. Nobody knew visual voicemail was possible. Most people weren’t even aware of their own pain points and challenges with how regular voicemail worked. Voicemail wasn’t important enough for us to give it any thought.
Voicemail, at the time, was a minor inconvenience. To gain access to your voicemail, you dialed your own phone number, entered a password, and listened to each message sequentially. One by one, you had to decide if you wanted to replay a message, keep it, or delete it. If you had five messages and you needed to hear the third message, you had to decide what to do with the first two messages before you could get to the third one.
Voicemail was tedious. We were so accustomed to the tedium that we no longer noticed it. In fact, voicemail was a vast improvement over an earlier technology—tape-recorded answering machines. Early answering machines required that you be at home to check your messages. If you wanted to skip a message, you had to manually fast-forward and hope that you stopped in the right spot to hear the next message.
Voicemail, on the other hand, allowed you to check your messages from anywhere. You could quickly skip from one message to the next. Jobs and his team, however, weren’t satisfied. While voicemail was better than early answering machines, it still presented pain points and challenges for the end-user. Apple uncovered these opportunities and addressed them. Visual voicemail delighted consumers.
Apple is secretive about the way they work, so it’s not clear if they interviewed users, observed friends and family, or simply identified these opportunities based on their own experience. But what is clear is that Apple is better than most at discovering opportunities.
For the rest of us, this chapter will cover how to use continuous interviewing to reliably find customer opportunities. As we saw with visual voicemail, we can’t always rely on our customers to tell us what they need or want. Instead, you’ll learn how to use your customers’ own stories to discover their unmet needs.