Book Club March Edition: The Mom Test
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This year we are launching some exciting new products and companies. To better prepare myself to lead this process, I picked up a book that had been recommended to me multiple times but always slipped off my reading list "The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick.
The Mom Test considers a simple premise, if you show your mother (or anyone) an idea you are particularly excited about, the constraints of social nicety will mean they find it very difficult to give you their feedback with anything other than very heavy positive bias.
Why does this matter?
When building product, we use our understanding of a customers problem to build a solution. This process needs data, and if not collected correctly, this data can easily become corrupted.
Making decisions on biased data can easily lead you to overestimate customer interest in your solution or even whether the customer experiences a problem in need of solution in the first place.
How do you conduct customer interviews that collect good data?
Fitzpatrick coins the rule: "Customer conversations are bad by default. It’s your job to fix them" and highlights two classes of information that usually yield unreliable data:
1. Feedback on your product or solution
2. Asking interviewees to predict their future behaviour
Both these lines of questioning encourage the interviewee to either favourably review your idea or self-flatter. As examples of each of these, feedback your might hear could go as follows:
"Yes, an app to help me work out is definitely something I'd buy it"
An easy answer when the entrepreneur isn't asking then and there to make a purchase.
Or "I want an app to help me work out 5 times a week, I love working out".
When perhaps in reality the user hasn't worked out in the past month.
Beyond the interview, the interviewee is unlikely to feel bound by their answers to actually follow through, so its much easier for them to give you the answer they think you want to hear, rather than the truth.
To circumvent this stretching of the truth, Fitzpartick suggests asking questions that are hard to lie to in response.
To pass the "Mom Test" questions should
Focus on the interviewee's life, not your product or solution
Ask about specifics. Actual examples of their past behaviour rather than generics or opinions
Talk less and listen more
When you do it right, interviewees won't even know you have an idea, but you will have a much better understanding of how they currently solve their problem and what your solution needs to do to fill the gap.
By Ben Miles