Deploy Empathy - A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers by Michele Hansen [Part 1]

Why read this book? What do you know about customer interviews and what do you think about the word Empathy before starting?

I know that customers interviews are good to do and helpful for many businesses. I tend to associate them more with SaaS businesses where you would talk to your existing customers to find out how they are using your product. You may use that to guide in what features to build next. I'm a little unclear on how you'd do customers interviews before you build anything. Though clearly this is advice I've seen often. I can imagine it would be for uncovering problems or pains your potential customer's life that then you could solve. This is the part I hope to learn more about in this book. Because so far I can't imagine someone agreeing to speak to me for 30 minutes if the premise of the call is "I want you just walk me through your day and tell me about all your problems". I mean I understand people do this and I hear people love to talk about their problems. I just can't imagine this. I am also looking forward to learning the specific terminology to use and actual words to say. I love details and it seems this book offers scripts and such so I like that.

For the word empathy, I think of that is something I use with my kids and family members and close friends. People that I love. So I am intrigued by using it with potential customers and complete strangers. Intellectually it makes sense, though I feel wary of getting exhausted if start to care deeply about everyone. Not sure if that makes sense. From the definition I understand empathy is not about feeling what the other person is feeling. It's more about acknowledging that what they are feeling is valid and makes sense to you. I am afraid that if I take this empathy thing seriously though I won't be logical or focused (on the business part).

Why am I reading it? I quit reading traditional startup books a year ago (after reading many classics). Business building is about understanding people and human psychology more than anything else. So this one fits that bill. But I'm mostly reading because I enjoy reading, tracking notes and sharing what I learn. And also because I'm familiar with the author from Twitter and her podcast. All good reasons for me. Let's go!

Who is this book for and How to use it

Who can you interview? you can use this to interview potential customers, former customers, current customers, clients.

What are some reasons to interview customers? to find out why people cancel, how to get more people to buy, what features to build next.

The promise of the book is a "toolbox of repeatable processes that will allow you to find opportunities and moments of unexpected insights". Specifically we learn a set of conversation techniques and ways of speaking.

Using these, people will tell you useful actionable things. You create a competitive advantage for your company by being open to listening to your customers and having empathy for them. Since many large companies overlook this resource.

This book is written for people who do not come from a user experience background and intends to make the tribal knowledge from that community accessible to a broader audience. This book is written with solo founders in mind, who are likely developers and makers. It aims to "demystify the skill of pulling wants and needs out of potential customers". Doing so from the beginning can save us from the pain of building something people don't want.

What is Empathy? A definition:

Empathy is about understanding how another person thinks, and acknowledging [their] reasoning and emotions as valid, even if they differ from your own understanding.

Empathy doesn't mean that you agree with the other person. But you do need to enter their world and understand their perspective.

[aside] Stripe has integrated talking to customers as part of their DNA and this includes developers talking to customers. Cool. I never did this as a developer. When I first joined, I recall really wanting to talk to users at Castlight. Actually I wanted to eavesdrop conversations that customer success reps ("the guides") were having in that conference room across my desk.

Surprising tidbit - Listening to someone is powerful, even if you don't do anything with what you've learned afterward. [Really?! Has to do with how the brain creates good feeling towards someone who listened to you]

Key Frameworks

This is the theory part, three are 3 frameworks to learn about. These framework guide us in how to think about which questions to ask, how to ask follow-up questions, and what to do with what you learn.

Everything is a Process

Insight: all business tasks are made of a steps and are processes. Solving one step of the process, by making it easier/faster/cheaper, can be valuable too. People think that they have to solve the entire process. Understanding this will allow you to dig deeper when someone talks about a single task like "sending an invoice" that you know is a package of tasks.

Processes vary in frequency and complexity. People are more willing to pay to problems that are frequent, complex, time consuming, expensive to get wrong, or frustrating in some way.

Core Questions

What are they trying to do overall?
What are all of the steps in that process?
Where are they now?
Where does the problem you are solving fit in that process?
Where in that process do they spend a lot of time or money?
How often do they experience this problem?
What have they already tried?

Functional, Social, and Emotional

A process has more than functional elements. There are also social complexities and emotional elements. Understanding all of these motivators and constraints are key to understanding why someone might choose, continue or discontinue using a product. ("hiring" and "firing" products per Jobs To Be Done framework/book).

After discovering motivations, you also need to probe the commercial viability of the problems and how you might price it by asking:

how often they experience it
what they're currently using to solve it
how much time do they spend on it

Valuable, Usable, Viable, and Feasible

Product needs to be valuable to the customer, usable by the customers. It needs to be commercially viable (i.e make money) for the company and feasible to build (and maintain and support) by the company.

This evaluation happens after the interview though. During the interview, your job is too absorb whatever the person says like a sponge. [Warning: This is something I'd have trouble with (and would need to practice to learn!). As of now, I can imagine dismissing something, at least in my mind, a customers says if I judge it to be not feasible or not something people would pay for or...So the point here is to not start doing that judging and filtering during the interview.]

Getting Started

There is a sample interview you can listen to here which is useful as a template for practicing.

Some phrases from the sample interview I noticed: at the beginning "do you have any questions for me?" at the end "is there anything else I should know?" Without directly asking, managed to get answer to "how did you hear about the product?". Another observation - never directly talked about the product pricing.

In a well-run interview, the interviewer should do about 10% of the talking and the customer 90%. You get the customer talking with follow-up questions. Following up can also just be rephrasing what the person said to elicit elaboration.

A good suggestion of starting with interactive interviews:

You might find it easier to start with interactive interviews (such as testing a prototype or website) rather than digging into someone’s process and emotions. The prototype, landing page, or whatever it is you are testing can act as a neutral third party in the interview and give you an easy way to deflect awkwardness.

[insight] I can practice these techniques with my mentee/students (after all, they are my customers and I don't really "interview" them at all. We mostly talk technical things, and I teach/explain not exactly listen.

Steps to get started:

Read the "How to talk to people with talk" section
Do a practice interview (and record it) with a friend, using the script and topics provided
Analyze the practice interview - for the information you gathered and how you conducted it
Do more interview and practice

How will you know if you're doing it right and interviewing successfully?

Success is walking away excited about what you’ve learned, with new questions to answer, and full of ideas for things you could do differently.

You'll know if you're doing it right if you can identify their overall goal, steps that go into their process, relevant problems, and frequency and time and money spent for relevant steps. You are also looking to identify different functional, emotional, and social components.

Practice Interview

An interactive exercise in the book suggests doing practice interview with someone you know loosely. The topic is “What’s something new you bought in the last three months?” The idea is to understand why we made the new purchase, both as an interviewer and interviewee.

Sample questions for the exercise and longer version of these notes on my personal blog

This covers 1/4 of the book. Will be sharing notes for rest of the book over the next few weeks. Subscribe to the Indie Book Notes series, to get these in your inbox.