At our product book club, we read then discuss popular product books, sharing tips on how to put the advice in the book into action. In this session, we discussed ‘The Mom Test’ by Rob Fitzpatrick.

Published in 2013, The Mom Test has grown through word-of-mouth recommendations into a must-read for anyone wanting to avoid the common problems caused by poor discovery research.

People like it because it’s simple, tangible, and the example conversations illustrate perfectly the mistakes many of us have made with customer research about an idea on which we are already sold.

The chapters cover three main areas:

• interview technique (asking the right questions, in the right way)

• customer segmentation (deciding on the right people to start with)

• discovery logistics (sharing and storing your research)

Even for experienced PMs who know a lot of the information in the book, it’s a handy reminder. And the examples are really helpful for coaching others in your organisation who might need to do customer research. For example, customer success teams.

But, it’s just an introduction and quite heavily focused on early-stage product development. So when implementing the advice in the book, people often have questions about how to make it part of their day-to-day work with more mature products. And that’s what most of the discussion in the book club focused on.

The tips

The tips we shared focused on the three main areas covered in the book, interview technique, customer recruitment and segmentation, and post-interview admin.

Interview technique

Challenge: How to focus on asking good questions in the interview.

The book makes it very clear how to ask effective questions, but when you’re new to this it can be difficult to remember that advice while you’re in a real conversation.

Tips:

• Make sure you are clear on what you want to get out of the conversation. However you prefer to prepare for an interview, be clear on what the goal is and make a note of it. Then even if one of your questions isn’t great (or you forget what you were going to ask) you can refer back to your goal to get things back on track.

• Create an interview guide. This can have the level of detail you feel is right. In the book, he suggests ‘keeping it casual’ (ie. informal and with no interview guide) but if you’re still learning how to interview people, having a guide there can give you peace of mind. Generally speaking, the guide will have some information about the goals, demographics you are targeting, main questions, follow-up questions, and checkpoints so you can end the interview if it’s not useful.

• Start with a warm-up. Broad general questions can help both you and the interviewee feel more comfortable before diving into the more detailed questions.

• Read ‘Just Enough Research’ by Erika Hall. It covers a broader range of research techniques with a similar tangible approach to The Mom Test and is a popular book for learning more about research.

Customer recruitment and segmentation

Challenge: Recruitment for interviews outside personal network.

Sometimes, finding people in your target demographic is a challenge. We shared these tips on how to find the right people to speak to.

Tips:

• Go where the users are. Are there online communities where these interviewees hang out (eg. subreddits)? If so, recruit them there. Maybe there are physical locations where you can find them in stores, gyms, or other places related to the product. If that’s the case, get out and about to speak to them.

• Get help from people in the company who are already speaking to customers. If you have a customer service team, they

• Automate discovery recruitment. This tip also came up in our Continuous Discovery Habits book club – if you make recruiting customers a habit, you can build up a group of people that you can speak to when needed.

• Make a lo-fi version available for feedback. Sometimes having something to play with can be more interesting to customers than an interview. Where this is the case, a lo-fi prototype might pique their interest and help open a conversation.

Challenge: How to decide whether to compensate interviewees.

Reward for interviewees is the topic of much debate. The advice shared in the book club mainly fell into the following two areas.

Tips:

• Find the right size reward. Having no reward suggests you don’t value people’s time. On the other hand, recruiting people who are solely participating in research because of the reward can lead to bias. Consider what their time is worth to them, then base the reward around that. For example, a busy doctor will likely need more compensation to take half an hour out of their day than a student.

• No need to pay for casual chats. ‘Keep it casual’ is one of the mantras that’s repeated throughout The Mom Test, and it applies well here. If you are ensuring your interviews are casual conversations and

Challenge: How to recruit users when nobody wants to speak to the company.

If the company is unpopular or has burned bridges with users already, it can be challenging to find people to participate in your research. These are the tips the attendees came up with for if you find yourself in that situation.

Tips:

• Do it anonymously and focus on the customer problems not the company. For example, you could use an email address that’s not associated with the company and explain you are doing research on behalf of someone, not mentioning their name.

• Keep it casual. If you are already going where the customers are and having casual conversations, nobody needs to know about the company you are associated with.

Challenge: Knowing which customers to recruit.

When you have a broad customer base with a wide range of ideas and opinions, it can be a challenge knowing which of them to focus on.

Tips:

• Align the choice of customers with your business goals. If you’ve got your product strategy sorted (handy product strategy guide here), you should have an idea of the customer profiles you are looking for. If you don’t have that yet, this article will help you understand [how to identify your target audience - link to relevant article].

• Use an opportunity solution tree to organise your thinking. We’ve already shared one tip from this book but Continuous Discovery Habits is such a gold mine, here’s another one from it. The opportunity-solution tree is a simple way to streamline your discovery research and organise your thinking.

Post-interview admin

Challenge: Filtering out ‘bad’ data.

You can only make effective decisions based on your discovery research if you have the right data there. Opinions from people who aren’t in your target audience can skew your results and might mean you make the wrong decisions for your product.

Tip: Make sure you have enough metadata on your interview notes that you know you are only using relevant information for your research. One neat way to do this is to write a description of the customer segment you want to speak to on the interview guide or paper you are taking notes on. That also makes it easy to cut the interview short if while you are speaking you find the customer is not actually in the segment you thought they were.

What we’ll do differently

At the end of the session, we all committed to doing one thing differently based on what we’d learned during the session. These are what we came up with.

• Consider less structured interviews

• Add a ‘key question’ to the end of interviews

• Prepare more before an interview

• Use reddit to find customers

• Read 'Just enough research' by Erika Hall.

Conclusions

It’s easy to see why The Mom Test is so popular. It’s highly tangible, useful, and manages to be an entertaining read at the same time. If you’re thinking of starting your own business, it’s a must-read, and could help prevent you making a lot of expensive mistakes. If you’re a product manager working on a more mature product, the tips will still be a useful reminder of how to get the most out of customer conversations. And, if you’re leading a team of product managers, it’s a handy tool to give your team members to teach them some of the interview skills you likely take for granted.

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