The art and science of great customer interviews - Part I
How to listen for what your customers are not telling you.
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. —Steve Jobs
This famous quote by Jobs is misinterpreted to mean don’t talk to customers, they don’t know what they want. Wrong. The key to what Jobs said is in the second sentence — Our job is to figure out what they're going to want. We can’t do that by ignoring their lives. Your customers know what gives them joy, what frustrates them, and what causes them pain. What they don’t know and frankly don’t give a hoot about is how YOU are going to address that need. That is entirely up to you.
But here’s the trouble that Jobs’s first sentence suggests: we humans are cagey about revealing our true motivations. We are more likely to project the image we’d like to see of ourselves than our sordid reality. We don’t always do what we say or say what we do. As marketers and product people, one of the ways to get to the underlying motivations and aspir…
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