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How to Conduct a CustDev Research

A non-exhaustive guide based on having conducted 100+ B2B Customer Interviews.

To develop a new product or a feature, product managers need to ensure that they are doing the right thing before submitting the epic or a user story to JIRA. In addition, because development is expensive and time-consuming, PMs don’t want their team to work on something that no one will use at the end of the day.

One way to overcome this concern is to research the problem, target audience, and possible solutions before the actual development. This research phase is called product discovery. It could be applied to the whole product, its parts, or features at different stages of a product lifecycle whenever you or one of your stakeholders develop a new idea.

Source: https://www.productboard.com/blog/step-by-step-framework-for-better-product-discovery/

During this product discovery PMs can do many things: surveys, feedback reviews, market research, A/B test, etc. Generally, they could be divided into two big buckets: quantitative and qualitative research. While the first is often expressed in numeric values or graphs and relies on data, stats, and numbers to say how likely some hypotheses are true or false, the latter uses words to describe concepts and experiences and aims to get precise details about the subject matter to understand how things work or how people think.

Product managers use qualitative methods such as customer interviews to discover why, how, and what people do to solve their pains or get what they want. These interviews are sometimes called Customer Development interviews. It is not a way to test your hypothesis or ideas, but it could help you understand your customers better: find segments, define pains, product ideas, or sales and marketing messages. By the end of the day, this helps you get insights into why and how your customers made their decisions, what they did to solve their problems, and which alternatives or blockers they met on their journey.

Types of Customer Development Research

I believe you can use several types of customer interview structures and questions depending on the goal of your research. Throughout my career, I have relied on the following options:

Customer Development to find a customer segment for your product. It is used when you have a hypothetical idea about the product and want to find customers who will most likely need your product.
Customer Development to find an idea for your product for an existing segment. You would use this one when you already understand the current customer segment and want to find out how they solve particular problems so that you could build a better product.
Customer Development to craft better marketing and sales messages for the target audience. When you already have a product and want to know how to communicate it more precisely to your customers.

These are identical regarding the general flow and questions but aim for slightly different goals. Though you can use results interchangeably, and in some cases, one interview will cover all the topics.

Customer Development research steps

Let’s say we have an idea of a SaaS service that will provide Enterprise customers who use CRM to get insightful and polished reports in an instance. At first, it may seem like you only need respondents, a pen, and paper to conduct the research, but if you start thinking about it thoroughly, you may find several crucial steps that are required.

First and foremost — build and write down a hypothesis you’ll work on to get insights from your customer segment. For example, “Sales leads struggle to get insights from existing built-in reports in their corporate SaaS CRM.” Building the hypothesis is the cornerstone of your research. Without this initial step, you might miss crucial points when considering your target audience and open questions to ask them.
Prepare the target audience description. Whom will you be targeting to schedule an interview and ask questions? These are, in most cases, your potential customers or users. For example, “Sales leads in Enterprises, who use SaaS CRM in their daily work for more than a year.”
Define possible channels and prepare messages to find the interviewees. Depending on your target audience, you might consider several possible ways and channels where you may find your customers for an interview. It might be friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, existing customers, partners, stakeholders, company management, etc. A good practice would be to prepare email or social media messages in advance to reach out and not spend too much time crafting a new message every time.
Prepare the script for questions. The rule of thumb here is to ask open questions about your interviewee's experience and not nudge them to your desired answers in any way. If you don’t know where to start, think about six Ws (actually, it’s 5W+1H): Who, What, Why, Where, When, How. The key point is that while picturing your customer's journey towards their desired outcome, keep asking questions related to these six pillars to understand their real pains, roadblocks, paths, and the channels they use.
Reach out to customers and conduct interviews.That’s one of the most complex parts because if you’re using cold outreach, it will take time and patience to get to 8-10 scheduled interviews. Consider the conversion rate around 3-5% if you don’t have a target audience in your network. Take notes while conducting an interview or have a sidekick to help you with that so you can pay full attention to the customer without having to take notes in parallel.
Write down customer quotes, your findings and insights to make a final report.You already have around 8-10 interviews and can start making a final report. Write down key quotes, customer journey pitfalls or jobs you found (new jobs, new ways of doing existing jobs).It’s time when you can see how your research answers the initial hypothesis: what insights help you to understand your customers better, which patterns do you see, what new ideas, hypotheses, product features, marketing or sales messages you might need to test.And there is also a possibility that after the cust dev interview, you find that there is no such problem or the customer segment you were targeting does not exist. Of course, it’s better to know this before you commit yourself and the team to several months of development. In this case, you might want to conduct new research to find another segment, or you might have found a new product idea while conducting interviews.
Share results with the team (product, marketing, sales, stakeholders). Take all your findings and bring them to your team. Let them know what and how you did it, guiding them briefly through the process and explaining the main insights and next steps.On the one hand, sharing your findings and insights with your team will help you show your work and gain valuable input, ideas, and perspectives. On the other hand, it helps your team to understand customers and their behavior better and thus make better decisions in their daily work. Product management isn’t something you work on your own — it’s a team effort.

How much time could Customer Development research take? (some real-life numbers)

As a general rule of thumb, you will need around ten interviews for B2B products and more than fifteen for B2C. Of course, the more complex your product, the more interviews you will need.

One interview would generally take 30 to 40 minutes, but there may be cases where you might talk for an hour or even more with a customer. So consider 20-30 minutes more to put your notes and thoughts into digital format if you didn’t do it during the interview.

After having conducted several customer development researches and 100+ interviews, I could say that such a study could take 20 to 30 hours of focused work considering all the required jobs (crafting the hypotheses, preparing questions, creating message templates, outreaching customers, conducting 10+ customer interviews, and creating a final report).

In total, a team can do it in a couple of weeks if they find enough interviewees and manage to schedule meetings fast. Otherwise, it could prolong for 4-6 weeks if there is a lack of interviews for the research.

What to do after the research?

There might be a whole new story about the target audience, next feature, new product idea, or the need to pivot. You need to proceed with some next steps after your findings so the whole research and effort wouldn’t vanish in some shared drive or your laptop.

By talking regularly to your users or customers, you could find new jobs they need to be done or ideas for your products. When a customer speaks about their way of doing things — that’s the most crucial input for you as a product manager because this is how you can develop the next big product idea and help them in their journey.