Customer Understanding Toolkit
The Customer Understanding Toolkit is a flexible set of frameworks and approaches for teams to deepen customer understanding. The Toolkit is highly versatile: you can apply it to explore markets you’re considering entering, test if early product concepts are valuable, evaluate features, and drive customer-centered pricing and sales conversations.
Goal
The first piece of the toolkit is “Goal”, which helps you scope what you want to learn from customers. As the foundation for customer learning, it’s important to get this right. Enter the Goal Template:
We want to learn [knowledge] to decide [decision], so we need to learn from [audience].
This template is built based on years of hearing team goals that are insurmountably broad or overly specific, not tied to a decision the team has to make, or lack a clear understanding of whom you need to learn from to meet your goal. Let’s examine each component.
[knowledge]
You might be familiar with Henry Ford’s quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. This quote is often used as justification to not listen to your customers. I respectfully disagree with Ford - the quote is actually an example of not hearing what your customers are telling you.
These customers articulated an important unmet need: I need to get from A to B, faster. Reframing your thinking to orient around what customers need to get done is key to scoping your goal, and will help you pick up on key insights shared by customers. Subsequently, ideating on “how might we build faster horses?” won’t yield the solution of “car”. In contrast, “How might we get people from A to B more quickly?” is much more likely to yield “car”.
We can use the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework by Anthony Ulwick as a concrete way to help us achieve this customer-centered reframe. The core premise of JTBD is that markets are defined as groups of people trying to get a job done - not around specific products. A JTBD is solution-agnostic, such as “to get from point A to point B”, “to share memories”, or “to stay healthy”. They are reasons someone will “hire” a solution, and different solutions can be hired for a given JTBD. JTBD are written as [verb] + [object of the verb] + [optional: contextual clarifier] (e.g., [to gather] [all the things I need] [before checking out at the grocery store]").
Bringing us back to “Goal”: We can frame (or reframe) what we want to learn around JTBD. Here are two examples, taken from a recent workshop with Lazaridis ScaleUp cohorts of high-potential, high-growth Canadian tech companies:
Before JTBD: “What do customers really think about our product?”
After JTBD: “What are customers’ JTBD? Does our product meet their JTBD, based on what they say and do?”
Before JTBD: “How do customers want to leverage AI solutions?”
After JTBD: “What are customers’ JTBD and current barriers?”
This second example was asked in the context of a sales conversation with customers. You can enter the conversation with your AI solutions in mind. First, listen to what JTBD and barriers the customer shares. Does that match what your AI solutions do? Could you build or change your solutions to remove customer barriers? At this point in the conversation, you can introduce some potential solutions to your customers for feedback, referring back to their JTBD and barriers.
[decision]
Are you learning about JTBD to inform features you’re building for a given milestone? To revise your go-to-market strategy? To learn if a button should be blue or green?
Take a moment to decide what action you’ll take if you had this knowledge in hand. If you’re unable to think of what action you’d take, or if the action is extremely low-consequence (e.g., change the color of a button most customers won’t use), go back to the drawing board about what you want to learn.
[audience]
Your learning goal and the decision you’re trying to make will also help you get crisp you should speak with. Let’s look at a concrete example.
“We want to learn customers’ main goals and barriers, to decide what AI features to invest in to drive retention.”
The specificity of “retention” signals you need to learn from existing customers, rather than prospective customers. If you instead were seeking growth, you would focus on prospective customers, or people who use a competitor solution.
To get more specific about exactly whom to learn from, leverage existing personas, segments, and analytics. Also consider “extreme users”: Early adopters, power users, people who frequently do x, or people who rarely do x. These extreme users can yield insights into innovation opportunities.
For example, when I was leading zero-to-one research for Adobe Aero, an augmented reality (AR) authoring app for designers, we were aiming to identify JTBD for a market that didn’t yet exist. We started by learning from bleeding-edge extreme users - developers creating AR experiences. Through conversations with these extreme users, we uncovered that they were collaborating with creative professionals with needs that Adobe was well-poised to serve.
Plan
You’ve identified what you want to learn, the decision that learning will inform, and whom you need to learn from. It’s now time to plan for your time with customers, which we can break into three main steps:
Methods
Questions
Recruitment
Methods
A common mistake I observe is teams leading with methods, for example: “We should run a survey” Or, “We need to talk to people”. Methods follow from what you want to learn, so ensure you’ve got your Goal Template filled out before proceeding.
To pick the best method to serve your goals, start by asking:
Do the questions I want to learn start with ‘what? why? how?’ or ‘how many?’ For example: What documents do people share? Why do they share documents? How do they share documents? - versus “What % of people share documents?”
Do I want to learn what people say (attitudes), what people do (behavior), or both? For example, what are people’s attitudes around using generative AI tools for education use cases? How are people using generative AI in classrooms? (That is, their behavior.)
We can map these questions to the Methods Matrix, inspired by a classic Nielsen Norman Group diagram showing the landscape of user research methods.
I’ve placed some common approaches for learning about customers on the Matrix. I’ll be focusing on customer conversations for the remainder of this post, because they are versatile, cost-efficient, and a great way to build rapport with your customer base.
While out of scope, let’s walk through an example of how surveys and analytics fit here. A survey would be a suitable method if you’re looking to learn, say, “What % of people think booking a vacation takes too much time?” (a “how many?” question about attitudes). Analytics are helpful to address questions like, “How many people use a given feature in our solution?” (a “how many?” question about behavior).
Questions
To prepare for your customer conversation, write a “discussion guide”: a set of questions you’d ask your customer. The guide starts broad, as you introduce yourself and learn the basics about your customer, like where they are located. You then start focusing in, learning about general experiences (e.g., what their day-to-day looks like), followed by deep-diving into your topic of interest (e.g., how they use a specific product). You then debrief on the focused conversation, listening for things like following up on key points. You then move into the wrap-up, where you ask, “Is there anything else you wanted to share that we didn’t talk about today?”, which very often yields rich insights.
Recruitment
You also need to find and schedule people to speak with. Some key places to start include: analytics, social forums (Slack, Discord, Facebook, etc), and partnering with your Sales team to find customers. Aim for at least 5 conversations to identify themes. Apply key ‘filter criteria’ (also called a “screener”) to help you bring in the right people. This includes key demographic information (e.g., people who work at enterprise companies), key behavioral information (e.g., people who do x) and key attitudinal information (e.g., people who like y). Recruitment could be it’s own blog post. Check out the handbook, Observing the User Experience, for a deeper dive.
Think ahead
Before you start your customer conversations, also think through the answers to the following questions:
Whom else from your team needs to be involved in these conversations?
How will you take notes during the conversation?
How will you debrief about your learnings with the team?
Do
The time has come to have your customer conversations! We’ll examine at two key points to execute your Plan:
Golden rules of conversations
Sense-making
Golden rules of conversation
“That competitor tool must be really challenging to use, right?”
“Do you like the new workflow we just showed you?”
“Wouldn’t you like to save time with this feature?”
Questions like these only provide false signal and show you’re not listening. And yes, I’ve heard people ask this of their customers, almost verbatim. These questions are bad because they lead your customer in a direction that you want to go - not a direction they want to go. You’re also applying pressure for them to answer in a certain way, which might even make them uncomfortable. Instead: Meet your customers where they’re at. Instead of leading, try “nondirective questions” to follow the customer, such as, “tell me about your experience”, “what were you aiming to do?”, and “what did you expect to happen?” if they show surprise after an interface didn’t work as expected.
“How many times do you think you’re going to dine out this week?”
“How would you use this feature?”
“How much would you pay for these features?”
These types of questions are all too common in customer conversations. Except, we know that people are bad at predicting their future behavior. People are much better at explaining what they’re doing as they’re doing it, or talking about recent behavior. Putting them in relevant context or asking about the recent past will yield more actionable insights. For example, “How many times did you dine out this past week?” will be more predictive of future behavior than “How many times do you think you’re going to dine out this week?”
To understand the value of your features relative to one another, you can try reframing questions like “how much would you pay for these features?” into something more concrete. For example, “You have $100 to spend on five features. How would you spread the $100 across features? Why? If you had to put $100 on one feature - what, if any feature, would you put it on? Why?”
Sense-making
By now, you’ll have rich insights from your customer conversations. How do you make sense of it all? Enter sense-making, also called “synthesis". There are many synthesis approaches. We’ll cover an extremely versatile approach: the affinity diagram. Here, you use a whiteboard (real or virtual) to write one insight per sticky. Cluster them into themes and label your themes. You then write a one-sentence insight per theme, and identify the action you’ll take. This approach can be done solo or in a workshop setting, if other people were involved in conversations. Workshops also increase visibility of insights, and can help align teams around customer learnings.
Start your affinity diagram by writing one insight from your customer per sticky note. Next, cluster and label your themes. Then, write a one-sentence insight per theme, and identify the action you’ll take.
Decision
You now have the customer learnings you need to make the decision outlined in your Goal Template. As you go forward, keep these three points in mind:
✅ Iterate based on new knowledge
✅ Plan your next set of interviews
✅ Have conversations early and often
Summary
To recap, the Customer Understanding Toolkit includes several frameworks and approaches to help you better understand your customers, from exploring markets to sales conversations.
Would you like to workshop on specific goals using the Customer Understanding Toolkit? We’d love to collaborate! Reach out at hello@sendfull.com