Rob Fitzpatrick's review of Rob Fitzpatrick’s “The mom test”

Read a book by Rob Fitzpatrick, Rob Fitzpatrick’s “The mom test”. In Russian, it seems it is not sold anywhere. In English you can buy here: momtestbook.com

Honestly, I did not expect much from the book. Well, in fact, what can be said about the new CustDev, problem interviews and other lean things? We speak with clients, do what they want, everything seems to be clear. However, the book was pleasantly surprised. The topic is plowed so deeply that after reading and some practice you can read the trainings yourself and act as a speaker at conferences like LEAN Startup Russia . By the way, it was at this conference that I received this book for free, for which great respect to the organizers — FRIA and LPGenerator , as well as Julia Ploskonosova and Ilya Korolev . PS: I wrote a review of the conference here .

But first, some lyrical digression.
CustDev solves an important problem related to the fact that programmers like to program and do not like to talk with users of the product. Usually, to solve this problem, there are people in the project team who have been specially trained to find out the needs of clients - system analysts. They communicate with customers, they write TZ (technical task), according to TZ, the architect makes a TP (technical project) - a document with the decomposition of the modules, a description of the interfaces between the systems, the architecture of the solution. The project manager cuts functionality by iteration, sets priorities, forms a team and development begins. Problems in this case arose immediately:
a) requirements in the TZ were outdated, and the client easily gushing with new ideas, changed the previously set priorities.
b) the solution was doped along the way; during the implementation, the programmers made their own decisions (for example, the format of fields in the database and during validation), so the requirements needed to be synchronized (code-TK-TP) in both directions.
c) it is difficult to maintain a balance of interests - for a good design (including budget in fixed price projects), the planning of the team load requires a great deal of detailed TOR at the beginning of work, and for quick bug fixes, changing the priorities of TOR tasks is not necessary, but work is needed in agile style.
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The reasons for the problem, why developers do not like to communicate with customers lead to the myth of "garage programming", which arose in the year around 1975 and still survives. It lies in the idea that any 1-3 people locked up from the outside world in the garage for 1-12 months. they will create a superstuff that will conquer the whole world and in one moment will put them in the first ten of the Forbes list. Everything is completely wrong. At the heart of any good idea that won the market, first of all, is the search for a solvent customer who buys a product and quickly and effectively solves its important problem. Aerobatics - the client will give you money for a non-existent product until the moment it is done (see Kickstarter , Indiegogo and other MMM crowdfunding platforms)
Prior to practicing CustDev, such a major breakthrough in software development was Agile (XP, Scrum, Continuous integration, everything that came with it). She solved the previous great pain of developers - obsolescence of TK, changing priorities of functions, delays in the delivery of a workable product (or part of it) to a client.
Before Agile, TDD became a major insight - it solved the problem of a large number of bugs and module inconsistencies among themselves.
Before TDD, a major breakthrough was the active development of SourceControl systems - to solve group development problems and code backup.
Prior to this, UML, RUP, DesignPatterns appeared - to design software and avoid creating your own bikes.
Prior to this, code guidelines were widely used, reverse engineering - in order to be able to support previously written systems

etc. etc. Some things appeared at about the same time and develop in parallel, but the general idea is this - a solution is found for every important problem. Perhaps soon Lean will become obsolete and something else will appear, but at the moment it seems to be the best way to find, implement and bring the idea to the market, spending a minimum of time, money and team effort.

On this, the lyrics will finish. So, the insights from the book were quite substantial.

1) It is important to understand how the market works without you in reality, and not to try to impose your vision of reality on the market
2) It is important to clarify all types of uncertainty in the product - the number of customers, their conversion, how they learn about the product, how often they use it. For each question, it is necessary to generate and test solution options - product hypotheses. A good pace is to test 50+ hypotheses in 3 months, i.e. constantly analyze everything and communicate with the client.
3) Knowing customer segments is important to spend less money on advertising, i.e. sharpen advertising on a certain group of people, and not burn a lot of money, advertising on TV, and so on. bombing areas for wide coverage.
4) Listen more, talk less with the client. Ask about the past, not about the future. Talk about their life, not their idea. At the previous work, the chef said the magic phrase “OK, heard you” while talking to the client - this radically increases the productivity of the conversation, if you listen, hear and draw conclusions based on the client's opinion. PS: the phrase “I understand you” is bad, because implies that you previously did not understand anything.
5) Very insightful for many insight. Ask the client what the consequences of the situation are if a problem occurs (meaning, in the absence of your decision). Every entrepreneur dreams at this moment to hear that without his decision, the client will close all the chakras, he will lose 1 million. $ and in general, will die in terrible agony :-). As sad as it sounds, in 99.99% of cases the world will be without your brilliant idea (site, mobapp), and much also depends on Central Asian pofigism. For years, people in North Korea have been living without Appstore and are not blowing. The realization that the idea is not very painful, dramatically reduces the motivation of the team, but it is better to hear it as soon as possible. A separate problem - the Stockholm entrepreneur syndrome, when an idea that hasn’t flown up has been devouring its time and resources for years - the project does not develop, but it is not closed. Offtopic - when on the pitch of several of his ideas (the fact that there were several of them at once, was already a problem), one mentor, like a woodpecker, repeated the phrase “This is not a problem!” 10 times in a row, hardly kept himself from knocking his head with a laptop. Alisher Hasanov , hello!
6) We must love the bad news (the product, the realized function is not needed), because the search for truth is more important than compliments and it will save power in the future if you do not do unnecessary.
7) A typical mistake in a conversation with a customer - not seeing interest in the product, begin to push and pitch (explain) what a cool idea you have (cut in the seller). My favorite mistake!
8) It is necessary to ask only that question, the answer to which is not obvious (it cannot be, for example, google). To ask “Will you pay X money if it brings you 3 * X money?” Is a bad question, because he is obvious. You need to ask "How much are you currently paying for the solution?"
9) Do not even solve a very painful and massive problem if Central Asia has no money for a solution.
10) For each conversation, have a plan - the 3 most important questions for clarification
11) The meeting is considered successful, if everything is clear what to do next:
a) Plan made - commitments made for the time of the next meeting,
b) By reputation - they promise to submit to management / other experts,
c) For the money - made a pre-order or signed an agreement of intent. Those. Each new meeting with the same customer should be a promotion in the sales funnel - from identifying a problem to buying a solution.
12) Aerobatics - to conduct a problem interview without making an appointment, but during a simple conversation with an occasional acquaintance
13) Good ways to make cold calls less cold - i.e. so that you are not looking for clients / partners, but they are for you - to blog, meet through third parties, speak at conferences, ask industry experts, mentors, investors for contacts
14) Excellent letter of request for a talk - WFSF:
a) Vision (we are trying to solve problems in a certain area),
b) Formulation (we want to understand how this and that works),
c) Weakness (but we do not understand anything about it),
d) Significance (but you understand this),
e) Please (let's meet then)
15) Continue to meet until we hear something new, sometimes 3-5 meetings are enough to test the hypothesis. Offtopic - heard that for LinguaLeo 500+ meetings / 6+ months were held, although this may be the total number of meetings to test all the hypotheses, and not just to verify the original problem.
16) Segmentation of customers is also important because it will not need to implement a bunch of functions, trying to please everyone (and therefore, no one). Purely mathematically, the average score in the appstore application will be higher if you have 100 excellent reviews than 1000, both positive and negative. Although it seems that the more clients (including different ones), the more money, but it is not.
17) Customer segments are not only demographics (our clients are women 30+ with children), but also other characteristics - critics / admirers of the product, poor / rich, active commentators who leave feedback in the FB, stor and silent, share them based on the use of the solution . It is better to work in the 1st segment, rather than spray. The best segment is the rich admirers who are easy to reach and which will give great opportunities to develop business with them (for example, they actively buy additional services). Segments to form according to the “Who-Where” principle (Who are these people / Where can they be found).

Here, like this, I know that there are many letters - respect to those who mastered it.