Chapter 8: Running the Process

Core Idea

Put a light process around your conversations: prepare, take good notes, and review with the team. That way the learning reaches the whole team instead of staying in one person’s head, where “the customer said so” turns into an unanswerable argument.

Frameworks Introduced

• The learning bottleneck:
  • What it is: customer learning stuck in one person’s head. If one person goes to all the meetings and reports back, “What I learned” becomes “What you’ll do,” and that person becomes a de facto dictator.
  • It can start from either side. The person talking to customers may share badly, or the product team may refuse to engage with customers.
  • Symptoms: “You just worry about the product. I’ll handle the customers.” “Because the customers told me so!” “I don’t have time to talk to people — I need to be coding!”
  • The author’s own bottleneck made his CTO quit, saying the company would never succeed if the author kept changing what they were doing.
  • Avoiding it has three parts: prepping, reviewing, and taking good notes.
• Prepping:
  1. Know your current list of 3 big questions. Choose them with your team, and include the scary ones.
  2. If you’ve already learned the basic facts, decide which commitment and next steps you’ll push for.
  3. Spend up to an hour writing your best guesses about what this person cares about and wants. You’ll probably be wrong, but the outline keeps you on track. With a well-focused segment you’ll rarely need this.
  4. Answer anything you can with desk research first. Save conversations for what the internet can’t tell you.
  5. For a business, spend 5 minutes on LinkedIn and their website.
  6. Prep with the whole founding team, both business and product, or their concerns won’t get asked.
  • The minimum: ask a grumpy cofounder to “humour me” and spend ten minutes choosing learning goals.
  • The big prep question: “What do we want to learn from these guys?”
• Reviewing: after conversations, go through your notes with the team and update your beliefs and your 3 big questions. Share key quotes, main takeaways, and problems you ran into. Also review the conversation itself: which questions worked, and which signals did you miss? Teams do this as a quick chat after each meeting, a weekly review, or a chat channel used only for customer learning.
• Who should show up:
  • Everyone making big decisions, including technical ones, should join at least some conversations.
  • Two people is best: one talks and one takes notes. The second person can step in when the lead asks a bad question or misses a signal.
  • Don’t bring more than two unless it’s a group meeting with their team.
  • Going solo is fine once you take concise notes, but it’s harder to catch yourself pitching.
  • If you’re shy, bring a friend and take the note-taker role at first.
  • You can’t outsource customer learning until you have a working business model and a repeatable sales or marketing process. Hired help tends to soften lukewarm signals, and bad news from a hire is hard to accept. Hires can set up meetings as long as founders attend and listen.
• Signal symbols for notes:
  • Emotions: :) Excited; :( Angry; :| Embarrassed.
  • Their life: ☇ Pain or problem; ⨅ Goal or job-to-be-done; ☐ Obstacle; ⤴ Workaround; ^ Background or context.
  • Specifics: ☑ Feature request or purchasing criteria; ＄ Money or budgets or purchasing process; ♀ Mentioned a specific person or company; ☆ Follow-up task.
  • Combine the life symbols with emotions. A pain carries more weight when the person is angry or embarrassed about it. Obstacles matter because you’ll probably have to deal with them too (for example, an IT policy that blocks cloud tools, worked around by using a personal phone).
  • Ask for an intro to anyone they mention. Research any competitor they mention. Star the follow-ups you promised as part of a commitment.
• Where to write it down: notes should be:
  • Able to be sorted, mixed, and re-arranged
  • Able to be combined with the notes of the rest of your team
  • Permanent and retrievable
  • Not mixed in with other random noise like todo lists and ideas
  • Options: a general notebook is nearly useless. Spreadsheets and Evernote are good for sharing and sorting, but typing in a meeting seems rude, so you’ll transfer notes afterwards. A dedicated notebook works if you carry it. Index cards or sticky notes are the author’s favourite: one quote or learning per card with a symbol, plus the date and person added afterwards. Audio is hard to search and breaks a casual chat. If note-taking would be awkward, write everything down right after the conversation.
• The process:
  • Before a batch of conversations: if you haven’t yet, choose a focused, findable segment. With your team, decide your big 3 learning goals. If relevant, decide on ideal next steps and commitments. If conversations are the right tool, figure out who to talk to. Create a series of best guesses about what the person cares about. If a question could be answered via desk research, do that first.
  • During: frame the conversation. Keep it casual. Ask good questions which pass The Mom Test. Deflect compliments, anchor fluff, and dig beneath signals. Take good notes. If relevant, press for commitment and next steps.
  • After: with your team, review your notes and key customer quotes. If relevant, transfer notes into permanent storage. Update your beliefs and plans. Decide on the next 3 big questions.
• This stuff is fast: prep for an hour, not a week. Talk to customers for a week or two, not months, before giving them something to commit to. Keep talking to customers for the life of the company, alongside building it.

Key Concepts

• Exact quotes: write them in quotation marks so you know they’re verbatim. Use them later in marketing, pitch decks, and team debates.
• Going through the motions: holding conversations without knowing what matters.
• Talking to customers is a tool, not an obligation: if it won’t help, skip it, and don’t send a half-hearted survey to tick a box.

Warning signs that you’re going through the motions

• You’re talking more than they are
• They are complimenting you or your idea
• You told them about your idea and don’t have next steps
• You don’t have notes
• You haven’t looked through your notes with your team
• You got an unexpected answer and it didn’t change your idea
• You weren’t scared of any of the questions you asked
• You aren’t sure what you’re trying to learn in this conversation

Anti-patterns

• The business person attends alone and dictates: the team can’t check the interpretation.
• Notes in a general notebook or long recordings: notes you can’t find are notes you won’t read.
• Skipping the review: it seems trivial, but it keeps the team in sync, improves decisions, and prevents arguments.

Rules of Thumb (author’s wording)

• If you don’t know what you’re trying to learn, you shouldn’t bother having the conversation.
• Notes are useless if you don’t look at them.
• Go build your dang company already.

Worked Example

Illustration, not from the book: notes from the Chapter 2 “good conversation”, written with the author’s symbols on one card per signal.

Card	Note
⤴ ＄	Two full-time staff manage the process to keep everyone in sync. Uses Excel and many emails.
☇	Difficulties with the current workflow: details to dig into next time.
☆	Ask who else handles this process; request an intro.
Not recorded	“I really like your idea. I’m sure it will do well.” This is a compliment, so it isn’t data.
Back of each card	Date, person, company.

At the team review, the ⤴ ＄ card leads the discussion: they spend two salaries on a workaround, which is a strong value signal nobody expected. The team updates its big 3 questions. A likely new one is “Who owns the budget for those two roles?”

Key Takeaways

1. Prep with the whole team for up to an hour around one question: “What do we want to learn from these guys?”
2. Go in pairs: one person talks, the other takes notes.
3. Use symbols and exact quotes, and store notes somewhere sortable and shared.
4. Review after every meeting or batch, and update your 3 big questions.
5. Founders must attend customer conversations themselves until sales are repeatable.
6. Keep the cycle short: an hour of prep, a week or two of conversations, then something to commit to.

Connects To

• Ch 3: the list of 3 drives prep and review.
• Ch 5: prep includes the commitments you’ll push for.
• Ch 6: framing the conversation is the first step “during”.
• Ch 7: the process starts with a focused, findable segment.
• Ch 9: the book’s cheatsheet repeats this process.