Episode Description
On this episode, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Jim Morris, the Founder of Product Discovery Group.
There's no point in creating something that no one wants, yet so many teams skip the product discovery process.
Even the most efficient process can’t make a bad idea good. Building untested ideas is risky and can cause lost time, wasted money, and low morale.
Jim presents concrete techniques you can start using immediately to weed out bad ideas and focus on the good ones.
Specifically, Jim will cover:
9:11 - Tailoring your roadmap to fit customer needs
13:56 - How to bring the discovery process to the forefront
15:10 - How to get your team to contribute to the product discovery process
21:46 - Defining success metrics
32:03- Best practices for designing experiments
37:50 - Where are your users?
43:13 - Velocity over perfection
46:50 - Addressing customers who want very specific features
51:03 - How many interviews are enough?
51:12 - The recommended framework for product prioritization when it comes to features
1:02:20 - How to onboard potential customers for discovery interviews
Learn more at https://tractionconf.io
Connect with Jim Morris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmorrisstanford/
Learn more about Product Discovery Group at https://productdiscoverygroup.com/
Episode Transcript
Lloyed Lobo
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Jim Morris
Let's say you've got this interesting prototype. You show it to users and they.
Jim Morris
Say, oh, I like this.
Jim Morris
That's interesting. I'd use this. I have to say, after years of.
Jim Morris
Hearing this from hundreds of users, that they're basically lying.
Jim Morris
They're not lying on purpose, they just want to be nice to you. So I call this the meth feedback. When you hear that's interesting, or I like this, don't walk away with validation. What is validation? When someone says, OOH, oh wow, is this available? That emotional reaction when the user just exclaims something, that's what you're looking for. I need some traction.
Lloyed Lobo
You need some traction. Let's get some traction.
Lloyed Lobo
Hey, what's up? Innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana and many more.
Lloyed Lobo
There's no point creating something that nobody wants. And yet many founders skip this very important process of product discovery, right? Even the most agile, efficient processes can't make a bad idea good or successful. And doing product discovery is a key indicator of validation. Most companies fail because they can't get to product market fit. But what is the leading indicator of product market fit? It's product discovery. And so we're here to talk all about that. And today's speaker is an expert, a guru in product discovery. Jim is a coach for product management leaders and teams in early stage startup, tech companies and Fortune 500 corporations. Previously, Jim was an engineer, product manager and leader at startups where he developed raw ideas into successful products. Several times he co founded Power Reviews, which grew to 1200 clients and sold for 168,000,000, which is in today's terms billions of dollars. He product managed and architected one of the internet's first ecommerce systems at Fogdog, which had a 450,000,000 IPO back in the day and overall badass product management expert. He's a graduate from Stanford with a BS in computer science.
Jim Morris
I left school, went into join a company called Fog Dog. We sold sporting goods back when Amazon only sold books.
Jim Morris
We went public.
Jim Morris
It was a lot of fun, quite.
Jim Morris
A roller coaster ride. A couple years later I started the.
Jim Morris
Company with a couple others about product reviews and we called it Power Reviews. We were in that for seven years.
Jim Morris
And had a fierce competitor and eventually.
Jim Morris
Who bought us, and we joined them for a couple of years, and then the federal government split us apart because we were a monopoly.
Jim Morris
So I'm a convicted monopolist and basically.
Jim Morris
Became power reviews again. And after ten years, I exited the business and became a part of management.
Jim Morris
Coach, got a little bit burned out and really wanted to take the lessons I'd learned and help others. So I work with consumer facing companies.
Jim Morris
Digital health companies are like, about 50%.
Jim Morris
Of my business now.
Jim Morris
So many amazing things going on in connected devices to help you through chronic conditions or just everyday medical needs and.
Jim Morris
Then just tech, finance, clean energy.
Jim Morris
Everyone's using technology to get ahead. So what I want to know now.
Jim Morris
You know about me is tell me about you. Fill this out. And this is basically a four question survey to get us warmed up to each other.
Jim Morris
So everybody go here. Maybe you weren't expecting to contribute something, but I think this is a great.
Jim Morris
Way to see just kind of lead.
Jim Morris
Into the topic of not building things that are untested.
Jim Morris
Lloyd said some of the greatest frameworks.
Jim Morris
In the world can't make a bad idea good. They can't necessarily tell you if a bad idea is good or bad or if any idea, as Lloyd said, not even the best process can get a.
Jim Morris
Good idea, can make a bad idea good.
Jim Morris
A lot of great ideas were created without jira or rally or shortcut or pivotal or these things.
Jim Morris
And so I want to remind people.
Jim Morris
That, yes, tracking things and having a process is very useful for scaling engineering and product, but that we're here to validate ideas and to make sure that we test them.
Jim Morris
Okay.
Jim Morris
As we think about ways to do that, just remember that's different than Agile. When you use product discovery to accelerate growth, we're going to stop wasting engineers, stop wasting their time. We're going to collaborate upfront, explain what that means, as opposed to coordinate know your data. So really, this kind of talks about, like, quantitative data that leads into our qualitative data, talking to customers and then creating experiments, and this is the part that really helps accelerate growth as you expand the universe of ideas that you're working with. Okay, so stop wasting those engineers. I'm an engineer by trade, and it's terrifying when I hear about frameworks that exclude engineers that treat them like the agile factory.
Jim Morris
And really, engineers have been some of.
Jim Morris
The sources of ideas that create some of the most valuable companies in the world today. You might have a roadmap that looks.
Jim Morris
Like this gates rows with things you need to do.
Jim Morris
I had one of these, and I shopped it around to my clients, and it was a pivotal time because as we talked to our clients, we realized they weren't necessarily interested in new features. They were interested in being mobile compliant. Their traffic had gone above 50% of usage on mobile devices. And so it was incredibly important for us to be mobile compatible. This is back when this is really happening at a rapid pace. People didn't even think you'd buy on mobile, but they knew they'd do research, like reading product reviews. So we pivoted.
Jim Morris
I met two customers a week for.
Jim Morris
50 weeks, and after about two or three months into that, we pivoted our roadmap, almost basically threw it away and went to mobile compatibility, building on new frameworks, building APIs.
Jim Morris
And we didn't deliver a lot of.
Jim Morris
New functionality, just a couple of delighters in there. But people loved it, and it was much better than our fixed roadmap.
Jim Morris
And so we pivot.
Jim Morris
When we test ideas, right, we're not just there to put the stamp of approval on them. Now, I want you to spend time and money to learn before spending that time and money to build. So spending to learn is different, right? We know how to spend time and money to build. That's what we're talking about. Agile scrum, those frameworks here. I was working with an entrepreneur who spent $200,000 building this website. It had zero traffic. What had happened was he had an idea, asked somebody to build it for him, and they said yes. He paid them. They built it instead. When he got to me, we went back to ground zero of this concept and made some fake prototypes tested with.
Jim Morris
Users, gradually figured out what it was.
Jim Morris
The core value that they wanted, that he could offer, started marketing into different areas.
Jim Morris
And this was about getting recommendations from.
Jim Morris
Your neighbors about handyman plumbers and people like that. So we built this very simple site. He and his team built this site in squarespace with google spreadsheets. Very lightweight way, not $200,000. To test this concept of driving traffic from next door, facebook, groups, all the places our users told us that they went to get recommendations. And we made lists, and people could contribute to the lists.
Jim Morris
And this site grew in traffic.
Jim Morris
We grew in learning. Pivoted to this site and eventually pivoted to a subscription service. And what I taught him was not about his product. He had to learn that. But I taught him how to learn to learn.
Jim Morris
And I think someone mentioned that in the chat.
Jim Morris
And to me, that's what I do.
Jim Morris
With clients, that's what you can do.
Jim Morris
Is not just consuming materials about learning how to do things, but actually the process of testing with users, okay? That's the learning to learn. So in product discovery, it's well known we go after these risks, okay? Value usability, technical feasibility, business viability. So I like you. Now, these all sound like great ideas. In the chat, can you just type in something that blocks you from doing discovery? It could be other people. It could be lack of knowledge, could be lack of money. Go ahead and chat me a couple items that are blockers for you. Who will be first? You can do it.
Jim Morris
Yeah.
Jim Morris
Data concerns with users, getting users to respond, being an introvert. Absolutely.
Jim Morris
Knowing what's the best method, confirmation bias, the cost.
Jim Morris
I know what users want. Yeah. If you are in an organization with.
Jim Morris
Folks that are the highest sort of.
Jim Morris
Paid person in the room type, decision making resources, leadership, finding customers that will spend time answering questions, asking the right questions, the right platform.
Jim Morris
Statistically significant users. Yeah.
Jim Morris
Prefer to develop and write code. Absolutely. So to that point about developing and writing code, when we started Power Reviews, the other engineer and I that were the hands on keyboard folks, we stalled the two sort of business folks on the team for three months while we.
Jim Morris
Planned the product and thought about what we were going to build.
Jim Morris
And that discovery period allowed us to accelerate our development because we'd thought about.
Jim Morris
And tested ideas before doing it.
Jim Morris
So I do think there is a time to code and there's a time to think about coding, not just in the architecture sense, but in the products and feature sense.
Jim Morris
Didn't know I was blocked.
Jim Morris
We just decided on our own what we think our users need. Yeah.
Jim Morris
Fair enough. That's great that you don't have any blockers.
Jim Morris
I do think you can augment your intelligence with user feedback. Finding the right users.
Jim Morris
These are all great. And investors. Yeah.
Jim Morris
So let's talk about ways that we.
Jim Morris
Can bring product discovery more to the forefront.
Jim Morris
One is, of course, collaborating. A lot of this is one way collaboration. Waterfall is that typical anti pattern we.
Jim Morris
See slightly better, but still an anti.
Jim Morris
Pattern is throwing it over the wall. This is where the business folks and design folks get together and think about.
Jim Morris
In a concept, maybe build something that's.
Jim Morris
Clickable and then send it over the wall.
Jim Morris
The engineers are still confused because they.
Jim Morris
Weren'T involved and maybe you didn't have as much knowledge in that beginning process.
Jim Morris
So you designed things that really can't be built.
Jim Morris
There's also the agency model of the agency is internal or external, where people drop in. They don't have any context. They make something look pretty, they give you an estimate. This also leads to confusion. So what's a two way version of this collaborative solutioning? Bringing everybody up to that front of the process? People call it shifting left, but the idea is I want you to work together. Bring the engineer back into the fold. They're some of the greatest sources of ideas on the planet, historically proven by.
Jim Morris
The revenue and stock market value of.
Jim Morris
Some of the largest companies in the world. So make sure they're involved, make sure they know how to contribute, and make sure you value that contribution.
Jim Morris
Okay.
Jim Morris
And we can talk about how to value contributions from your team members now. We can't bring everybody in. As you bring more people in, people stop showing up to meetings. There's too many connections of communication. So we devise a core discovery team. Most people are familiar with the Triad designer, product manager, engineer. I like to add a data person, maybe a customer facing person. So what this results in is we're talking to that customer.
Jim Morris
We're showing them some sort of prototype. Might be analytical report, might be API.
Jim Morris
Documentation, might be a clickable prototype. Usually we've got to iterate. We've got to make some changes, test again with another set of users. Sometimes we validate, and after a couple of iterations, we really find something that works. And I want you to be throwing stuff away. So a lot of folks have heard this about discovery, but this is a muscle to get going.
Jim Morris
You have to pat your head and.
Jim Morris
Rub your tummy as you're doing delivery. And then discovery. Put it all together, and those two little green areas really show you what I want to change about the process. Bringing customers and engineers into the fold. Before you build that idea, don't build the untested idea and then stick together. Six months is probably the minimum for each person to start getting some insight. Remember, I was talking to two customers a week, and I generated the insight after talking to customers for a couple of months that they really didn't want. My roadmap doesn't come right away. So here we are, this mutual interactive session section.
Jim Morris
That's that roadmap.
Jim Morris
We try to replace it with a goal, a metric goal, something that's measurable, that we can all go after. This gives flexibility to the teams to find the right solution. So let's go through an exercise. Let's say you work at Lyft or Uber. Your team has been given this directive. Create a push message to tell the passenger that the driver has arrived. We've probably all gotten this push message.
Jim Morris
Okay, so what do we do?
Jim Morris
We're going to make a user story as a store, as a user, I'd like to get a push message from Lyft in order to know when my drivers arrive. We ask an engineer for an estimate. They just kind of make something up. It's pretty stressful. 20 days. I might pad the time, don't really know exactly what's involved. And then you just set the priority.
Jim Morris
And delivery date, and then you go, don't do this.
Jim Morris
Let's break standard operating procedure. Let's take a product discovery approach.
Jim Morris
So please, in the chat, write a.
Jim Morris
One sentence I statement, problem statement that you had to reverse engineer out of that stakeholder or customer or driver or whoever who told you, hey, I want you to create a push message, this push message. So go ahead and add it into chat. Write that problem statement. I want to know when the drivers arrived. I want to be notified when my ride arrives. I'm worried as I don't know when the driver will arrive. Time wasted by our drivers when they arrived at the site too cold to wait outside. Yes. We don't necessarily have that in San Francisco, but I hear that all the time from folks in these coast.
Jim Morris
Could be too hot if you're in the Midwest right now or in New York. Yeah, as a writer.
Jim Morris
So someone's actually talking about it as a passenger. Want to be notified. I don't want to come out too early.
Jim Morris
We want to be efficient with our time. Need to know a bit earlier so I can prepare myself.
Jim Morris
Maybe I ordered the lift, and then.
Jim Morris
I just started scrolling. Okay.
Jim Morris
These are awesome.
Jim Morris
Thank you.
Jim Morris
So here's some samples I can't identify which car is my Uber. I'm waiting too long for the passenger. I don't want to waste time. I want to get the driver moving again. What you'll notice is that the I is different here, even though it says, I like, who is this?
Jim Morris
And someone in the chat had something about time wasted by our drivers.
Jim Morris
So that's actually from the perspective of the company. What I want is that perspective of one of the individuals in your ecosystem. In this situation, it's the driver. So we'll pick the driver, and a lot of my teams forget to pick a user. When we pick a user, then we can recruit for that user, and we can run through a use case. And we do that because we need to connect with a problem or opportunity for that person to give us real feedback. So we'll pick the driver, and we'll pick the problem and the customer. The driver. I'm waiting too long for the passenger. Everyone has experienced this on the passenger side. Not many on the driver side. So now let's think of multiple solutions. Of course, this is going to be the easy part with a bunch of product folks on the line. So now switch it and write a possible solution to this problem that I selected. Yes. Fine. The customer.
Jim Morris
That's the stick.
Jim Morris
I don't know if there's some carrots out there, but yes. Think it was a $5 fine for a while.
Jim Morris
Not sure.
Jim Morris
Maybe they still have it. I do stick. That's funny. Yeah. Send me a notification the passenger is ready. Turn on location tracking, notify the passenger sometime in advance and send periodic reminders.
Jim Morris
Anybody know what Lyft just did? If not, I'll explain it at the end. In the most recent three months, the.
Jim Morris
Driver could be rewarded for time spent. And that's actually what happens with taxis.
Jim Morris
When you arrive and they lift the flag or they drop the flag. There is wait time.
Jim Morris
And that's not a concept that Lyft and Uber brought over to their transportation system. Your phone buzes now. That's right, Omar. Yeah. And it keeps buzing and buzzing. Yeah. Thanks, Andre. Really interesting change.
Jim Morris
These are great.
Jim Morris
Okay, so these are some samples. Definitely finding the passenger, displaying signs, sending a text message instead of push message. They can often detect whether you've got this going, and they'll send either of those. Of course, in the old days, they just honk the horn. So one of your jobs as product folks is to understand the offline world and how your online solutions affect user behavior, right? Is it better or worse? Like trying to replace the honking of the horn with the whole app ecosystem? It's a very interesting concept.
Jim Morris
They did it here in San Francisco before.
Jim Morris
People would just honk, knock on our door, rev the engine, that kind of stuff. So there's a non technology solution everywhere. And sometimes there are simple technology solutions like text, email, and spreadsheets that are hard to overcome. So beware of these very basic solutions that people use. Sometimes they're hard to overcome with your more app based or website based or other based solution. Okay, so we're going to pick a success metric. It's the last one.
Jim Morris
You can do this. I want it to be an outcome, not an output.
Jim Morris
What's the difference? I often think of an outcome as something we don't control. I can control, for the most part, the launching of a piece of software, hitting a deadline. I can put more people on it.
Jim Morris
I can reduce the scope, I can.
Jim Morris
Get something launched, but it's not the case that I can get someone to use it. Jordan was talking about don't have the skills to build a good clickable prototype. All people are putting this in. What I do is I take screenshots using snagit. Snagit is my fake photoshop of choice. And then I throw them into figma. And in figma, I make little highlight spots and just link those spots, and those make what looks like on the screenshot clickable. And in Snagit I often change the text and replace logos.
Jim Morris
So I taught myself about two years.
Jim Morris
Ago to do that.
Jim Morris
That's the most basic version. So, Jordan, that's a place to start.
Jim Morris
When you're thinking about building a good Clickable prototype. Passengers enter vehicles within two minutes of arrival. I love that ride starts within three minutes of notification. Percent of drivers spent waiting. Idling Snag. It is like a print screen. It's like that little key combination you.
Jim Morris
Use on the Mac, but it puts.
Jim Morris
It into an app and it organizes them rather than just spamming your desktop and then you can actually modify it. You think of like Paint as the most basic program. Snag, it's like much better than that.
Jim Morris
Not as good as other software number.
Jim Morris
Positive reviews for applications have increased as opposed to the seamless process of booking. Absolutely. If there's a lot of traffic, lift waiting will cause more traffic. Reduce time spent waiting by 30%.
Jim Morris
These are great. So again, here's some examples. I typically choose this one.
Jim Morris
Reduce 50% reduction in wait time. I think the better way to write.
Jim Morris
It would be reduce wait time from five minutes to two minutes.
Jim Morris
But again, what I want you to just think numerically, think about a success metric. This is the thing you rally around. A good success metric gives people a common goal, and it keeps us open to multiple solutions. If we pick a solution too early, again, we haven't tested it. So stop building untested solutions. I really want you to think about what opens the team up to multiple solutions and what are multiple solutions?
Jim Morris
Like I said, your phone will vibrate.
Jim Morris
When your driver is three minutes away. Feel free to leave the app. Lyft and Uber have built these solutions and more. They spent ten years on this problem. It's a pretty interesting way to think about what you're doing as a team and how you can easily take that conversation about the idea, move it into that problem metric space, and then think about, how do I test multiple ideas?
Jim Morris
Right? So we work backwards, starting at that solution.
Jim Morris
And you can do this. You've got to start somewhere, changing your culture, changing how your team works. You can work backwards and eventually start to work forwards. Set some goals, pick a user, pick.
Jim Morris
Their problem multiple solutions.
Jim Morris
Let them help you validate that solution.
Jim Morris
So product discovery is going to keep.
Jim Morris
This loop going, right? Because after you launch, your post launch, product discovery is looking at your analytics, looking at your funnels, your pipelines. Where do people drop off? Do your next discovery where that drop off is bigger. There's a client I have where it's 3% drop off on one step, 3% drop off on the next step, and then a 15% drop off. So we just picked that spot, found those users, and talked to them about that process.
Jim Morris
And we learned a ton.
Jim Morris
These four items really just office Opportunity Assessment for Marty Kagan's inspired it's. Chapter 35. Like all of Marty's chapters, it's concise, it's two pages, and it's helped me organize my team's time and my time. And it's nothing like these long documents that people need to fill out in order to justify working on a product. Because we're not using engineering resources right away. We're using that core discovery team. So it's lower stakes to test ideas if you can get into a rhythm, and then if you want to learn more about OKRs, here are two fantastic resources. Felipe Castro and Christina Watkey. Christina Watkey's book, Radical Focus, starts with a 60 page fictional story that is just near and dear to my heart as a startup, lifelong startup person.
Jim Morris
And for all of you, those 1st.
Jim Morris
60 pages are just they embody so much about our experience in trying to bring products to market.
Jim Morris
So I highly recommend it.
Jim Morris
Okay, so how do we accelerate growth? Of course, talking to customers because all.
Jim Morris
Those ideas that we have aren't enough.
Jim Morris
Honestly, and we don't know which ones are good. So when you're accelerating growth, you can actually get in your own way by building things that are untested, right? So your growth is limited by stuff that may not be that good. You may have a good idea in.
Jim Morris
Here, but it's hitting a ceiling you.
Jim Morris
Created or your bosses. So let's look back in my past.
Jim Morris
Where I was product manager, trying to.
Jim Morris
Gather requirements, talking to CEO, sales, marketing, legal. Sure, a lot of you done this. You get frustrated, and you just head for the door. I can't figure this out. Everyone's got competing priorities. You hear a lot of this. I want so that's my customer avatar on the left. All of these departments are representing to you different things about the customer. They're really funneling their own dreams to some extent. Now, of course, they do hear things, but maybe they're not as process oriented and not as consistent as you need.
Jim Morris
To be in product when you're figuring.
Jim Morris
Out what folks want.
Jim Morris
And really, I'll call it need in.
Jim Morris
Parentheses because we can't really listen to users direct words because they often talk in solutions. So I want you to use that process. We just had to reverse engineer the problem success metric and maybe their solutions correct. I want your team to come up with multiple solutions to see if you can solve this need and to do some solution tests. A lot of people are doing the open ended informal conversations. You're going away, and then you're coming back at the end and showing them the product as it's built. I call that the product discovery valley of Death. Test that solution.
Jim Morris
You'd be surprised at how much more.
Jim Morris
You need to do in order to launch successfully. Okay, so now there are lots of users out there. Some of you have six users with large corporations. Some of you have millions of users. I recommend you just start with one discovery cycle at a time, five to six users, and gain insights from there. Zero users, zero insights. Five to 15 users. You can get quite a bit of insight. So don't forget about this customer here. A lot of my teams do. So we'll just take the customer down. Just a reminder that you need to test those ideas. So how do we talk to these customers?
Jim Morris
We do it over zoom, right? Used to do it in person, but zoom is a preferred choice during these.
Jim Morris
Times, and it's actually quite efficient, and we get a lot of good feedback. Now, when I think about an experiment, I've always thought about what's a good analogy for product experiments?
Jim Morris
Anybody know what this is?
Jim Morris
Most people probably do, but this is.
Jim Morris
A psychology test given to patients to figure out what's going on in their mind. It's like a mind map, but it's a Rorschach test. It's the name of the psychologist or.
Jim Morris
Psychiatrist that came up with this.
Jim Morris
And.
Jim Morris
When you see this, you might say to yourself, oh, I would explain.
Jim Morris
This as some sort of a bat or some object.
Jim Morris
And then you get a conversation about what's going on in that person's mind.
Jim Morris
And you use this as a talking.
Jim Morris
Point, as a way to describe something without asking directly, how are you feeling? So we want to do this in product. So I got four components. You have to find users or representative users proxies to get them in the mindset. Think back to a time. It's an elephant.
Jim Morris
I like that. Want to think back to a time.
Jim Morris
We don't want to ask users to imagine. And the reason we think back to a time is if they can't remember a time when they had this problem or opportunity memory, then you may not be testing with the right person. Let's say you were testing this solution about getting users out to the curb.
Jim Morris
If the users never really requested an.
Jim Morris
Uber or Lyft, and I have met.
Jim Morris
People like this, they may not be.
Jim Morris
Able to explain to you their reaction. You may not believe their reaction to the solutions you're giving them about the phone vibrating or getting a text message because they haven't experienced actually having to get out there.
Jim Morris
Maybe you're talking to drivers and maybe.
Jim Morris
You find somebody who's not been a Lyft or Uber driver, but who wants to be one. Again, no imagining. I want you to think back and channel that experience. I want good content in there.
Jim Morris
No, fake content is a large part of the experience.
Jim Morris
You don't need to wait for that content writer. You can generate content as a team. Doesn't have to be the perfect content in the end. And I want a high fidelity prototype. Let's call this realistic enough. I don't want pixel perfect.
Jim Morris
I don't like paper prototypes.
Jim Morris
They can work. But I like getting that muscle of screenshots that are clickable or rough prototypes. And I'll show you an example of what I mean. So you put these together, and by the way, you're welcome to screenshot these items. There's my Twitter handle.
Jim Morris
At the bottom, there's a hashtag for traction.
Jim Morris
I'm here to educate and hopefully bring more product discovery to your teams, help your users have a bigger voice in your company. So put these four things together, and.
Jim Morris
You can just start working with users.
Jim Morris
So here's some great best practices for designing experiments. There's a bunch of them here, but they're a lot of fun, and they're things that I've learned through working with clients the last six years, plus my time at Fogdog and Power reviews. So we all have big dreams, but testing a big dream is tiring and tedious, and it's not going to give.
Jim Morris
You great results because you barely get.
Jim Morris
Through one version of this.
Jim Morris
So pick a screen and let's test that screen.
Jim Morris
Now, if you're doing analytics testing, and I use analytics here because it's one of the hardest things to build and one of the best candidates for discovery. Even this screen is a little bit too big. So I want you to even simplify further, one hypothesis at a time. You might. Have put four metrics on this page on the left. When a user opens that page in.
Jim Morris
A prototype, just a design prototype, we.
Jim Morris
Can mock up the data, mock up the results, and they have a reaction like, oh, that's so cool.
Jim Morris
What graph was it about?
Jim Morris
And what's the concept that's most interesting to them? If you just show them one screen at a time, you'll know, right away, oh, I love having that data.
Jim Morris
Okay, now, because each time we talk.
Jim Morris
To somebody, it introduces a little bit of bias. And so someone in the chat earlier.
Jim Morris
Was saying, I want to reduce bias.
Jim Morris
Talk less. By simplifying the prototypes. You talk less and you get these honest reactions. You might end up building that dashboard on the left and releasing it. But if you test it, like the way on the right, you'll know that each of those quadrants is valuable. Now, in analytics and like most things, I want you to think about what actions people will do. What's the outcome of showing somebody this data? What can they do? Now, sometimes they can't do something, but most times they can. And I want you to make the outcomes, the calls to action, really obvious. Don't make a small button that's part of your design system. You need to be able to break your design system and make things obvious. Why? Because you talk less. Users see the button, and they're going to talk about it without you interrupting them. Users might say, oh, I don't like that design, but yeah, that's the right button. That's fine. We'll talk about design and pixel perfect. If the idea is good, make it obvious. So I showed you this pie chart, and most of you are probably going, oh, pie charts are awful. Everybody knows pie charts are awful.
Jim Morris
I don't like pie charts.
Jim Morris
They've been kind of hard to read. Makes me think brain hurts. So my first reaction is, I love bar charts. Bar charts are so much better. Maybe a line chart.
Jim Morris
And then really don't make me think.
Jim Morris
Just give me the numbers. And you have these meetings with your team. And then if you're facilitating this meeting, you're like, oh my gosh, how do I break this log jam of all these smart, interesting people? My teammates, we're collaborating, like Jim said, but they all have different opinions.
Jim Morris
Oh, no. Just test multiple solutions.
Jim Morris
We're not building the data store and putting the JavaScript D Three library somewhere and trying to program these. We can just put some numbers in Excel, make the graphs, take the graphs out, put them into a figma prototype, make them clickable, and we'll get a sense of it.
Jim Morris
Can they interpret this information?
Jim Morris
What would they do with it? And through discovery, you can improve your team morale. If my idea gets in, designer's idea gets in. I've had the QA engineers sit in on discovery and have an idea and let the user help you decide. So when we expand to multiple solutions, we're going to let the user help us decide. And this is also part of that accelerating growth. I'm not just arguing over one decision. I'm not predeciding, right? You're going to self limit your growth if you predecide things. Let's say you've got this interesting prototype. You show it to users and they.
Jim Morris
Say, oh, I like this.
Jim Morris
That's interesting. I'd use this. I have to say, after years of.
Jim Morris
Hearing this from hundreds of users, that they're basically lying.
Jim Morris
They're not lying on purpose. They just want us to be nice to you. So I call this the meth feedback. So when you hear, that's interesting or I like this, don't walk away with validation. In fact, these are just neutral comments, mostly for Americans. There's a lot of international folks here. So I'll say if you're in France, when we did product reviews, we were in 20 countries in 15 languages around the world with tens of millions of reviews. You aggregate all that data, you get a sense of what the average rating for each country was. And we did this, and the French were like a half star below the Americans, even more for the UK.
Jim Morris
And so the idea is that you.
Jim Morris
Have to know your audience and how they react. But in America, stuff like this is not validation. What is validation? When someone says, OOH, oh, wow, is this available? That emotional reaction when the user just exclaims something, that's what you're looking for.
Jim Morris
You get this in business software. I kid you not.
Jim Morris
Like business software. Folks are so tired of their awful interfaces that don't deliver value. When you show them something that's simple and valuable, you'll get this reaction. Those of you who think a lot of the discovery concepts are about B to C, most of the examples I share with you are actually B two B. Okay? So speaking of B two B and B to C, where are your users? They're usually in some other application or concept besides yours. My product teams do their solution tests, and they start them inside of their own company's application, as if the user spends all day there.
Jim Morris
They don't.
Jim Morris
They're on Netflix. How do you get them off Netflix? Well, maybe it's a push notification. Maybe there's a slack ding email teams.
Jim Morris
Or you can go to Google homepage.
Jim Morris
You can test the starting point in a lot of places. And I want you to become a marketer. I want you to adopt a lot of product marketing concepts because your product.
Jim Morris
Won'T sell itself, and you have to.
Jim Morris
Take responsibility for this.
Jim Morris
Okay?
Jim Morris
So I want you to add these options of choose your own adventure. There's a book called The Cave of Time. It's one of many of these books.
Jim Morris
Anybody out there read these books? I did.
Jim Morris
Choose your own adventure books. The difference between this and a normal book is that at the bottom of.
Jim Morris
I would say page.
Jim Morris
You're like four pages in.
Jim Morris
You've entered the cave of time and.
Jim Morris
Then at some opportunity, the author wants you to make a choice. And one of these choices will probably lead to you dying very quickly. What does this look like in a prototype? It looks like it's humility. We the product team. I the designer.
Jim Morris
I don't really know.
Jim Morris
I'm not going to assume I know what the users are going to do. I'm going to put a bunch of options out there. Again, this is against my design system. So you're not asking for permission from your design manager, right? Because this is not going live.
Jim Morris
This is a test to figure out.
Jim Morris
The demand for something. What would people actually do with this information you've given them?
Jim Morris
Are they going to hit the red pill or the blue pill? Let's do more icons to see where people would go.
Jim Morris
And then I give them the Kebab icon, which is like the menu. You could use the information icon, the hamburger menu. Give them an escape hatch.
Jim Morris
So if they click that, you'd say.
Jim Morris
What would you look for as an action to take here? So let the users help you make decisions. Multiple solutions, multiple options. It looks ugly, but users can't create solutions, right? You're the solution maker. The users, they own the problems, they own the opportunities. Unfortunately, what they comes out of their mouth are solutions. And you only want to half believe them because you want to test these things. So then my teams start thinking, oh, I've made all these options. I've got to make all these pages and these prototypes get out of control. So don't do that. Just build what you need, which is these options.
Jim Morris
And then when the user clicks something.
Jim Morris
Like the blue pill, great, we're going to maybe build that. In the next set of tests, we're going to ask user why they wanted to do that, what they would expect to see on the next page, and then we can build options and variations there.
Jim Morris
So I want you to be testing frequently.
Jim Morris
This is not your last user test. Leave something vague. I was in a user test and with a design sprint for a very.
Jim Morris
Short week and we left off this.
Jim Morris
Label for a diagram.
Jim Morris
As it turns out, users had a different interpretation than the team who built this graph thought it would be best.
Jim Morris
For their clients to have the average revenue. It would be best for a client to see the average revenue for the 12,000 clients. When we left off the label, I was in the middle of the test.
Jim Morris
And I said, okay, what do you.
Jim Morris
Think this line is?
Jim Morris
And they said, oh, this is my.
Jim Morris
Custom goal that I set. This is the revenue that I want to attain. And it's clear that in December I didn't attain it and in January I did. They heard this from nine out of ten users never heard this feedback before, but it was so reassuring and validating that they ended up building this feature. Not the average revenue feature.
Jim Morris
So leave some things vague.
Jim Morris
Let your users help you decide. Don't be pixel perfect.
Jim Morris
Like I mentioned, this is something that.
Jim Morris
Was created in Snagit with figma I was describing earlier.
Jim Morris
Like I said, I taught myself these concepts.
Jim Morris
A couple of years ago, I took the Meetup application, this really has a great homepage, and I just started doctoring it and then described a bunch of screenshots. And this gave us the results that we were looking for, even though it's.
Jim Morris
Not very nice looking.
Jim Morris
Then the last item for your bias.
Jim Morris
Is to think about your products like this.
Jim Morris
This is should there be fish shaped food or just like triangles?
Jim Morris
A null hypothesis is cats have no.
Jim Morris
Preference for shapes and food. And this is a scientific approach. This is what scientists do. Product managers in high tech often do this. They take their attitude about what's going to win and they do a test around that.
Jim Morris
So I always want to take your.
Jim Morris
Winning solution back it out to something. Make multiple options. The multiple solutions also multiple solutions also train you to use a null hypothesis mentality. So many good benefits here. Okay, velocity over perfection.
Jim Morris
Let's say I told you to make.
Jim Morris
A painting of the beach and you did this. You came back three months later, hey.
Jim Morris
Here'S my painting of the beach. Actually, as it turns out, these are.
Jim Morris
Not the aspects of the beach I was thinking of when I said I want a painting of the beach. What would have been easier to get feedback from me was would be to paint something very simple like this, right? So the two concepts, complex and simple, choose a simple one and iterate you can take a screenshot of this. These are all the sort of advice that I give.
Jim Morris
And again, these are situational to what.
Jim Morris
You'Re doing, but they can be super beneficial. So again, with these experiments, you're going.
Jim Morris
To do less work, you're going to.
Jim Morris
Learn more, and you're going to do it at faster time frame because you're going to have a lot of variations, but you're going to make short prototypes.
Jim Morris
And you're going to test frequently.
Jim Morris
You're not going to keep thinking, this is their last test. So we stopped wasting engineering time. We collaborated.
Jim Morris
You learned how to make some metrics.
Jim Morris
And reverse engineer solutions into problems. We talked to customers. You created experiments. This is going to be accelerating your growth because you're going to be testing a wider set of ideas sooner and faster to find the good one and not just predeciding.
Jim Morris
I'm going to take Q and A in a second.
Jim Morris
I would love for you all to.
Jim Morris
Go here and fill out my survey because I want to get better at.
Jim Morris
All this and I want to see.
Jim Morris
If oh, you're so nice, hottie. Here's the link. So this is my tips to you.
Jim Morris
And then your tips to me can be just anything about presentation and things like that.
Jim Morris
And I'll share it with Lloyd and then stay in touch on Twitter. I keep it super clean and focused on product and try to be the.
Jim Morris
Things that are relevant to my followers. And then I have a newsletter and then just my website. I kind of update articles every week or two and just write about what's.
Jim Morris
Important to my teams.
Jim Morris
And then Lloyd's put where the recordings.
Jim Morris
Will be on the Traction Coff website and YouTube channel. So, yeah, go ahead and throw questions.
Jim Morris
In either the chat or into the.
Jim Morris
Q and A box and we'll just go from there.
Lloyed Lobo
I started my career in product.
Jim Morris
I was an engineer, went into product.
Lloyed Lobo
But it was a startup. And so really I needed to learn to sell. I needed to learn to do consultative selling. When you're that first person in a startup, you're doing a little bit of everything when there's no product, right, you're like talking to customers, trying to figure out what solution to build based on the problems they have. You're doing discovery, you're doing a bit of everything. So I love working at startups because it builds your muscle for product discovery and sales. It helps you craft the messaging. So Omar's question here is, what about customers who say, build this feature and I will buy, what do you do there? My general learning has always been if you keep building what different customers ask, you'll never build a scalable solution. And generally customers ask for a faster horse. They don't ask, build me a car or a Ferrari. So you got to focus on listening to the problems first. So what's your advice there?
Jim Morris
Yeah, these are hard.
Jim Morris
I would say that you're not a consultancy because you're not an outsourced engineering firm, you're a product company. And you need to remember that in.
Jim Morris
The long run, you want to serve.
Jim Morris
100 or 1200 clients. And I would do this off a multi tenant platform. And that's how I built Power Reviews and I made a lot of hard decisions as the CTO head of Product at Power Reviews. Now, if you decide to just copy and paste that code base, you are going to make sure that your older clients are stuck on an older code base that will have security issues, that.
Jim Morris
Will have a lot of problems, or.
Jim Morris
You can have a lot of spaghetti code if you build everything in a multitenant platform. So I think there's technical issues. The big thing is you have this revenue pressure to make money as a startup and you're looking for five to ten clients to have the same idea.
Jim Morris
Okay?
Jim Morris
So if you just build it for one, it's very risky. And people will do this because you want to link arms. And as a product manager, you want to make sure that it's clear that you're making a group decision because you don't want to put this on your shoulder and say that this is the direction for the future on one client's advice. Okay?
Jim Morris
So first thing, if you do it.
Jim Morris
Make sure you make that decision as a group because it could go very poorly. They might not even use it because.
Jim Morris
They say they want it, but they.
Jim Morris
Don'T end up wanting it because priorities change.
Jim Morris
The second thing is if you are.
Jim Morris
Talking to enough users, then you can help drown out some of these singular voices. I find that product teams that stay in their own groups get the most important problems and only those from the sales and the CEO. If you're not out there talking to enough clients, customers, prospects, sales and CEO won't trust you. And I'm not sure they should trust you. And so when you say that one client, sometimes it's through the filter of a lot of clients you're not listening to. And if you knew, if you talked to two clients a week and you got that one request, you would know if that request was aligned to where your customer base is going or not. So volume helps drown it out. If you do make that decision, make it together. And just remember Life, the consultancy, it's so much more expensive to hire the engineers to build something for one client. So that client is basically treating you as outsourced engineering. In fact, I have a client who's really big, who's done this as a startup and now their feedback to me is they're not listening as much because they're starting to grow and they just got funding.
Jim Morris
And so you could take this trajectory of bootstrapping your development by using a couple of clients money to start your company. As long as you can break away and create a product company.
Jim Morris
If you don't break away and you keep creating a consultancy, you will stall.
Jim Morris
Growth because you'll have a lot of technical debt and you won't have developed a vision and no one's going to follow you. The only people are going to join you are the people who want to tell you what to do because you're good at saying yes.
Jim Morris
There's a couple of reasons in product.
Lloyed Lobo
And especially as a founder, you need to get really good at saying no. Even like Trello, we had Trello CEO a while back and he said, don't listen to customers feature requests, just ignore feature requests. Listen to the problems and creatively come up with solutions to the commonality. Because the worst thing is not knowing how many people it's going to reach, what's going to be the business impact, and then building one off, one off stuff. And then you don't have a scalable startup.
Jim Morris
And so tied to this is how.
Lloyed Lobo
Many interviews are enough now, anonymous attendee.
Jim Morris
Asks and my question back is that's an important question?
Lloyed Lobo
How many interviews are enough, but how many interviews have you done depend on the stage. Also, like, how early are you? Startups are built in phases, and phase one is validation. Phase two is product market fit. Then you figure out a reputable channel, then you scale.
Jim Morris
And generally, I feel if you can't.
Lloyed Lobo
Talk to in the early days and this is probably I have a high.
Jim Morris
Benchmark, but if you can't talk to.
Lloyed Lobo
Hundreds of customers when you have no.
Jim Morris
Product, and then at least get ten.
Lloyed Lobo
To pay you to try it out in a B, two B space. When you have no product, I think it's going to be very hard for you to hire salespeople to later sell it. When you build something without talking to customers. So what's your insight here? How many interviews are enough?
Jim Morris
Everybody in my business will tell you it depends. And so I'm a more practical type, so I'll go out on the limb and say things that I'm sure you'll find holes in, but I need you to start somewhere. And the one person who's written about this, it's a 20 year article.
Jim Morris
A lot of people have, but Jacob.
Jim Morris
Nielsen reads this article 20 years ago.
Jim Morris
That's test with 15 users in groups.
Jim Morris
Of five, and in each group of five, you learn about 80% of what.
Jim Morris
You need to know.
Jim Morris
He was doing usability testing, which is the user confused? Can they complete their task? When we do value testing, it's more complicated than that, but you can still learn quite a bit in these groups of five to six users. If you're talking about something that's two to four weeks to build, that's low risk. Maybe five to six users. Eight out of ten users, you're looking for validation. If you're looking at two to three months worth of work, maybe a few more users, 15 to 20. If you're talking about this entrepreneur I was working with, that's the whole company's idea. Extremely high risk. Where do I start building? Do I build the whole thing? Do I spend $200,000?
Jim Morris
No, you do it in ways Lloyd said, right.
Jim Morris
He has to find one person that will commit to buy this thing and use it and will use it like.
Jim Morris
In a prototype form, but then find another.
Jim Morris
This idea that you can't learn anything from a handful of users often is.
Jim Morris
A way not to test out your.
Jim Morris
Insecurities about the product. You can think about pre revenue. Companies, once they start making revenue, then they start to get a multiple. Right. We don't want to be treating our product like not testing with users because we don't want to get the valuation on it.
Jim Morris
We want to really learn.
Jim Morris
So I would start with five grow from there. The amount of risk you're taking will tell you how many users to test with.
Jim Morris
I would also say, if you're a.
Jim Morris
Healthcare company and your user population is the world, I want you to test with a few more users and round out your demographics. If you're a computer vision company, are you going to test with only white people? Stop doing that, right? Like you can't. When you choose the five to ten people, you may decide the idea looks good, but I'm going to test with more people to get validation before I start to build it, because I have.
Jim Morris
The world as my population.
Jim Morris
So that's the starting point.
Jim Morris
And how you would scale users either.
Jim Morris
Through risk or through demographic risk or through business risk.
Lloyed Lobo
Now, do you recommend meet customers individually or as a group? I have a very opinion for you on this, but let's hear it, Jim.
Jim Morris
Always one on one. I'm not a big focus group person. What are people doing when they're using your application? They're just there generally by themselves.
Jim Morris
They're not like, maybe a bunch of.
Jim Morris
People around FaceTime or there's group dynamics in certain products in 99.9% of the products.
Jim Morris
It's not a group dynamic thing.
Lloyed Lobo
I completely agree. One of the things you'll launch before you talk to customers, right? And then you get tens of thousands of people or thousands of people. You do the scalable when you're not supposed to scale in the early days, and then you start seeing churn, and it's very hard to fix. It's like you build something, and now you got to reverse engineer and fix the user experience. You waste a lot of time and money, like you said. And what I've learned, all the success has come from saying, okay, what is my ideal customer profile? Where do they eat, breathe, drink, sleep? Who is this title?
Jim Morris
What is the problem?
Lloyed Lobo
What is the day in their life? What is the job they're trying to do? How do they do it today? Because a solution like this doesn't exist. What are they jangling together?
Jim Morris
And if they had a magic one.
Lloyed Lobo
What does a delighted state look like? Kind of thing. And so I would send emails then saying, hey, research. Really research the person on LinkedIn and whatnot, script the email, send emails saying.
Jim Morris
Hey, you're an expert in the space.
Lloyed Lobo
I'm an entrepreneur working to solve XYZ solution. Do you have 20 minutes of your time for some advice? Not looking to sell you anything. Get them on the call, understand the jobs to be done the day in the life, and spend all my time doing that because it also helped me nail down the messaging. It also is hard to navigate when you're trying to do this discovery in groups. So Omar actually further expands on his question. We sell to HR talent, whoever you sell, most companies have a laundry list of requests at any given time of the buying journey. What framework, Jim, you recommend for product prioritization?
Jim Morris
Most of these frameworks are a self reflective journey, right? I do write reach, impact, confidence, and effort. And I write them all down, and maybe I talk to some engineers. And it often is just a way to reflect my opinion of these things is, as I do the weighted scores.
Jim Morris
And I sort them into my spreadsheet.
Jim Morris
I compare the top result with what was in my mind as the top result. So I like them as a self reflective journey.
Jim Morris
Then they look at maybe what was.
Jim Morris
The contribution of it being high or low. The issue is often reach is one of the only things I can do before I do. I can determine before I do discovery. So if you do discovery along with.
Jim Morris
Rice, you can influence what is the impact of this product, how confident am.
Jim Morris
I that it's going to be adopted? And when the engineers sit in and help devise ideas, they will get a sense of the fringes of the idea, what the depth of it is, what users really want out of it, and they can give you a better sense of the effort. So I think rice without discovery is mostly self reflection. And most people will put their finger on the scale and push the idea they want to the top. And then some people will do discovery, of course, and they realize that nobody wants it, and that's when the reach goes down. So Discovery, I like rice if it's informed with some qualitative. I don't really like weighted shortest job first. A lot of these, like, quick win scenarios. I believe in the Kano model like you, you do need some quick wins, some delighters, especially in business software, but they can be small.
Jim Morris
I think you need to do tech.
Jim Morris
Debt 20% to 40% of your time. And I don't want to blame the engineers, let's call it product debt and feed tech debt.
Jim Morris
And somewhere in that middle, I want.
Jim Morris
To see because you have some commitments, you do, but I want to see that prioritization be informed with discovery and rapid discovery. So that's my thought about prioritization.
Lloyed Lobo
You're like, at a phase where you get a lot of feature requests. And I see this I love rice as a framework for a few reasons. It's a framework that you don't only use for product prioritization, but you can use it for marketing prioritization and also figuring out new markets effectively. You're starting with how many people is going to reach and then you're going to what is the impact, financial business impact, what is your confidence in it, and then what is the effort involved? And even from a marketing perspective, people.
Jim Morris
Just have this T shirt that says.
Lloyed Lobo
I love it when you talk data to me. That's our company T shirt. But I love to hear that this is how many people it's going to reach and how it's going to reach them. Don't do anything if you don't have the reach sorted. And in the early stages, when you have no product, yes, talk to hundreds of people, understand the problem and creatively come up with a solution. But then as you evolve, you get.
Jim Morris
All these feature requests and some are.
Lloyed Lobo
You don't want customers telling you what to build. You need to understand the problem.
Jim Morris
Like you're saying, I think once you.
Lloyed Lobo
Get to a mature product and you've got these feature requests, I think Rice is super helpful. That's my opinion on it.
Jim Morris
Right.
Lloyed Lobo
How do you prioritize otherwise? Let's say you got a laundry list of things, but the worst is having a laundry list of things and each one of them is asked by exactly.
Jim Morris
One customer, you never build anything. I would suggest the one thing I wanted back when I was running product at Power Views was to have a client count on every feature. I almost linked back into my salesforce. I would love jira to have been linked to my salesforce. So not only could I get the client count, but I get the client.
Jim Morris
Size, like the deal size.
Jim Morris
So I could basically put deal dollars behind I could put my potential churn dollars behind something. Because for us it was not just churning customers, especially now in downturns, it's churning dollars.
Jim Morris
This is the lesser known metric in.
Jim Morris
SaaS because most companies will keep customers but lose money as customers renegotiate. Go to three quarters, one quarter deal instead of one year deal. There's a lot of things that companies will do to you during downturn. I always get Power Views during the 809 downturn. So the laundry list again, you're looking for some consensus out there. You're looking to do some discovery on them because you want to get to the problems. So turn your laundry list of solutions into a laundry list of problems. Do card sorting on the problems with your clients.
Jim Morris
Right.
Jim Morris
It's hard to card sort solutions. They're apples and oranges. Problems are much easier for people to identify with and prioritize. So turn your laundry list of solutions and do a laundry list of problems. Go back to the same customer. Make them prioritize other customers problems because they only think about what's happening to them right now. Expand their brain a little bit. So just a little bit more due diligence on that laundry list is going to make it a little bit easier to handle.
Lloyed Lobo
How to onboard potential customers for discovery interviews?
Jim Morris
Yeah, short interviews.
Jim Morris
Like 30 minutes. Get in and get out.
Jim Morris
Make sure they feel valued when you're talking to them.
Jim Morris
You don't have to agree to their ideas, but you can make them feel valued when they give them.
Jim Morris
So that helps you get them back.
Jim Morris
For consumers, we're talking about $25 for 30 minutes. That's my rate right now for business professionals.
Jim Morris
Might be going up to $60 for 30 minutes. $50 for 30 minutes. Depends. And so I'm not afraid of compensating.
Jim Morris
For my own customers. I'm looking for the quarterly business reviews. I've got customer success managers. I can sit in on those calls and take a few of those 60. Minutes, 15 of them, probably. So one of my best friends in my company is my head of customer success. If I'm in B to B and I'm talking to them about how important it is for product to be in touch with customers, I'm getting all my product people and my heads of engineering onto client calls.
Jim Morris
And at the last part of the.
Jim Morris
Client call, you can turn it into a little bit of discovery. Hey, let me give you this link. Share your screen, click through. So for consumers, you're just going to pay them. For business folks, you're going to use.
Jim Morris
Your customer success team. You can also use recruiting services.
Jim Morris
You just need to vet that people have the problem. You can use professional testers, not really professional, but people have signed up for these things. As long as you can verify with a story they tell that you believe that they have that problem. So I do think you can find users. And that's one of the ways those are a couple of ways that I get in touch with folks. And there's user interviews.com.
Jim Morris
I use them a lot.
Jim Morris
They don't sponsor me. I pay for their services full price. And there are other companies like them to recruit.
Lloyed Lobo
Figure out who your ideal customer profile is, nail that down, especially if you're in the B. Two b space. Scrape a list of those people and reach out to them via LinkedIn or email or both to understand if the message is resonating. And a simple email like this, and I did this, all three companies is, hey, I saw you're an expert in the space list. The space they're in personalize it based on something they wrote about or they said on Social and say you're an entrepreneur looking to solve XYZ problem. You would love to get 20 minutes of your time. I like the 20 minutes. I read this book long ago in my early days of school called Spin Selling. It's a good product interview style book, but it's actually a sales book. It spins for situation, problem implication and need payoff. It's like you're asking about the situation, the problem they're facing, the implications of the problem. And then the need payoff is like in a perfect world, how would you see it working? And I love reaching out directly because what ends up happening in the early days pre product market fit is if they say, oh yeah, if you had Magic One solution, it worked like this and I'd pay XYZ, then you can immediately ask them, hey, can I add you to my sort of pilot list or beta list?
Lloyed Lobo
You can probe with two questions would you be willing to pilot this for me? And then you send them a recap email after the call and then add them like Kickstarter, add them to your regular updates, right? Like they become part of your subscriber list that you can constantly follow up with them so I like reaching out directly and so on because then you have the double whammy of them becoming your customers. Jim, what a great pleasure, man. Thank you so much to learn from you. I took a bunch of notes as well. I'm a big fan of the product games. So thank you so much for joining us. Love and peace, my friend.
Jim Morris
Cheers.
Jim Morris
Thank you.
Lloyed Lobo
You thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find all the information mentioned in today's episode at tractioncoff. IO that's T-R-A-C-T-I-O-N-C-O-N-F IO no.