Book Review: The Mom Test
Author: Rob Fitzpatrick
Author, Instructor, Founder
Why you should read this book: Everyone can get better at interviewing.
The Mom Test is a practical, hands-on guide for avoiding bias and preventing inadvertent lying from your interviewees.
In the early stages of an idea, before you even have a prototype, this book will help you cut through the clutter of people being nice and telling you they like your idea.
And in just over 100 pages.
The review: Fitzpatrick is not just writing a book; he's on a mission.
He wants to save you time and the pain of investing your life into something that sounds useful but might fall flat.
As entrepreneurs and product creators, we want to know whether a potential customer will value our newest idea.
"We crave approval," writes Fitzpatrick.
Unfortunately, this desire for acceptance clouds our ability to collect impartial data.
So the author's first tip is a bit like the mantra from the Fight Club book and movie about not talking about Fight Club.
He implores you to not mention your idea at all.
Instead, talk around your idea. Inquire about the customer's environment, their daily activities and possible pain points related to your idea.
Then dig deeper. How painful is the problem?
Is your potential customer already trying to solve their problem or opportunity?
The Mom Test itself is a simple three step mantra:
Talk about their life instead of your idea
Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
Talk less and listen more
When you talk about your idea, the interviewee senses your desire for approval and, like your mom, will be supportive of you no matter what they think.
(There are some rare honest folks out there but most people are conflict averse.)
According to the author, you can identify a bad interview by looking for these common pitfalls:
Compliments - You may receive these but quickly pivot the conversation
Fluff - Don't allow the conversation to engage in hypotheticals, generics and the future. It's all hearsay when it's not grounded in actual user experience.
Ideas - Once you state your solution or your startup idea, the conversation moves away from the more important aspect of problem finding
He writes that you can be proactive by avoiding these types of questions:
"Do you ever..."
"Would you ever..."
"What do you usually..."
"Do you think you..."
"Might you..."
"Could you see yourself..."
If you do stray into conducting a bad interview, Fitzpatrick describes several ways to recover the conversation and redirect into a more productive dialog.
One awesome takeaway: Keep it casual. Fitzpatrick wants you to avoid formality.
When you only have 5 minutes with a hard-to-schedule expert, don't spend it scheduling some future time (that the expert may end up canceling).
Use that time to get your 3 important questions answered (Chapter 3).
As you get good at this, he says you'll have more, shorter conversations and quickly increase your knowledge.
Another awesome takeaway: My Product teams struggle to handle feature requests from stakeholders and customers.
They are always on the defensive as customers barrage them with lists of features.
To get back to your vision and start controlling conversations, Fitzpatrick provides myriad ways to calmly and confidently probe under the surface of these features requests.
When a feature request is made, Fitzpatrick suggests:
"Why do you want that?"
"What would that let you do?"
"How are you coping without it?"
"Do you think we should push back the launch to add that feature, or is it something we could add later?"
"How would that fit into your day?"
Then ask one or more of these clear follow-up questions:
"Tell me more about that"
"What seems to really bug you - I bet there's a story here"
"What makes it so awful"
"Why haven't you been able to fix this already"
"You seem pretty excited about that - it's a big deal?"
"Go on"
To coach the digging deeper concept, Fitzpatrick creates realistic conversations and annotates them with his thoughts.
These annotated conversations provide a welcome break from the usual narrative text that is common for business books.
Rob Fitzpatrick
What’s unique about this book: This book is short and to the point. I love it. The use of annotated, mock interviews makes his theories stick in my brain better.
My Advice: Read the last part of the book first, "Conclusion and Cheat Sheet." It’s a quick summary of the whole book. This way, when you see an individual tactic, you can place it in his larger framework.
Audience: Anybody doing conversational interviews (without a prototype) whether it's a new feature, new product or new company.
Style: The style is clear and jargon-free. There are numerous mock conversations that illustrate his points. The structure of the book flows from most important concept in the beginning to refinements towards the end.
I learned about The Mom Test via word of mouth from a PM at a conference.
Jim coaches Product Management organizations in startups, scale ups and Fortune 100s.
He's a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with over two decades of experience including an IPO ($450 million) and a buyout ($168 million). These days, he coaches Product leaders and teams to find product-market fit and accelerate growth across a variety of industries and business models.
Jim graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Computer Science and currently lectures at UC Berkeley in Product Management.
