Customer Conversations for an Iterative Product

Perfect is the enemy of shipped. Creating the perfect feature indicates making lots of assumptions without gathering user feedback and data, and will take significantly more time. Are you continuing to work on features that are polished enough to put in front of a few customers now and get feedback? (Location 749)

I read this book before building Stenography, and have learned a lot about the harsh reality of creating a production ready product for other people to use.

This advice is easier said than done, especially when the few (patient) customers will lie to your face or not know what they want.

^d533e6

If you just avoid mentioning your idea, you automatically start asking better questions. Doing this is the easiest (and biggest) improvement you can make to your customer conversations. Here are 3 simple rules to help you. They are collectively called (drumroll) The Mom Test: The Mom Test: 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 (Location 144)