Rob Fitzpatrick

Doing it wrong is worse than doing nothing at all. When you know you’re clueless, you tend to be careful. But collecting a fistful of false positives is like convincing a drunk he’s sober: not an improvement.

We find out if people care about what we’re doing by never mentioning it. Instead, we talk about them and their lives.

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

The questions to ask are about your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals. You humbly and honestly gather as much information about them as you can and then take your own visionary leap to a solution.

It boils down to this: you aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

There are three types of bad data:

Compliments
Fluff (generics, hypotheticals, and the future)
Ideas

Fluff comes in 3 cuddly shapes:

Generic claims (“I usually”, "I always", "I never")
Future-tense promises (“I would”, "I will")
Hypothetical maybes ("I might", "I could")

The world’s most deadly fluff is: “I would definitely buy that.”

When you hear a request, it’s your job to understand the motivations which led to it. You do that by digging around the question to find the root cause. Why do they bother doing it this way? Why do they want the feature? How are they currently coping without the feature? Dig.

Questions to dig into feature requests:

“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 add that feature, or is it something we could add later?”
How would that fit into your day?