Hey Ai Ching! Learning how to listen to customers was one of the hardest things! We found two things that helped us get very good insights:
-
Setting expectations: when we do a demo or an interview, a lot of times our customers will have questions for us that if we answer, it would result in us biasing our customer. For example, if we’re showing them a new builder idea and they ask “is there a way for me to send myself a test” if we say yes or no, we’re missing out the reason why they’re asking. So as soon as we start a call, we let our customer know that to avoid biasing them and to really understand what they need, we might sound awkward, we might avoid answering questions or bounce a question back with another question.
-
Which brings me to the next and probably most important part of listening—asking why. Let’s take that previous example, our customer asked if they’d be able to send themselves a test. If we take this at face value, we might just build a way for them to send themselves a test. If we ask why once, we might hear that they always send themselves a test before doing a real email send. If we ask why again, we might hear that the act of pressing send gives them anxiety. We ask why again and learn that they might think of one more thing to edit right as they’re sending or that they’re afraid they might have a typo or would’ve forgotten to include a link. With this information, the real why, we decide to include a “send a test” feature, yes, but not where we were planning to build it, but much earlier in the process, right in the editor, since it sounds like part of the creation process and not the sending. With this information, we also decide to add an “undo my send” button to ease the anxiety of pressing that send button.
We don’t yet communicate our roadmap with our customers because things change so often! New priorities come up, fires get in the way, etc., we instead focus on building trust, listening a lot, and shipping often.