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The mom test (short summary)
- 1. THE MOM TESThow to ask good questions to test your product idea April 2016 Based on the book by Rob Fitzpatrick
- 2. www.byteout.com Avoid bad data ■ Compliments ■ Fluff – Generic claims (“I usually”, "I always", "I never") – Future-tense promises (“I would”, "I will") – Hypothetical maybes ("I might", "I could") ■ Ideas ■ When someone starts talking about what they “always” or “usually” or “never” or “would” do, they are giving you generic and hypothetical fluff.
- 3. www.byteout.com Wrong questions ■ Do you ever…? ■ Would you ever…? ■ What do you usually…? ■ Do you think you…? ■ Might you…? ■ Could you see yourself…? ■ Instead: When is the last time…?
- 4. www.byteout.com Questions to dig into feature requests: ■ Why do you want that? ■ What would that let you do? ■ How are you coping without it? ■ How would that fit into your day? ■ Ask about the specific examples.
- 5. www.byteout.com Questions to dig into emotional signals: ■ Tell me more about that. ■ That 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? ■ Why so happy? ■ Go on.
- 7. www.byteout.com Pitch Symptoms: ■ Sometimes we accidentally slip into pitch mode: – No no, I don’t think you get it… – Yes, but it also does this! ■ The important thing is to recognize that we are pitching our solution instead of listening to people’s problems and to try to recover from that.
- 8. www.byteout.com Look before you zoom ■ We can miss the important questions by spending time on ultimately unimportant details. ■ This can happen when we get stuck in the details before understanding the big picture. ■ Most people have lots of problems which they don’t actually care enough about to fix, but which they’ll happily tell you the details of if you ask them.
- 9. ALWAYS PRE-PLAN THE 3 MOST IMPORTANT THINGS YOU WANT TO LEARN FROM ANY GIVEN TYPE OF PERSON.
- 10. 5 – 10 MIN (ANYTIME, ANYWHERE) avoid being too formal; you don’t need to make appointments just to ask these questions; ask people you meet at conferences, meetups, or anywhere else.
- 11. EXAMPLES
- 12. www.byteout.com Questions for a PM Tool: ■ How big is the team you work in? ■ How do you communicate with your teammates? ■ How do you receive clients’ requests? ■ Which PM tool do you use? Are you paying for it? Which payment model do you use? ■ How did you find out about it? ■ What do you (mostly) use it for? Tell me about 2-3 tasks that you most frequently accomplish using that tool? ■ What is the most valuable feature of that tool for you? Why? ■ What don’t you like about it? Is there something missing? ■ Have you tried another tool to accomplish the same tasks? What made you switch to the current one?
- 13. www.byteout.com Questions for an Alarm Clock App: ■ How many alarms do you set in order to wake up in the morning? How many alarms have you set up for tomorrow? ■ In which time interval do they ring? ■ How many times do you snooze before you get up? ■ How about this morning? When did you wake up? How many times did you snooze? ■ When is the last time you overslept and why? ■ How often did you wake up later than you should in the last year (or month)? ■ Do you use an alarm clock app on your phone? Which one? Why? What do you like about it? ■ What is the first thing that you do after you turn off your alarm and decide to get up? How about this morning?