Book Review: TMT's 9 tips for Product Managers

Customer Conversations are difficult for you. If you are a budding founder or a product manager you understand the pain. Bad customer conversations increases your Time to market (TTM) and also worse false-positives that causes you to overinvest on your precious assets (Time, money & resources).

The Mom Test is a savior for you. practical how-to book which gives tools to talk to the customer, navigate the noise & learn what customer really want. I attempted to create a summary in this article.

# 1 What people say vs think:

The Customer conversations are not about you or your product vision. Ask about their problems, challenges, constraints and how are they managing it ? Remember that your mom (or anyone) will not want to hurt your feelings by telling what think instead but will tell you as brilliant idea when you talk about your product/vision.

It's simple to remember. You are not allowed to tell what their problem is and customers are not allowed to tell you what solution to be build. Be clear on ownership. They own the problem and you own the solution.

# 2 Avert Compliment, Avoid Fluff:

You as founder/PM want facts & commitments but not compliments from a initial customer conversation. Humans crave for validation and often tricked to taking complements as reliable data. Learn to catch complement from customer and ask right questions to get required facts beyond complement.

Fluffs are generic and hypothetical - Never, Usually etc., Ask questions like ' when did you face this issue last?', 'how do handle this issue right now?'. These type of questions will move you from generic to specific zone to avoid the fluff.

Remember you need commitments rather than compliments from your customers.

# 3 Dig beneath and ask important questions:

Dig beyond initial ask about requirements, pain-points to get the reason out of the ask. You can achieve this only by asking important questions. Questions are generic but will give you signals that you can anchor and dig further down. Example questions - 'Is this your top 1 problem?', 'Do you have budget allocated for getting solution for this problem?' Start broad & zoom in only when you find a strong signal to dig down to specifics.

Identify that scary question that you are shrinking in your mind to ask. You might know beyond the customer on a legal implication or compliance to be followed. Be terrified of at least one question you will ask on every conversation. Remember that while asking important questions you are not trying to sell but you are learning .

Differentiate Product risk vs Market risk. Product risk is about Can you build it? Can you scale it beyond? Market risk is about Do customer really want a solution? Will he/she pay for it? How many such customer's exist etc., To a prospect you may ask about market risk and to an advisor you may need to ask about the product risk.

#4 Casual conversations vs formal meetings:

Precious resource for every founder/PM is time. You will be the all-in-one who does everything in a start-up. Try to keep your conversations casual and asking specific questions. How do you differentiate formal vs casual? if prospect thinks he is doing a favor talking to you, you are making it as formal. Try making in-person conversations. It may sound illogical post-pandemic era, but human as a habit animal want to finish a remote call to get off to their 'routine' rather than talking to you relaxed on a video conference.

#5 Commitments post meeting:

You asked good questions and able to understand the market need. Now you are on next level meetings. Outcome of these meetings are not just learning but sales advancement.

An complement received at end o the meeting may boost your ego. If it's without any commitment then you need to understand that it's zombie leads in your sales pipeline. Ask for commitment of next steps from your customer. You need to be prepared with your final asks to the customers when it reaches the end. Commitments can be time (ask for meeting with next level), reputation risk (public testimonial, discussions with budget owner), financial (Letter of intent).

Do remember your first customer is always crazy cause they won't know whether you will be a hit or miss. If they are showcasing their emotions ensure you are keeping them close to finish that first deal. It can range from crazy discounts to out of the way customization to keep them happy.

#6 Where to find potential customers to talk?

Go to them - Cold calls (Remember the failure rate will be huge), immerse yourselves in the places where you will find them, find good excuse to talk about it when you find them, landing pages on digital media.

Bring them to you - Organize meetups, give free speech & teach, do domain/industry blogging etc.,

Try Warm Intros - Use 7 degrees of separation to reach the leads which is much better than large failure rate cold calls . Advisors, Startup Incubation centers, College Lecturers/Professors will work best to reach your prospects

Keep an elevator pitch ready - Be prepared for serendipity. When you get to meet a potential customer have your pitch with vision/framing/weakness/pedestal/ask ready.

#7 Don't forget customer segmentation

Startups don't starve for ideas but they drown. If you are starting too generic your outcome will be watered down. You will end up with feature creep. Remember Google started for Phd students research before expanding to the masses. Getting specific about your ideal customers in the beginning allows you to filter out noise. Simple rule of thumb is that if there are no consistent customer problems after multiple talks then you didn't do your customer slicing well yet. Good customer segmentation are who-where pair. You need to know who is your target customer and where to reach them. If it's not there yet you need to slice down further.

While in this process don't overlook stakeholders. Example - if you are building an app for the students you should remember not just students but the funding parents and the recommending teachers are also your stakeholders.

#8 Don't be bottleneck - Relay learning to team:

Before the conversations do your homework (aka elevator pitch) and after the conversations sync with your team on outcome. Set up the process for sharing the learning to the team promptly. The meeting process should include three parts prepping, reviewing & good note taking.

Prepping - Elevator pitch, 3 big questions to ask, have your 'why' you are talking clear

Note taking - Use shortcuts, emoticons, short hand notes to capture the conversation. :) - Happy, ;( - Painful, :( - Sad etc.,

Reviewing - Update your team about the meeting outcome with help of your notes. Verbatim quotes, emotions, body language etc., With this step you are no longer the bottle-neck for the team.

#9 Law of inertia:

Don't get bogged down with law of inertia. The questions are to move your business faster and not to slow down. Don't do week long meeting preparations, months of customer conversations. Keep optimizing finding the right time for mentioned task. Remember as a product manager/founder you need to extract maximum value in minimum time to grow your business.

Time-constrained reader:

The book review is an attempt to summarize the book for the time-constrained reader. If you are a founder/product manager pick up The Mom Test - a 128 page short book which will save your time many fold while growing your successful business.