Customers & Research

How do I do user research when I'm building something nobody has seen before and can't describe what they want?

A starting point

People are terrible at imagining products, but they are excellent at describing their current struggles, so research the struggle, not the solution. As a starting point, dig into how they solve the problem today with duct-tape workarounds, spreadsheets, and WhatsApp groups, because the ugliness of the workaround tells you how much they'd pay for something better. Show, don't ask: put a rough thing in front of them and watch what they do.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 2 link-checked Watch Read

Watch

▶️ Video
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it Reading about the switch interview is one thing, watching one run live is another. Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek interview an audience member on the spot about a real purchase, reconstructing the timeline of struggle from first thought to buy and mapping the forces that pushed and pulled them. It is the most concrete way to learn the actual questioning technique for uncovering the real job.

Uncovering the Jobs to Be Done (with a live switch interview)

On Business of Software by Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek

  • Build the buyer's timeline from the first thought to the purchase, so you surface the causality behind a switch instead of stated preferences
  • The forces diagram (push, pull, anxiety, habit) explains why someone moves or stays put, which matters most when your product is unfamiliar
  • Interview around a concrete recent decision, not hypotheticals, because memory of a real struggle is far more reliable than opinions about the future
Open businessofsoftware.org →

Read

📖 Book
✓ Link checked Paid Intermediate

Why we picked it When you feel that something is broken but cannot name it, Christensen's Jobs-to-be-Done lens gives you a way to describe the actual progress a person is trying to make in a specific situation. That reframing turns a fuzzy hunch into a concrete job you can go test with real people, which is exactly the move from vague to sharp. It is the canonical text on the idea, and it is a starting point for thinking in jobs, not a formula to follow blindly.

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

From HarperBusiness by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan ~288 pages

  • People do not buy products, they hire them to make progress in a specific circumstance, so define the job, not the demographic.
  • A job has functional, social, and emotional dimensions, which is often where the real, unmet problem is hiding.
  • Once you can state the job clearly, you have a testable claim you can validate or kill by talking to the people who have it.
Open amazon.com →
✍️ Essay
Free Beginner

Why we picked it The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few customers. The cheapest, most honest way to validate demand is to go get it one person at a time.

Do Things That Don't Scale

From paulgraham.com by Paul Graham ~15 min read

  • Recruit your first users manually, don't wait for them to come.
  • A tiny group of users who love you beats a big group who like you.
  • Manual, unscalable effort early is a feature, not a failure.
Open paulgraham.com →

People also ask

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