The best book or article I’ve read on how to ask better questions, and how to do research. This book will guide you through the common pitfalls and biases you fall into while doing customer research.

These are some of my favourite tips from the book, but I recommed reading it, and trying each idea by itself in your next user/customer interaction. There’s a lot of subtle detail to learn here.

“Rule of thumb: Opinions are worthless.”

“Rule of thumb: People know what their problems are, but they don’t know how to solve those problems.”

“Rule of thumb: If they haven’t looked for ways of solving it already, they’re not going to look for (or buy) yours.”

“Rule of thumb: Compliments are the fool’s gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and worthless.”

“Rule of thumb: Ideas and feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed.”

“Rule of thumb: You always need a list of your 3 big questions.”

“Rule of thumb: “Customers” who keep being friendly but aren’t ever going to buy are a particularly dangerous source of mixed signals.”

“Rule of thumb: If you aren’t finding consistent problems and goals, you don’t have a specific enough customer segment.”

Definitely read this book, and please you my affialate link when you get the book on Amazon.