Part One: Strategy · Deciding what to build
Makers need to know what people will do. People can only report what they did, and asked about the future they oblige with a guess.
People are polite. Ask "Would you use a feature that did this?" and they say yes, because yes costs nothing. They are predicting their own behavior, which nobody does well.
The past is firmer ground, and the most useful piece of it is a purchase. Find someone who recently switched, to your product or to anything like it, and walk backward from the day they paid. When did they first think it was not good enough? What did they look at and not buy? What happened that made them act that week? What did they hope would be different? Who else had to agree, and what nearly stopped them?
The owner of a physiotherapy practice says she changed her patient-notes software because the old one was clunky. Walked back, the story has dates in it. The first thought came in spring, when an insurer sent back a batch of claims with treatment details missing. She looked at three products that summer and did nothing. In October an auditor asked for two years of notes, and she spent a weekend printing them. She signed up that Monday. She hoped to leave at six. Nine years of records nearly stopped her.
That is a timeline: a first thought, months of half looking, an event, a decision. Each stage tells you where to be found, what to say, or what to make safe.
Memory tidies. Pin it to the scene: where they were, what day it was, who else was there. Talk to people who looked and walked away, too.
Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek call this a switch interview. The warning about polite answers is Rob Fitzpatrick's, in The Mom Test.
Therefore:
Do not ask people what they want. Find someone who recently switched and walk back with them from the purchase to the first thought, scene by scene. Ask what they hoped for and what nearly stopped them.
In practice. Ask your three newest customers for twenty minutes each. Start with "When did you sign up?" and keep asking "And before that?" until you reach the day they first thought of changing.
Goes with. The story shows you THE STRUGGLING MOMENT (1) and names THE PEOPLE WHO MUST AGREE (33). The hope and the worry in it are two of the FORCES FOR AND AGAINST (4).
Sources: Bob Moesta, Demand-Side Sales 101 (2020); Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test (2013).