It’s that easy! We just need to be empirical in our process.

Hiring Jobs’s Theory

Before I walk you through the steps, I want to mention a relevant theoretical framework called Jobs To Be Done aka JTBD or “Jobs Theory.” The theory gained traction in the tech world after it was endorsed by Clayton Christiansen in his 2016 book Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice. The main premise is that you look at a customer’s need as a job that needs to get done.

For example, our blockbuster movie producer hated shopping in stores but needed a tasteful wardrobe; this is a job he must do. But he didn’t want to use salespeople to accomplish his task. Instead, he wanted a better solution to make progress in his life like an online VIP shopping experience. What this means for us is that we need to truly understand his unmet needs—why an online experience over an in-store shopping experience? What about VIP treatment is meaningful to him? Why does he find shopping so distasteful? In knowing these answers, only then can we truly create a compelling customer experience that alleviates the pain he finds in the current solutions. But this requires that we ask the right questions to the right people and vice versa.

Step 1: Define your primary customer segment

In 2016, Clayton Christiansen endorsed a theoretical framework called Jobs to Be Done aka JTBD aka “Jobs Theory” in his book Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice. The main premise of the theory is that a customer’s need is like a job that needs to get done. If they can’t accomplish that job, then that customer has a problem, and breakthrough innovations can occur if we reframe how we understand our product vision by properly addressing those problems. For example, our blockbuster movie producer hated shopping in stores but needed a tasteful wardrobe. So he wanted to fire salespeople and hire a better solution (an online VIP shopping experience) for accomplishing his goal aka aka “making progress” in his life. In order for us to create a compelling customer experience that alleviates his pain points, we need to truly understand his unmet needs, and this requires asking the right questions to the right people.

Because you and your team are launching an innovative product, you are starting with zero customers. Therefore, if you think your customer is everybody, think harder. Otherwise, you’re facing an uphill battle in customer acquisition. Which is easier: getting everybody to use your app or getting people who really need it to sign up? Many hit digital products have done just that. When Facebook launched, it was exclusive to students at Harvard University and not the entire world. Airbnb tested out its product in 2008 during the Industrial Design Conference in San Francisco, and even Tinder did its initial pilot project by focusing on college students at the University of Southern California.²

The customer is a group or segment of people with a common need or pain. Your primary customer’s pain point must be severe because there is a lot of risk involved in trying to change how people do something. Examples of customer segments include international college students in Los Angeles who have a hard time making friends with native students, aspiring musicians in big cities who want practice gigs, or busy suburban moms who can’t manage their kids’ schedules. These segments can be identified by a combination of demographic and psychographic attributes, but what is most essential is that they describe in 10 words or less a set of people on whom you can identify and separate from everyone else.

So, let’s go back to the computer-generated value proposition and imagine the most obvious primary customer. Who the hell needs to plan a wedding? Hmmm… As Figure 3-3 demonstrates, maybe a bride-to-be? Yes, let’s go with it!

Figure 3-3. Mock-up of typical first page of a pitch deck with the name of the product and value proposition

Step 2: Identify your customer segment’s (biggest) problem

The problem should be a specific one that a specific customer segment is having. Nonetheless, you need to acknowledge that you and your team are working solely on assumptions, and that’s just the reality of where you begin when making a product. You make assumptions about your users, their needs, and how to solve them. You just need to be very honest about the assumptions you’re making and to take them for what they are: facts people take for granted. Or, as the great Coach Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) in the movie Bad News Bears said to his baseball team, “When you ‘ASSUME,’ you make an ASS out of U and ME .”

At the beginning of the chapter, Paul the movie producer stated that he understood his customer’s problem because it was his own: he was a busy man with money who didn’t have time to shop. Therefore, all busy men needed an online shopping experience to build a high-end custom wardrobe. If that logic worked for every value proposition, I could easily look at the digital value proposition and say, “When I planned my own wedding, I was a bride-to-be on a limited budget, and my biggest pain point was finding a wedding venue in Los Angeles that I could afford.” Which was true for me, but is it true for every frugal bride-to-be?

This is where you want to write out the customer and problem hypothesis in a statement. Here’s what a customer/problem hypothesis statement could look like:

Brides-to-be in Los Angeles have a hard time finding wedding venues that are affordable.

Which, if proven true, would validate a potential need for the value proposition:

Airbnb for Finding Wedding Venues.

It would seem, then, that the next logical step would be to start dreaming up the entire feature set for this much-needed solution, right? No. Not yet.

Here’s a pro tip: don’t build your product’s UX around a value proposition unless you have tangible evidence that people will want the product!

If you are a problem solver, which is instinctual for UX designers, product makers, and entrepreneurs, this process feels backward at first. That’s because it is. We are reverse-engineering the concept of our solution to validate the assumptions about the customers and their problems. This approach is particularly important for those of you who have produced dozens of products, including ones that have been very successful. Don’t believe your own hype. Instead, approach every new product or project like an experiment.

As I mentioned in the Preface, I’ve been a part-time college professor for more than 25 years. I have always run my courses the same way. The first week, the students have to think of problems they would like to solve using technology. Each week, they build toward the final course project, and that is to pitch a real product that they’ve tested using the methods I’m teaching you in this book. In the spring of 2014, I offered UX apprenticeships to my students Bita and Ena to take on the “Airbnb for Weddings” product vision. I’m going to present their methods and results to show how you can give any value proposition a real shot to see if it is viable. Their first assignment was to create the provisional persona.

Step 3: Create provisional personas based on your assumptions Personas can be a helpful tool in giving stakeholders and the product team an empathetic sense of what the end user’s needs, goals, and motivations are. In this way, they can make a product more “user-friendly.” However, the concept of personas has had a tumultuous history with advocates on both sides of the table, so I’m going to give you a little lesson on it to explain why I’m using them here and now .

In the early days of software design, the engineers who developed and programmed the products were also typically the designers of the product interfaces. These product interfaces were rarely “user-friendly” because they were not tested on the end user of the product. Too often, interfaces were pasted together in a hurried fashion to meet a shipping date.

Alan Cooper, a widely recognized Bay Area software designer and programmer who invented the visual programming language Visual Basic in 1988, knew this problem all too well. In 1995, he invented personas and wrote books to help software teams embrace a goal-directed design methodology. To Cooper, personas were a critical tool to inspire product stakeholders to make more user-friendly interfaces.³ But to achieve this kind of persona, it meant that months of qualitative “ethnographic” research had to be conducted to create an authentic model of each end user.

By 2002, personas were a popular tool in the designer toolbox, but they weren’t often used to achieve their original purpose. Instead, big interactive agencies such as Razorfish or Sapient used personas to upsell the discovery phase to clients. When used in this way, personas were often laughable caricatures packed full of stereotypical details based on nothing more than marketing data at best. In fact, this is what happened with the three personas I conducted for the Oprah.com redesign, which I discuss in Chapter 2. The personas that made it to the discovery brief were depicted as three fictional people from different minority backgrounds but only because Oprah had a massive multiracial following. In reality, ethnicity had little to do with the UX of the product. Did black Oprah fans need a different interface or feature set than white Oprah fans? In this way, the personas failed in informing the UX strategy process in a basic way such as when Cooper writes, “Don’t confuse persona archetypes with stereotypes. Because personas provide a precise design target and also serve as a communication tool to the development team, the designers must choose a particular demographic characteristics with care.”

By the third edition of Cooper’s book About Face in 2007, he added a new section called, “When Rigorous Personas Aren’t Possible: Provisional Personas.”⁴ The concept was geared for product makers who did not have the time, budgets, or corporate buy-in to perform the fieldwork necessary to gather detailed qualitative data. Instead, they were a simple collaborative group exercise for designers and nondesigners to quickly create. In fact, the product designer and author Jeff Gothelf later reintroduced them as “Proto-Personas” in his book Lean UX** to help align teams on how they think about the customer before doing customer discovery.

I prefer the term “provisional” that means: “existing for the present,” meaning it will possibly be changed later. This is because our ultimate goal is to turn our provisional personas into validated personas through the process of conducting customer discovery. In this context, you will use the provisional persona as a helpful communication tool to depict your hypothesized customer segment and align your team on the most important assumptions. This gives everyone a starting point for the validation process in terms of what questions are mission critical to ask. Thus, you can think of a provisional persona as a “placeholder” persona for conducting a form of validated user research.

And because we are eventually using this type of persona creation as both a recruiting and marketing tool, we need to learn to paint all the characteristics using medium-size brush strokes. We want a person that isn’t too specific in which only a handful of people are represented, and we don’t want a persona too broad in which it represents everybody. Later on in the book, we will use our validated persona to inform our landing page campaign to acquire users through a “saved audience” on Facebook. Saved audiences can encapsulate specific cities, age groups, genders, interests, and even job types. And because running an online ad campaign costs money, this process you are about to learn is an important reality check for turning a fictional representation into something that is based on concrete facts!

Provisional persona layout and breakdown

The provisional personas will collect and present the assumptions you are making about your primary customer segment. Therefore, all information will be contextual to the hypothesized customer segment and relevant to the initial value proposition. Demographic details and user behaviors need to be reflective of the segment of people you’re targeting as opposed to just one person. In short, you want to focus your personas on what you assume is critical for summarizing your customers’ needs and how they are currently dealing with your hypothesized problem.

The provisional persona is made up of these four parts:

Segment name and photograph/sketch

What is the customer segment’s name? You want to choose something descriptive like 1980s Los Angeles punk rockers)? Do they have a certain look? Where do you believe they will be using your product the most? Or are experiencing the painpoints that it could solve? Or even experiencing the solution that it provides? Sometimes it’s better to wait on this quadrant until you have worked out the other quadrants. But once you have the crucial demographics, do a Google image search and see if you can find a photograph that represents a group of people who fit the part. Because it is a segment of people, it is ideal to show either a group shot or a collage of people. Everybody depicted should represent people who closely match all your demographic details. It is also great if they are engaging in the activity that is aligned with your value proposition.

For our value proposition, this means my students looked for images about “Los Angeles” and “brides.”They eyeballed the photographic images until they found something that worked. Because you are not using the provisional persona or the image for commercial purposes, you should not spend considerable time on this task.

Description

How would you describe this group of people using only crucial demographic and psychographic statements? Include the city/country where you plan to conduct your research study and make sure that this crucial data point is validated. Include gender only if you believe the problem you are solving is predominantly felt by males or females. If the segment represents people within a certain income bracket and you believe it’s pertinent, then include it. Include an age groups that represents you and your team’s best guess at the age of your most likely users. Are they college educated or does this not matter? Just be careful when you use these labels because the cohorts they represent might be quite dimensional or wide. For example, “millennials” and “baby boomers” or “college-educated” or “low income” can encompass a wide spectrum of people. Just be prepared to ask a few personal questions when you conduct your customer interviews as you’ll see to make certain you’re talking to the person who best matches the characteristics in your persona. And of course, don’t be afraid to adjust your description as you move forward.

Behaviors

Whatever product you are devising, it is crucial to understand what will motivate people to use it. Motivation and behavior lie at the heart of value creation and innovation; they give insight into the reasons behind the actions and mannerisms of a person. In the Jobs-to-be-Done framework, customer behaviors are called “job drivers” and are critical factors for segmentation.

When you describe your user’s behavior, you want to think about their mindset and environment. Where are they trying to solve the problem? Or what “job” are they trying to get done? Is she visiting numerous wedding venue locations on her own? Is she sharing links to her favorite venues with her fiance? Is she tracking certain aspects of each venue with a spreadsheet or making swipe-like gut decisions after reading online reviews and seeing photographs? Are there workarounds they are using to help them accomplish their end goal? And why? Why are they doing these things? “Why” is the most important question in our arsenal because it gets us to the root of a person’s behavior. For more on this, Google “The Five Whys” which is a famous iterative interrogative technique⁵
.

In the example (figure ##) below, Bita guessed that her bride-to-be was “resourceful” and “open-minded” about where her wedding would take place. This matters because if she is close-minded, she might be completely opposed to having her fantasy wedding at a stranger’s house.

But how do we validate if a person is open-minded? If Bita asked a bride-to-be this question, I don’t think we could take her subject’s “yes” to mean she would also be open-minded to Airbnb-ing a wedding venue location. This is when a behavioral statement might be a more useful guide than a simple adjective. If Bita reframed her user’s behavior to “stays in Airbnbs when she travels,” then we could definitely validate that with a real person. That’s because a user who already stays in Airbnbs probably trusts the mental model of the platform and would be open-minded to using our product. Other behavior statements could be:

Goes to punk rocks shows weekly to meet interesting people

Goes to church regularly to feel closer to God

Avoids animal products for environment reasons

Shares photos of food of social media to impress friends

What’s important about these behavior statements in comparison is how they describe both the action and motivation of the user. But whether you choose statements or adjectives, choose your terms with care so that they are not too hard to validate, too general, or too specific. Once you validate these behaviors, it will help narrow down the features and capabilities of your ultimate solution.

Needs and goals

This category explains what motivates the customer and causes her to act a certain way. For example, what is she missing from the current solution? What specific needs or goals aren’t being satisfied by the customer’s current behaviors? What are the dealbreaker issues she faces? What are the fundamental tasks that she is trying to get done?

This quadrant is the most important to get right because it can inform your UX strategy the most. Don’t think of it as a short list of features you want to build into your product. Instead, you want actionable statements that address underlying customer concerns.

Here are a few examples of Needs and Goals statements not related to Airbnb for Weddings:

Needs an easy way to stay abreast of upcoming punk shows in Los Angeles

Needs to know which local restaurants serve good vegan meals

Wants to quickly book flights and accomodations for business travel

Wants to have a romantic night out

Because you are using the provisional persona purely as a thinking tool to get a sense of your primary customer segments, you and your team want to keep the layout and content simple. In the provisional personas that follow, Bita and Ena use a two-by-two grid with a section for each part. They’ve pasted the photo of their target customer (or customer segment) in the upper-left section, and they’ve created five to six bullets in each of the other three. Observe how the assumptions about their customers seem relatively easy to prove with one carefully worded question. You only want statements in your provisional personas that can be externally verified .

Figure 3-4 shows the provisional persona that Bita did for her first homework assignment, for “Airbnb for Weddings .”

Figure 3-4. Bita’s provisional persona for a bride-to-be

Figure 3-5 shows what Ena developed.

Figure 3-5. Ena’s provisional persona for a bride-to-be

What’s most telling about the personas is how different the customers are even though each student worked on the same value proposition. They each assumed the primary customer was a very different kind of bride. Bita assumed that her customer was a professional woman in her late 20s or early 30s. She earns a decent income and is value conscious. Ena, however, assumed that her customer was a younger 20-something bride. This younger bride is in a very different place in her life than the more established and professional one. This creates more distinctions between the two brides. For instance, price is an issue for the younger bride, but she wants people to have fun. She’s willing to compromise and not have fancy food or that big of a wedding. However, our more mature bride is efficient and a problem solver. She has high expectations that everything will be perfect. She needs a solution that will help her save time and get good value.

Which persona is the right one? It doesn’t matter right now because Bita and Ena are just working with assumptions anyway, and what they’ve built in the provisional personas are just more assumptions. Perhaps in the final product they might be able to suit the solution to the needs of both personas, but until then, everything in the personas remains an assumption until proven true or false. Regardless of who ends up being more “correct,” the provisional personas helped Bita and Ena paint a clearer picture of their hypothesized customers. Now they just need to find those customers in real life and see what the brides really think!

Step 4: Conduct customer discovery to validate or invalidate your solution’s initial value proposition

Customer discovery

In 2005, Steve Blank, a long-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur, published The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win.⁶ Although his methodology revolves around four phases, I’m going to ruminate on the first one, which is customer discovery, as part of your UX strategy.

Customer discovery is a process used to discover, test, and validate whether a specific product solves a known problem for an identifiable group of users; it is essentially conducting user research. However, you don’t want to just watch people, empathize with them, and then make judgments. Instead, you want to “get out of the building” and get customer validation, which is foundational to the Lean Startup business approach and Tenet 3. You want to actively listen to people and engage them because your goal is to uncover the specific problem that they need solved .

This might sound like an obvious thing to do, but shockingly, the majority of stakeholders whom I work with in startups and enterprises don’t talk directly to customers. In fact, before Lean Startup, the norm was that companies would just build the product without talking to them. Much like Paul the movie producer, the stakeholders or product team assume that if they have the problem or associate with it, this means that they understand it. I think the real reason stakeholders don’t talk to customers is fear. Product visionaries are like screenwriters sweating away at a script that they never show anyone. They’re frightened of what their real customers might think—nobody wants to hear that their baby is ugly .

In an ideal world, customer discovery is a collaborative process involving as many members of the product team going out into the field as possible. Collaboration will also help organically build consensus on what exactly the vision is for the product. If the people you work with don’t want to do customer research, do it for yourself. Do it on the sly without waiting for permission from your boss, the client, or any naysayers. What is crucial is that it is attempted. You can come back from your research and share your discoveries anecdotally with your team. If nobody wants to listen, you can decide at that point if you want to continue working on that project or with your current team or with your current employer. But at least get out there and discover evidence that might make your product better in the time that you have to work on it. Own your destiny.

We’ve already touched on some reasons why product makers become very protective of their ideas. They put a lot of energy and love into them. If you’re a UX designer, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Clients such as Paul typically come to you with an idea for a product that they want to build. They’ve assumed that customers want their product. But as I’ve already stated, the UX strategist wants to know whether those assumptions are correct. As you’re learning in this book, you don’t want to get too attached to any ideas, especially without proper validation that real customers want the solution .

Fortunately, Bita and Ena aren’t emotionally attached to the value proposition I generated off the Internet. They just need to validate their initial assumptions. And that’s exactly what they’re going to do. They’re going to get out of the building (office or classroom) to conduct problem interviews.

The problem interview

During customer discovery, the goal of the interview is to talk to real people. My students have personas, and they need to talk to the people who match those personas .

Let’s remember Tenet 3: Validated User Research. You want to use the approach of the Lean Startup, which means research should be meaningful, effective, and swift. You want to get into the build-measure-learn loop as quickly as possible. (See Figure 3-6.) That loop begins with the smallest build of an idea. This build leads to some form of data that can measure what the customers say. Based on that, you then learn from that feedback about how to make the build better. And at this infancy stage of a value proposition, this means getting out of the building to validate provisional personas and your problem hypothesis.

Figure 3-6. The Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop from the book Lean Startup by Eric Ries

You need to identify two or three nearby locations where you can make direct contact with your proposed customers. You can’t hide behind your desk. Think creatively about where your customers lurk by focusing on the types of activities or jobs they might be doing. There are going to be many cases where you simply can’t find them in-person. The reasons can vary from time to geographic constraints. In fact, your customer segment persona might even be much easier to find on the Internet. In the revised Chapter 8, I will be teaching an online form of conducting guerrilla user research. So please jump ahead to the section “Finding Your Customer Segment Online” where I list over fifty tactics for doing so. But keep reading if you want to see how Ena validated a customer segment over the Internet.

In the case of Bita, her provisional persona was of an upper-middle class yet value-conscious bride-to-be. Bita decided to hit the malls of Los Angeles where she thought she could find people who matched her persona. Her first stop was the Westside Pavilion in West Los Angeles. This mall had plenty of kids’ clothing stores such as Gymboree and Baby Gap where mothers with babies shopped. This was certainly different than what I was thinking, which was that Bita would find women in the midst of shopping for wedding gowns. Bita actually dismissed that idea after being thrown out of a bridal gown shop. But she wasn’t discouraged by the event. Instead, she learned from it and pivoted to another hypothesis on where to find her users.

Bita’s updatedassumption was that these new mothers might give her insight about planning a wedding because they probably had one before starting their family. And because they had very young children, their wedding was most likely recent. Bita dressed professionally and appropriately. She carried a notebook on which her questions were written. She always approached her targeted customer with a smile and only if the timing was right like when the baby was asleep in a stroller.

The problem interview is actually made up of two parts: the screener and the interview. A screener is a short list of 1 to 3questions used to qualify potential participants for a study. You need these questions because you cannot assume that every person you approach is in fact the customer you need or want to validate your persona assumptions. The screener questions will identify the “control group” on whom we will ultimately validate your hypotheses. Good screener questions must help you quickly weed out the wrong people. Be careful not to mix your screener questions with the actual questions you need answered to validate or invalidate your customer/problem hypothesis statements.

For example, if your customer/problem hypothesis is, “Busy professionals in LA have a hard time knowing what gifts to buy their loved ones,”then your screener shouldn’t ask a question like: “Is it hard to buy your loved ones gifts?”Doing so will instantly contaminate your study because you won’t be learning from the specific customer segment you need to validate against. Instead, a better screener would be something like: “Do you consider yourself a busy professional?” You can also follow up with a question about whether they live in Los Angeles in case the circumstances aren’t obvious. Then in the course of the interview, we can learn from our self-identified customer segment how they buy gifts for loved ones, why it might be hard, and if it is or isn’t, how they solve for it.

Screener questions should seem nonintrusive to the participant, but you know they are dealbreaker questions. To construct them, it might be helpful to work backward. What are the exact answers you must hear from someone to qualify them for this mini-experiment? Sometimes, it takes a few iterations of your screener questions to truly ensure that you are talking to the right people. Be okay with fine-tuning your questions on the fly to either make them more general or more specific based on what happens “in the wild” as you begin talking to people.

Let’s get back to Bita. This was her script when she approached a mother and her child:

Introduction:

Hi, I’m Bita. I’m conducting research on a product idea for an Internet startup. Can you spare a few moments to answer questions related to wedding planning?I am offering a $5 <nearby coffeeshop or Amazon> giftcard as compensation for the interview.

This introduction is carefully worded to quickly explain why you are talking to them and what you need from them. You can try approaching people first without offering them compensation. However, you are asking people for their time, and a $5 gift card to a nearby cafe shows that you value their time. Byy including the words “for the interview,” you are safeguarding yourself from paying those who don’t pass the screener. You can also remember to caveat the screener questions with “But first let me just ask you…”.

If the woman she confronted seemed open to chatting, Bita immediately launched into her screener questions.

Phase 1: The screener questions

1. Were you married within the last few years?

• Yes (continue to question 2)

• No (kindly end the interview)

2. Did you happen to get married here in Los Angeles?

• Yes (interview the person)

• No (kindly end the interview)

Based on Bita’s persona, the goal of her screener questions is to identify if the woman she’s interviewing recently planned a wedding in Los Angeles. She needed participants with fresh memories about what happened at their weddings. Also, she needed them to be married in sunny Southern California in which they probably had an outdoor venue like a park, beach, or fancy backyard. This detail was crucial to validating the Airbnb for Weddings value proposition because she assumed that these outside locations (such as someone’s fancy backyard overlooking the beach) would have solved this potential participant’s wedding venue woes.

Phase 2: The interview

If a woman passed the screener test, Bita was able to move on to her actual interview questions .

Typically, this is when product makers and tech entrepreneurs like to extol the virtues of their awesome value proposition. But if you just start pitching ideas at strangers, they tend to just nod their heads in agreement to quickly get the hell away from you. That’s not the validation you need or want. Remember customer discovery is about listening and not selling. Let’s take a look at how Bita handled it in her interview questions:

1. How did you go about planning your wedding?

• Prompt for both ceremony and reception locations

• Prompt for tools/means, such as Internet, word-of-mouth

2. Did you have a budget for venues and were you able to stay within that budget? (If not, by how much more?)

3. How many people were you planning to have at the reception (for example, 50 to 200)?

4. What were some of the challenges you faced in finding the venues (Prompt: e .g ., finding the ideal location, such as by the beach)?

5. How did you overcome these challenges? Did you end up having to compromise on your ideal wedding?

These questions actually set up the context for our solution. Now that the participant has that context, it’s time for Bita to ask her money-shot question. Bita:

Excellent, thank you so much for all this great feedback. I have two last questions for you.

6. Have you ever heard of or tried a website called “Airbnb”?

• Yes (continue to question 7)

• No (quickly explain what value prop is of Airbnb with respect to the part about short-term subletting and continue to question 7)

7. If there were a website, like Airbnb, that gave you a numerous choices of gorgeous homes with big backyards in LA that you could rent specifically for a wedding event, what do you think?

You end with your money-shot questions, which are when you actually pitch your hypothetical value proposition. Again, you want to listen and not sell. See how open-ended Bita’s questions are? She’s just pulling the trigger on the solution to see what response she gets without trying to bias the participant in favor or against it. You are simply trying to unlock the right feedback that can get you to the winning value proposition. When you ask the money-shot question, just capture the essence of the person’s response and, if they apply, ask any relevant follow-up questions. Then that’s it! Thank the person profusely, give them the gift card if you offered them one, and let him go on with his day. Ideally, you will try to collect 10 complete interviews from screener to money-shot.

Two-sided markets

Remember in Chapter 2, we discussed how Airbnb didn’t just create mass adoption and turn one user group into an asset for a customer. Instead, both of its most important user groups are also its most important customer groups. And since we are a book talking about digital products for the twenty first century, we want to think about all our potential customers. All this is to say that sometimes you only have one primary customer segment for which you need to validate a UX in the same way the New York Times needs readers to attract advertisers or Netflix needs viewers to attract networks to invest in its catalog.

But, what if you need two distinct user types for your product to have value? Two-sided markets are what make the Internet go around. They drastically affect the UX strategy because they require two distinct user experiences—one for each customer segment—to be validated and created. eBay has buyers and sellers. Airbnb has hosts and guests. Eventbrite has event producers and event attendees. These digital products are insanely good at providing value to both of these customer segments through their feature sets, and that’s something that you might also need to do.

The real Airbnb is a digital platform that facilitates one set of customers (hosts) subletting their properties to another set of customers (guests). Airbnb then collects a small percentage of the transaction from both “sides.” Bita and Ena’s value proposition is based on Airbnb’s innovative business model, which is based on the peer-to-peer sharing economy. For them to solve the problem of helping brides find an affordable venue for weddings, they must match them up with the other side of the market: people who are willing to rent their homes out for a wedding event .

Ena realized this during her customer discovery. Consequently, she took a step back and created a provisional persona of her other primary customer, which you can see in Figure 3-7 .

Figure 3-7. Ena’s provisional persona for a wedding venue host

This is the customer segment that also must exist to make her value proposition work. Ena needs people who own nice homes in Malibu and are open to innovative solutions for taking advantage of their home’s value. They are probably older than our brides-to-be and quite concerned that their homes don’t get trashed or so Ena’s persona assumes.

I asked Ena how she planned to validate this provisional persona. Where would she find people of this type? Would she knock on big fancy doors of homes by the beach? Good luck. Maybe she could ask people who were shopping at the high-end grocery store in Malibu if they would rent their home? I was concerned that she was chasing a persona that wouldn’t be easy to verify. So I sent her out to do more customer discovery .

The following week Ena came back with some pretty cool validation, which is shown in Figure 3-8. She had put on her bride-to-be hat and contacted some real hosts on the real Airbnb. She asked them if they would consider renting their homes out for a wedding event. She even asked how much they might charge. As it turns out, people are already doing this.

Figure 3-8. Example of a positive response from hosts on Airbnb for Ena’s inquiry about renting their home for a wedding

Hosts on Airbnb were already bending the system. They were creating pricing packages totally separate from the Airbnb business model and UX, and the responses showed Ena how familiar hosts were with wedding inquiries. So, how did this information affect Ena’s value proposition? Let’s find out!

Step 5: Reassess your initial value proposition based on what you learned! (And continue to iterate until you have product/market fit.)

As you can see, conducting validated user researcher does not need to be costly or time-consuming. For Bita, it cost her one Saturday to validate whether her assumptions were right, which she then compiled into the results shown in Figure 3-9 .

Figure 3-9. Bita’s customer discovery results

Yes, she only talked to 10 people who passed her screener questions, but she found that 9 of them had a huge problem finding an affordable venue. Obviously, the value proposition’s hypothetical problem was real. However, she also learned about how much those people spent on their weddings and how many people they invited. This knowledge affected how she thought about her value proposition because it meant the detail of venue size was actually more important than she originally assumed. It made her question whether there were homes large enough in Los Angeles to accommodate the needs of her target customer segment. It was a reality check .

In contrast, Ena’s customer discovery revealed that there is already an existing solution for Airbnb for Weddings, and it was … Airbnb! Moreover, she also learned that Airbnb is not designed to address all the logistical needs faced by the host or bride-to-be. For example in 2014, you currently can’t deal with other aspects of wedding planning such as the food, parking, flowers, etc. Yet people (both hosts and brides-to-be) are currently using Airbnb as a Band-Aid solution because there is no better alternative for booking an affordable wedding venue! It’s when you stumble on evidence like this that your “value innovation” creative juices should start flowing.

Now that we have feedback, you and your team, like Bita and Ena, need to make some decisions because one of three things should have happened:

• You did not validate your customer hypothesis. Therefore, you need to pivot on who you think your customers really are. Go back to Step 1.

• You did not validate a common pain point your customers are experiencing. Therefore, you need to pivot on the problem. Go back to Step 2.

• You validated both your customer and your problem hypothesis and are feeling pretty good about your solution’s initial value proposition. Go on to Chapter 4 .