Customer Research

Customer research is extracting the unvarnished voice of the customer (VOC) to guide product development and marketing messaging. High-impact research uncovers Jobs to Be Done (JTBD), identifies switching triggers, isolates exact pain vocabulary, and turns qualitative interviews into structured persona dossiers.

1. The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) Interview Framework

Customers do not buy products; they "hire" them to make progress in a specific life or operational situation:

• The 4 Forces of Customer Progress (Bob Moesta Framework):
  1. Push of the Current Situation: The pain, frustration, or inefficiency of the existing solution that makes staying intolerable.
  2. Pull of the New Solution: The attractive promise of the new product and how it will improve their operational reality.
  3. Anxiety of the Unknown: Fear that the new solution will break, fail to integrate, or cost too much time to learn.
  4. Habit & Inertia: Comfort with the legacy routine and reluctance to change existing muscle memory.

2. The 5 Golden Interview Questions

When conducting customer discovery interviews (20–30 minutes), never ask hypothetical questions ("Would you buy X?"). Ask about past behaviors:

1. "Take me back to the day you first started looking for a solution like this. What happened that day that made you say 'I need to fix this'?" (Identifies the switching trigger).
2. "What other solutions did you try or consider before choosing us, and why did you rule them out?" (Identifies true competitors and trade-offs).
3. "What was the hardest part about getting set up or convincing your team to use this?" (Identifies onboarding and adoption friction).
4. "What can you do now that you couldn't do before?" (Isolates the core value proposition in the customer's exact words).
5. "If you could no longer use this tomorrow, what would you replace it with?" (Identifies mission-critical dependencies).