Hi friends,
I’m eschewing (eschewing!) my regular “here’s all the things I’ve made this week” format in order to ponder something.
I’ve been thinking a lot about customer research lately. In my dream world at &yet, we talk to customers all the time. We share conversations and insight across the team. Every iteration of every project is based on new learnings that come out of deep collaboration with our customers.
In the real world, while we handle customer research for our clients like champions, we struggle with doing this for ourselves. We’re a small team, so every customer conversation takes quite a percentage of our available time. We’re lucky to work really closely with our clients, so we get a deep understanding of their businesses in the process. But when it comes to developing our own new products and services, it’s tough to get a feel for what our broader community is dealing with, and how we can help.
I’m committed to getting better at this. So I sat down today and was going to create a survey. I was going to call it the Weirdos Survey Extravaganza (the “Extravaganza” part was that we’d send you a weirdos sticker pack as thanks for your participation, based on the amazing illustrations from our Find Your Weirdos project).
But what I realized is that crafting really good survey questions is hard. I need some test subjects.
For this next research project, I need to talk to a specific set of people:
If yes, and if you’re willing to be vulnerable with me (I know these are big IFs, and I swear myself to utter confidentiality), I have a proposal for you.
The goal is for me to end up with a better understanding of the questions I need to ask (and to decide if a survey is really the right way to ask them), and for you to end up with some business catharsis, some outside perspective, and some amazing stickers.
Thanks in advance (and also feel free to share this with a friend if you think they might be a good person for me to talk to).