Step-by-Step Instructions

Break out your Post-It notes!

Problems it Solves

1. Making sense of your interviews

You've just finished interviewing customers and have pages and pages of notes. Now it's time to make sense of those notes, and use them to understand your customers at an intimate level.

2. Build the foundation for your first Offer Test

1. Your customers' problems
2. The emotions those problems evoke in your customers
3. The channels they are using to find new solutions
4. The deficiencies with their current solution

You've Interviewed Your Customers, Now What?

So you've got your interview notes, and now it's time to make sense of them. How do you do that?

Post-It Notes®.

In this exercise, there's no worksheet. Instead, you'll use either old-school paper Post-Its®, or new school electronic post-its, to do build an affinity diagram.

In this exercise, I will be using an example from customer interviews I did in order to create a workshop on "Pricing a Product" for the Lean Startup Conference. I realized when I started outlining the workshop that I knew what I wanted to teach, but I did not know what attendees (i.e. my customers) wanted to learn - so I interviewed them.

I wanted to answer the question:

What is the biggest challenge founders face when pricing a product?

Step 1

Highlight the nuggets in your notes.

What is a nugget? A nugget is a salient piece of information, a critical concept, that gives you insight into what your customers are struggling with, how they are managing, and the feelings they are experiencing.

Take the notes from one interview. Specifically, you will be looking for anything in your notes that references:

• Problems: specific words, phrases or jargon your customer used to describe his or her problem, challenges or annoyances.
• Emotions: fears, frustrations and motivating factors associated with the problem and their search for a solution.
• Channels: references to where they found their current solution or where they are currently looking.
• Deficiencies: aspects of their current solution that are not working or any wish they have for a new solution.

In my example, I found out that the way my first interviewee described his problem was that he was "wasting time." Emotionally, he was "concerned" and unsure (he used the term "don't know" a lot).

Pro Tip: If you'll be analyzing more than 10 interviews, you may wish to analyze your interviews in chunks of 5 at a time. Analyzing more than 10 interviews at once not only requires a giant wall, it can also get overwhelming.

To analyze your interviews in chunks, follow steps 1-5 with your first set of 5 interviews. Then you'll repeat the process with the second set of 5 interviews, but this time you'll use the results of your first set of interviews as your starting point. Repeat this process until you've analyzed all of your interviews.

(Note: if this the above doesn't make sense, don't worry, it will once you read the rest of the steps :)

Step 2

Step 3

Repeat Steps 1 and 2 with a second interview, this time using a different color Post-It.

Different color Post-Its® are nice, but aren't strictly required.

Repeat this steps for each of your interviews.

Step 4

As you add new nuggets from new interviews, begin to group similar ideas or themes together.

In my example, I started to see a few people saying they "didn't know how" to approach pricing, so I grouped those Post-Its® together.

I also saw that multiple interviewees mentioned that pricing was "not a priority" - so I grouped those together as well.

Keep in mind that as you add more interviews, your groups may morph and change. This is why you want to use Post-Its: they are easy to move and rearrange. Allow your groups to be fluid as you learn more and see more connections.

Step 5

Once you have extracted the nuggets from multiple interviews, your Post-Its® space will likely be a mess.

For this step, clear out any Post-Its® representing ideas or themes that were only mentioned once. Keep only themes that were mentioned by 2 or more customers.

Pro Tip: If you are analyzing your interviews in chunks of 5 as suggested above, you can now use these groups as starting points for analyzing your next set of interviews. You already have established "clouds" of Post-Its®. See if similar nuggets continue to appear in the next group.

Step 6

Next, sort the groups remaining by popularity. Rearrange your Post-It® groups so that you have those ideas and themes that were mentioned most, first.

In my example, I have some concepts that were mentioned by four different people, others that were mentioned by three, and, finally, the concepts mentioned by just two people.

What's Next

You should now have before you multiple clouds of Post-Its® that quickly and clearly show you your customers'...

• Biggest problems
• Strongest emotions
• Most accessible channels
• Greatest deficiencies with their current solutions

This is the voice of your early adopters. They have told you exactly what they need and where they go to find it.

Now that you have analyzed your interviews, you are ready to turn your learnings into actionable steps.

In the next exercise, you will use this information to create the foundation for your marketing strategy, and your solution design.