Michael Sippey is currently the VP of Product for Twitter and shared the following tips in an article I read recently. According to Sippey there is one important rule and three steps for gathering powerful customer feedback that can make all the difference for your product roadmap.

The No. 1 most important rule: You must speak to your customers every day.

Talk to at least one customer a day. Sippey got on the phone at least once a day to connect with the people who were using the products he managed, and sat in on support calls for a couple of hours each week. Why? It’s what we used to call “Market Validation” which is now more commonly referred to as “Customer Development”. It is the key to knowing your customers’ problems that you can solve.

The three key lessons he learned from his mentor, Frank Robinson:

Lesson One: Set up at least 30 meetings or you won’t have a good product.

Get customers on the phone and line up 30 meetings with the point people you will be selling to at each company. Talk to them about their problem and describe what you’ll potentially build to solve it. Do this before you spend time writing a single line of code or developing a product or service.

The simple formula for leading a customer feedback session:

5 minutes:

• Introductions

30 minutes:

• We think you have this problem.
• Do you have this problem?
• How are you solving this problem today? (Drill down to specifics – who is solving the problem, what is their process today, etc.)
• How much are you spending to solve this problem?
• How does this problem impact your business?

10 minutes:

• Here’s how we’re thinking of solving your problem…….

10 minutes:

• Feedback (“Did we hit a home run or a base hit?”)
• Next steps
  • Would you be willing to beta test our solution?
  • How much would you be willing to pay for a solution like ours?

Be ready to ride out an uncomfortable silence after this question. Let them be the first to respond.

The final discussion question:

• If you had our budget of 100 points (think of a pie chart), how would you allocate those resources for your team?

Sippey’s example from one customer was “Well, I’d spend about 10 points of your budget on this product that we talked about and 90 points of your budget fixing the bugs in your existing product.” Not what his team wanted to hear, but certainly valuable information from a customer that helped his team reallocate their resources where they were critically needed.

Another market validation experience Sippey had was marketing for a new digital jukebox. The idea was to sell it directly to bar owners. They would be able to make more money from their jukeboxes and life would be easy since they would not need to buy CDs. When they marketed to bar owners and asked “Do we have a problem to solve here?” they were told “No”.

Bar owners liked the idea, but they weren’t the buyers. Jukeboxes are generally owned and operated by third-party distributors. The product still went to market – but with the benefit of knowing who the actual buyers were from the conversations with the bar owners. The initial assumption about their target customer was completely wrong.

Lesson Two: Get in the van.

In today’s language “Get in the van” might be more appropriately “Get on Google Hangouts” or “Get on Facetime”. For Sippey it literally meant renting a passenger van and taking the lead engineer, Quality person, lead support person, and sales person to the meetings. Your key players need to be face-to-face with customers and hear them describe the problem you’re about to solve. The whole team should understand the three fundamental questions around building products and businesses: What problems are you solving? Who are you solving them for? How are you going to measure success?

Equally important to having the team at the meeting is getting the team together when the meeting is over to summarize.

Points to review include:

• How sophisticated was the business/customer you met with?
• How technically sophisticated were they?
• What were the top three problems that the customer identified for you to solve?
• Would they beta test for you?
• What would they pay?
• Did they identify other people for you to meet with?
• Any surprises?

Sippey points out that you get much better at your pitch after the first five meetings. After 10, you start to see patterns. After 20, you really understand segmentation of the market. After 30, you have a really good understanding of what it is that you actually need to go build.

If you don’t have a whole group of department heads to carpool with, that doesn’t mean you can skip this step. Sippey is working on a new product where the team is just himself and a co-founder. He uses Google Hangout sessions. As soon as he ends a session he spends time processing the takeaways. He transcribes everything and always debriefs with his co-founder, documenting what he learned and the things the customers care about.

Lesson Three: Focus on their problem, not selling your solution.

The things that customers care about should guide all of your requirements. Your success will depend on addressing their needs – not developing your slick concept. Go back and look at Sippey’s formula for the meeting. He spends more than half the time discussing the problem, and only 10 minutes on his proposed solution. This is purposeful.

When Sippey reflects on his mistakes in product planning and development, the common thread is spending too much time thinking about the feature and not enough time thinking about the problems they were trying to solve. We all love our solutions. We love our products, but that’s missing the point.

The point is that we should be focused on solving a problem for customers, and understanding their problems on a really fundamental level. Only then can we create a product that actually resonates with the market and develop a business that can scale beyond one product.

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How does this relate to your business? How will you determine the problem your customers need to have solved? How will you solve it? Food for thought –