Michael Margolis: recommendation

Transcript context

…Awesome. And this informs other... I imagine, all the things you do next. And so in the PDF [inaudible 00:23:55] too, in the show notes, you can see all these questions and run through them yourself. Okay, cool. So that's step one. What's step two? So step two is, based on what you want to learn, now let's figure out who is the bullseye customer that we need to talk to to answer that question. It all starts with those key questions that you have, because if the question is about, let's say, big questions about onboarding, well, if the questions are about onboarding flow, then you're going to want to talk to new customers, somebody who's fresh to this to see, how do they get through or how do they understand what this is? Whereas if you're talking about something that's a new feature that's already in your product, then you'd be talking to existing customers. So that's an example where if I understand what the questions are, I can kind of work backwards to understand, who do I need to talk to? And then based on that, what I do is run what I call a bullseye exercise. So it's, again, essentially another kind of interview. Get the team together, and I pepper them with a lot of questions to figure out exactly who is this bullseye customer that we've been talking about. And the reason I love doing this as a team is that what happens invariably is having that conversation before we've even gotten to any interviews is super clarifying for a team, because they tend to get a shorthand about who their customers are. And this is a way... And I just keep asking questions, like, "Well, what do you mean by that? So when you say you're building a delivery service for people who get specialty medications delivered, specialty prescription medications, who exactly is that? It's not everybody." And so we start narrowing it down. So they start having those conversations, debates, arguments about who it is, and just having that is really clarifying for the team. Like, "Oh, well, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, I guess it's true. Maybe it's not everybody who has that. It's only people who have this kind of condition or this set of conditions or these needs." And to follow that thread real quick, I imagine people's natural inclination is not to narrow it too much, because there's always like, "Why would we exclude this big market opportunity? Why would it have to be so narrow?" Can you just speak a little bit to just why it's so important to get very, very narrow? Andy Johns, on a newsletter post I wrote once, he described it as, "It should feel comically narrow." Does that resonate?…

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