The Mom Test: How to Find Truth in Customer Conversations

Eliciting the truth from others is hard. Humans are not hardwired to tell you the truth about their thoughts, feelings, or perspective. They’re more likely to say things that make others feel good or hide their own unflattering thoughts. At worse, they might give a completely trivial answer because they don’t know or care what the truth is. “How does this dress look?” *eyes glued to phone* “It looks great!”. If the truth is so hard to come by, how can you get honest feedback from others about a product or idea?

In the book “The Mom Test”, author Rob Fitzpatrick describes the best way to find truth in conversations. The approach sounds simple, but surprisingly, is very difficult to follow in practice and involves thoughtful planning in advance of conversations. That’s because he recommends asking neutral, specific, and important questions in a casual way — a balance that’s as difficult to achieve as it sounds. Below, I’ve summarized some of Rob’s recommendations for achieving these goals in practice.

Neutral Questions: Avoiding Biased Data

When asked for their opinion, most people weigh “what do I really think?” against “what does this person want to hear?” If it’s easy to infer what the asker probably wants to hear, then we have a biased, non-neutral question. Neutral questions, on the other hand, are open-ended and focused on the other person’s life. “What did you do yesterday?” is a neutral question because its relatively safe to assume the asker doesn’t have a vested interest. Some biased questions include:

• “How does this dress look?” (regardless of the intention, this question is biased and sounds like it’s fishing for compliments)
• “What do you think of this idea?” (any variant of asking about your product is biased, because your ego is on the line when you reveal your idea. Since no one likes hurting feelings, 99% of the time you’ll get compliments)

Specific Questions: Avoiding Meaningless Generalities

If we ask a question the responder doesn’t care about, or is too general, we’ll get non-meaningful fluff. Fluff occurs when we ask for an opinion, or ask a “Would you ever” question, instead of asking about behaviour (Rob especially dislikes “Would/Could/Do you usually” type questions, as they all produce fluff). You can avoid fluff by asking about specific instances that occurred in the past. Some examples of bad questions are:

• “Which button do you like more?” (You can ask a designer this question, but not a regular person. You’ll likely get fluff. Most people wont notice, care, or know what their preferences are and will give an over-generalized answer they thought up on the spot.)
• “What features would you want from the product?” (Here, you will get a mixture of fluff and ideas. Fluff is the unthoughtful response given on the spot, because you asked. If however, you do get a detailed feature request that seems thoughtful, you should listen but not obey. Your job is to listen and dig deeper to understand the problem they’re trying to solve. Ask “Why? What would this allow you to do?”).

Facts and Commitments are the Goal

In The Mom Test, Rob emphasizes that we want to avoid compliments, fluff, and ideas. Instead, our goal should be to find facts about people’s lives, about the industry, and the world. You’ll also want commitments about future use. Here are examples he gives of good neutral and specific questions:

• How are you solving that problem right now?
• Can you walk me through how that works?
• How would X fit into your day?
• How often do you do X?
• When was the last time you did X?
• What makes your current experience so [awful/wonderful]?
• What would X allow you to do?

Important Questions: Answers that Move You Forward

“How old are you?” is neutral and specific, but, as you might have guessed, it’s also not important. You want to ask important questions that give you information you can act on.

Important questions should scare you. They’re the ones that could kill (or at least, critically change) your business. Important questions could reveal bad news that a business idea is likely to fail, or a potential customer is unlikely to buy, or a big obstacle needs to be surmounted. That’s critical information that allows you to change course before going too far down the wrong path. And that’s what you want — the true value and practicality of your idea.

Do They Care? Gauging the Importance of the Problem

If you’re early in your business, you may first need to de-risk whether the customer cares about your problem space. For example, if you’re working on a fitness app, you could open with “What are your biggest personal goals right now?” to understand if the person cares about fitness. If fitness is not on their top three goals, you could ask about how they rank health, but probing for any more detail would be a mistake. Zooming in too quickly on a super-specific aspect of the problem if this person is not your customer will produce misleading information.

If you can assume, based on industry research or reasonable logic, that all customers within a segment care about the problem and would pay for the solution, then you’re more likely to have product risk: Will it work, can I build it, can I grow it? Rob suggests that video games are pure product risk. People buy games, you just need to build the right game and test a prototype as soon as possible. Customer conversations are often better suited at addressing market risk: Is this a big problem? Do customers value the solution?

How to Ensure you’re asking Neutral, Specific, and Important questions

In advance of a customer conversations, Rob suggests preparing a list of your top three learning goals. You can segment them by user type: your customers, industry experts, etc. As you learn more, you should update the questions and refine them so you keep learning new information.

Pre-planning your questions makes it easier to broach the scary topics and to make sure you don’t get pulled into trivialities. While they don’t need to be perfect, they do need to address topics or insights that allow you to learn, act, and make decisions in your business.

In his book, Rob covers the practicalities of how to book, schedule, and run these conversations and how to keep them casual so they don’t feel like an interview. The Mom Test is a short, easy read that I’d highly recommend!