Michael Margolis: Why bullseyes beat ICP personas in one day

1. 0:00 – 9:11

   Michael’s background

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky0:00

      (instrumental music) You have done 30 years of work, and iteration, and refinement. You're here just to tell us, "Here's the most important thing you need to know and here's how to do it, based on all that time I've spent." Help us understand, what is a bullseye customer?

   2. MMMichael Margolis0:09

      Every ambitious founder wants to build a product for everybody, but it doesn't start there. Amazon started just selling books or Facebook with just profiles for college students. So a bullseye customer is the very specific subset of your target market who initially is most likely to adopt your product or service.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky0:26

      Why this of all the things that you can focus on of a startup journey?

   4. MMMichael Margolis0:31

      It helps you get really deep in understanding who are those people and understanding what they need. It helps you prioritize the feedback you're getting and it just gets everybody, as a team, much more aligned on what are we doing and what are we doing first?

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky0:43

      So you have this bullseye customer sprint that your book describes. You basically give people a, a plan for how to figure this out in a day, which sounds like a dream.

   6. MMMichael Margolis0:52

      The basic formula, the way I think about it is, is five and three and one. So it's five bullseye customers and three very simple prototypes, and then we conduct those interviews in one day while the whole team is watching and debriefing and kind of thinking about what are the key big takeaways at the end of that.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07

      Where do you start?

   8. MMMichael Margolis1:08

      So step one is... (instrumental music)

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14

      Today my guest is Michael Margolis. Michael has been a UX researcher at Google Ventures for almost 15 years where he's worked with over 300 companies to help them get unstuck, move faster, and build something that people want. He helped develop the design sprint method made famous by the book Sprint, and more recently wrote a book called Learn More Faster: How to Find Your Bullseye Customer and Their Perfect Product, which essentially helps you identify and refine your ideal customer profile in a single day. I've said many times on this podcast that one of the biggest mistakes founders make, and product teams make, is not being very clear and very narrow with their initial target market. And I've been looking for a book and a guide to help people figure this out. This book is that. And also this book is completely free and available online as a PDF. Michael is not looking to sell books or drive leads to Google Ventures. He generally simply wants people to avoid pain and avoid wasting time building something that nobody needs. In this episode, we go step by step for how to identify your bullseye customer, how to interview people, how to recruit people, and how to refine your idea to build something that people actually want. This episode is both for founders and also for product teams at larger companies who want to avoid building something that nobody cares about. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Michael Margolis. (instrumental music) Michael, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

   10. MMMichael Margolis2:44

       Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky2:46

       So we're gonna be going really, really deep on how to very clearly and also just very quickly identify your bullseye customer, which some people refer to as ideal customer profile or ICP. There's differences there, we're gonna touch on that. But you wrote a whole book about this very specific topic. I have it right here. It's called Learn More Faster and the subtitle's important, How to Find Your Bullseye Customer and Find Their Perfect Product. And interestingly, this topic has actually come up a bunch on recent podcast episodes, so I've been like telling guests, "Hey, we're gonna have a whole podcast episode about this very specific topic," which I'm very excited about. So Michael, again, thank you for being here.

   12. MMMichael Margolis3:24

       Thank you a ton.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky3:26

       (instrumental music) This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at GetEppo.com/Lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's GetE-P-P-O.com/Lenny. (instrumental music) This episode is brought to you by Paragon, the developer platform for building native customer facing integrations with third party apps. Are native integrations on your product roadmap, whether it's to ingest context from your user's external data and documents, or to sync data and automate tasks across your user's other apps, integrations are mission critical for B2B software products today. But building these integrations in-house cost an average of three months of engineering according to the 2024 State of Integration Survey, which results in difficult roadmap trade-offs. This is why engineering teams at Copy.ai, AI21, and over 100 other B2B SaaS companies use Paragon so they can focus their efforts on core product features, not integrations. The result? They've shipped integrations seven times faster, all while avoiding the never-ending maintenance that comes with rolling your own integrations. Visit UseParagon.com/Lenny to see how Paragon can help you accelerate your product's integration roadmap today and get $1,000 in credit on their pro and enterprise plans. That's Use P-A-R-A-G-O-N.com. I wanna start with giving you a chance to just share the work that you have done over your career that this framework and process is rooted in, because it's based on a lot of hands-on work with startups and founders. So just...Talk about the work that you have done that has led you to this process and framework.

   14. MMMichael Margolis6:11

       Yeah, so I've been doing this kind of product in UX work for over 30 years. So the work that I'm gonna describe here is kind of a combination or the synthesis of about 30 plus years of that. And so there are a lot of different pieces that I've picked up along the way and recombined and adapted for this. So, started out studying anthropology. My first job was working in educational software as an editor, so it was kind of introduction to UX. My introduction to usability testing and went from there to, uh, working at a boutique product design invi- innovation, uh, studio. So basically consulting with big companies like Alcoa and DuPont and Ericsson. And so learning really deep ethnographic research techniques, very big, long, expensive projects, consulting projects. Um, and then from there I went to Walmart.com. So going from there to Walmart.com was really learning to take those techniques and compress them and accelerate them. Walmart is really all about execution, about scale, about, um, everyday low cost and speed. And so I had to really compress those techniques and make them much, much faster and learn to combine deep ethnographic discovery work with usability work and getting lots and lots of reps. From there, I went to Google. So I was embedded in the Gmail team early on in 2006. And so what we did there was then combining these also at scale, doing this kind of innovation at speed. Um, you can see kind of this trend of getting faster and faster. One of the things we did a lot there was the way I would do the research is with watch parties. So teams would be able to see it. Google had invested in lots of video conferencing, streaming from the labs, one way mirrors, a lot of things early on. So the teams were involved and they were seeing and watching this stuff. So a lot of those techniques I brought then to, uh, GV, to Google Ventures when I joined in 2010. So I was the first, uh, UX research partner in Venture Capital, um, at the time. Still, uh, I think maybe there's one other person in this role. And so it took a lot of those techniques and recombine them and have adapted them and experimented over the last 14 years working with hundreds of different kinds of startups. So we have a very broad variety of founders and product people that we're working with. So over the past 14 years where we've really experiment, gotten to experiment and gotten to work with them and be kind of a small piece of the journey that they're on to learn and, and, and answer these fundamental questions that they have about their products and their people.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky8:28

       How many companies/founders have you worked with this point? Just to give people a sense of the scale.

   16. MMMichael Margolis8:32

       It's hundreds. So I've conducted at this point over 300 hands-on research sprints with them. Um, so we also work with many, many others where we're just doing tons of office hours. And so it's everything from, just to give you a sense, it's anything from biotech to healthcare to security, food, I've worked with farmers. I, you know, it's- it's really all over the place.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky8:53

       What I love about this podcast and guests like you is you have done 30 years of work, uh, and iteration and refinement, and then you're here just to tell us, "Here's every... (laughs) Here's the most important thing you need to know. Here's how to do it based on all that time I've spent." Perfect. What R- what ROI we are providing here.

   18. MMMichael Margolis9:09

       (laughs)

2. 9:11 – 12:32

   Bullseye customers vs. ideal customer profiles (ICPs)

   1. MMMichael Margolis9:11

      .

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky9:11

      Okay. So your book and your process is about finding a bullseye customer. Tell- help us understand what is a bullseye customer and in particular how... Is there any difference from how most people think of the ICP, ideal customer profile?

   3. MMMichael Margolis9:24

      So a bullseye customer is the very specific subset of your target market who initially is most likely to adopt your product or service. And so compared to when we talk to founders about their ICP or the personas that they come with, this tends to be more specific even than they usually have gotten. Um, and the reason that this- this concept of bullseye customer has become so important to us is we've seen this as really key to accelerating teams. So everybody, every ambitious founder wants to build a product for everybody and we're- we're investors. So at GV we want them to be successful and to have these huge markets, but it doesn't start there. So to build it successfully, usually you have to be much more focused and much more specific. So you can look at lots of companies, right? Amazon started just selling books or Facebook was just profiles for college students, et cetera, et cetera. So helping founders be very specific about who are you gonna start with? Who is the- that very distinct group that is most likely initially to adopt, um, helps streamline a huge number of things. So it helps you prioritize what are you building. It helps you get really deep in understanding who are those people and understanding what they need. It helps you prioritize the feedback you're getting. You're often getting just a ton of input from investors, from friends and family if you're talking to them, from lots of people who kind of seem like they're in your target market, but it helps you kind of winnow away some of that stuff and be like, "Uh, which- which parts of this are important?" Like, we'll get to you. It's not that we're not going to eventually serve you, but initially here's where we're gonna focus and it just gets everybody a- as a team much more aligned on what are we doing and- and, uh, what are we doing first.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky11:10

      I love that the incentives as you just referred to of a- of a VC like Google Ventures are so aligned with help figure out what most will help a startup. Like I love that this is a good filter for what have you seen most cause trouble for a early stage startup and it's interesting that this is where you ended up going. So let me actually, let's spend a little more time here and just like why the bullseye customer/ICP is so important. Why is this the thing of all the things that you guys have seen along the early stage of a startup journey, you have decided this is where we need to focus and help people?

   5. MMMichael Margolis11:48

      Having them focus on the bullseye customer is a way to help them focus and prioritize what they're thinking about building, what the questions are that they're asking, and who it is that they need to target and build for. Um, and so all of those things, once we can help them narrow that down and decide who are we really focused on and who are we setting aside until later, it helps...... helps them prioritize their roadmap, it helps them prioritize the feedback that they're getting, and gets the whole team aligned, um, and moving together much faster.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky12:17

      Yeah. Makes sense. Basically everything trickles down from who the heck are you selling to, 'cause it's the pains you're solving for them, how do you find them, so I love that. Uh, and I totally agree. And again, this has come up a bunch on recent podcast episodes, just like how essential this is and how underappreciated

3. 12:32 – 20:56

   An overview of the bullseye customer sprint

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky12:32

      this often is. The other thing I love about what you're describing is you're focused on speed. Like I love that you're... As you move through your career, it's like, "How do we do this faster and faster?" And what especially love about your approach is it's a... You basically give people a, a plan for how to figure this out in a day, which sounds like a dream. What a dream come true. In a day, you can-

   2. MMMichael Margolis12:54

      Yeah.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky12:54

      ... change the trajectory of your startup by getting very clear on who you're selling to and your bullseye customer.

   4. MMMichael Margolis13:02

      Yeah.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky13:02

      Awesome. Okay, so let's start getting into it. So describe the sprint. So y- you have this bullseye customer sprint that your book describes. And by the way, this book is freely available. You could download the PDF. We're not trying to sell books here. This is just like, "Use this. You'll be, you'll be better off."

   6. MMMichael Margolis13:17

      Yeah. There's the... At learnmorefaster.com, there's the book, there's all kinds of resources and sprin- and, and templates, and yeah. Please-

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky13:23

      Great.

   8. MMMichael Margolis13:24

      ... grab it.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky13:24

      Okay, cool. So describe the sprint high level, h- how it's laid out and the kind of the core pieces of it.

   10. MMMichael Margolis13:30

       Yeah. So the, the basic formula, the way I think about it is, is five and three in one. So it's five bullseye customers and three very simple prototypes, and then we conduct those interviews in one day, um, while the whole team is watching and debriefing and kind of thinking about, "What are the key big takeaways, um, uh, at the end of that?" And so that's all, um, as a team.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky13:52

       And you mentioned a few of these kind of key ingredients, and I think things that people may be surprised about, specifically you don't need to talk to a ton of potential customers. You build a number of prototypes, which is interesting, versus like iterating on a single prototype, and there's a few other elements. So can you just share some of like the key insights, the key unique, uh, ingredients to this framework and sprint?

   12. MMMichael Margolis14:15

       Yeah. So one is bullseye customer. So we talked about that, right? So again, bullseye customer is that very specific subset of your target market who's initially most likely to adopt your product or service. So we want to recruit that group of people, and one of the reasons that we do that is if the whole team is in agreement, I, I have five people who match that, and everybody's like, "Yeah, yeah, those, those people, those are the ones that if they saw this, we're pretty sure like they'd be into this, they'd want this." Like we're all... We agree. And so that way after we do the interviews, depending on what the feedback is, they can't really dismiss it. Like, "Well, we all thought that." And it's fine if it didn't, uh, if they didn't want it, and, or they reacted in certain ways, that's what we wanted to learn. But up front, we were able to like identify and say, "Yes, yes, those really we think are the right people." That's our hypothesis. So first is five bullseye customers. The next part is about, um, qualitative interviews. So there are lots and lots of different kinds of research methods, but what I found over doing this for many years is that the biggest bang for your buck is doing these kind of deep qualitative interviews where I can dig in and understand people's stories, understand their motivations, understand past experiences. Why did you do this in the past? What have you done in the past? What's worked? What hasn't worked? And having the whole team watch that and understand and build that kind of empathy and understanding and hear those stories is very powerful. But then we do those in small batches. So rather than do an interview on Monday and then one on Wednesday and then a couple on Friday, we clump them. So ideally it's in that one day. So I bang out five interviews, one-hour interviews in one day while the whole team's watching. Um, sometimes we do it across two days, depending on time zones and things like that. But the idea is that they're clumped together. And the reason for that is if you do them in a clump like that, then the patterns are just much more obvious. You have to... At the end of the day, it's just really clear what were the big takeaways. It's not gonna answer every question that you ever had about your product or your customers, but the big things that you set out to answer, it's pretty clear. Like did it work? Did it not work? Which parts were good or bad? All these kinds of things. And the whole team has watched it, and so they have that sense. And that idea of just doing five of them, you hit what's called data saturation. And so this is the thing in qualitative research, um, where kind of the, the, the common version of this is everybody after four or five is like, "Oh, for God's sakes, please don't let me sit through any more of these." Like, "I get it. I'm hearing the same things over and over." Like, "I understand. Like let's, let's move on and do something different." Change the, change the customer, change the prototypes, whatever. So qualitative interviews in small clumps. And then we compare prototypes. Um, and so this kind of comes from that time I had at Walmart where I s- sort of see the whole world as a shopping process. And so there's something very valuable, just the way any of you have shopped for anything, right? You don't look at just one thing. If I showed you just one thing, you'd have some feedback and you'd have an opinion about it. Like, let's shop for a couch. I like the color. The s- cushions are uncomfortable. I like the fabric or not. And that's helpful and that's interesting to hear, but as you start looking at two or three, then you start having this different, uh, s- reference points. And, and when you're testing with customers, it's not up to them to come up with these different possibilities of what could be. And so if I'm presenting those, you're like, "Oh, that's interesting." So I like the way this one has cushions that are made out of down, but this other one is really interesting 'cause they deliver it. Oh, but this... I like this because it's a style that I like and they actually take away my old couch, right? So then I can like compare and contrast across these different possibilities, these different distinct value propositions. Um, and I'm not looking for a winner, but this comparison. The other big benefit of having multiple prototypes is it helps teams avoid getting too wed to one specific idea.And so you can get a little overcommitted. There's a risk that you get overcommitted to one idea, you're polishing that, you're working on it, you're too committed to that, and this pushes teams to think of new different possibilities, and you can be a little bit more neutral and a little bit more objective if you're not all so bought into one thing. So comparing prototypes becomes very powerful. And then the other thing is making this a team sport. So, um, the watch parties are a key example of this. So I'm conducting these interviews and the whole team is ... and I'm live streaming it, so the whole team is all watching it. These days, typically people are pretty distributed, so I'm doing it over Zoom and they're watching the live stream independently. And then, uh, one of my partners, so Kate Aronowitz or Vanessa Cho, amazing design partners I get to work with, are often facilitating kind of that back room. And so what they're doing is they're helping the team ... We have a structured process for taking notes, and then in between each interview they're debriefing. So I have kind of this spreadsheet that I use with like, these are the key things we wanted to get out of this, and so they're, they're going through and just capturing that, like what just happened in this interview, like let's make sure we have the high level. And at the end of the day, we have a way to kind of all capture, like what were our big takeaways, what happened? But the magic of all watching it and, and processing it and discussing it and debating it through the course of the day is that everybody is aligned. We've all seen it. I don't write a report. I haven't written a report in, I don't know, 10 years because we've ... At the end when we capture those big takeaways, that's ... The team has captured it, right? We end up, we do it through a Google Form, it shows up in the spreadsheet and we kind of discuss it, and then everybody's just like raring to go do the next thing, and everybody's aligned and there's this incredible amount of momentum from the team after that, and they're like, "Let's go do the next thing." Like, it's clear what we need to do and what we learned. And, and sometimes the next thing is do this again and adjust so we can build more confidence. Um, but the make it a team sport is just, is, uh, been this very powerful, um, tool for building consensus, building alignment. Especially as teams are growing and people are in a startup running in different directions, it's like a chance to come together and make sure like, oh, where are we? What are we doing?

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky20:25

       Awesome. That was really helpful. So just to summarize kind of the key elements of this approach, there's a bullseye customer concept of just like a very narrow, uh, people ?? ) most of who would most want this thing, and we'll talk more about that. Making it qualitative versus surveys or things like that. Uh, comparing prototypes and making a team sport. Okay, so we're gonna actually go into more detail of each of these steps just so folks can ... Basically what I'm hoping to do is they listen- you ... folks listening to this can do this tomorrow or next week. There's a little prep

4. 20:56 – 22:19

   When to use the bullseye customer sprint

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky20:56

      time. Before we get into each step, when do you recommend people do this? When in the stage of a journey can you do it, like, many times? Any just context there before we dive in.

   2. MMMichael Margolis21:05

      Um, you can do it many times. (laughs) Um, the key times to do it is at a high level, it's before hopefully you've invested a lot of time into building something, a lot of energy and, um, the team's energy and money, eh, that goes into the building. So it's usually before you build something. Maybe if you're expanding into a new group of customers, so you were killing it in the UK and now you're trying to get into the US market and that's different, or you worry it's different, or you're not sure, it's a good time to check. Um, or maybe you were selling to enterprise, you're doing very like white glove, high touch sales to enterprise and now you're, you're gonna shift down to maybe a different tier of customers and you're trying to set up some more of a self-serve kind of a, uh, sales motion. You need to understand that. Another common time is when you're selling but it's, like not ... something's not going quite as well as maybe you hoped it was going. You've already launched and you wanna, you wanna just kinda troubleshoot, like what's going on?

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky22:01

      Mm-hmm.

   4. MMMichael Margolis22:01

      Like we clearly ... This is ... We have some traction maybe, but it's not what we wanted, or we're getting that kind of very polite encouraging feedback, which is kind of a sounds good, but it's really no.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky22:13

      Yeah.

   6. MMMichael Margolis22:14

      Um, let's go dive in and find out. So those are kind of the big key things of the times

5. 22:19 – 23:48

   Step one: Agree on goals and key questions

   1. MMMichael Margolis22:19

      of when to do it.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky22:20

      Okay. Let's actually get into the steps. Uh, I believe there's six kinda core steps to the process.

   3. MMMichael Margolis22:26

      Okay. Yeah.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky22:27

      O- Okay. Cool. What's ... How ... Where do you start? What's step one?

   5. MMMichael Margolis22:29

      Yeah. So step one is what I do is I plan, um, about a 45-minute meeting with the team. Um, so again, it's really important to have that core team together and have this conversation about what are the key questions. Basically, what do you wish you could, you would know about your product, about your customers? What's, what's getting in the way? One of the most common ways that we ask this is basically what keeps you up at night. 'Cause founders and product people have ... There's a bazillion things that they're kind of bubbling in their head that they're worrying about, but that often gets them to kind of step back and be like, "Oh, what I'm really unsure is, you know, this." Right? What- what's gonna happen? Like will people ... How will people respond to this fundamental concept or this idea or how will they use it, right? And so that's kind of the, the ... I, I have a set of questions that I'll go through with them to, to help prompt and, and elicit what are those big things that you wish you knew, right? What, what would have to be true for this to succeed, right? Um, what are your, kind of your hypotheses and what are your assumptions about the product, about the customer? You know, who do you think this is or not and why? Uh, kind of what are those nagging debates on the team, those kinds of things that keep coming up over and over. You know, like, oh, for God's sakes, let's go get some information and answer the question, right? So it's some of these things. So we, we have that initial meeting to kind of detail like what do we need to answer?

6. 23:48 – 25:52

   Step two: Define your bullseye customer

   1. MMMichael Margolis23:48

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky23:48

      Awesome. And this informs other, I imagine, all the things you do next. And so in the PDF we'll link to 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?

   3. MMMichael Margolis24:01

      So step two is based on what you wanna learn, now let's figure out who is the bullseye customer that we need to talk to to answer that question. And, and 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, right? Somebody who's fresh to this, to see how do they get through or how do they understand what this is. Um, whereas if you're talking about something that's a new feature that's already in your product, then, you know, you'd be talking to existing customer. So that's an example where if I, if I understand what the questions are, I can kind of work backwards, um, to understand who do I need to talk to. And then based on that, once... 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 we, I pepper them with a lot of questions to figure out like exactly who is this bullseye customer that we've been talking about. And the reason this is... I love doing this as a, as a team is that what happens invariably is, 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?" Right? "So when you say you're building a delivery service for people who get, um, specialty medications delivered, specialty, um, prescription medications, like who exactly is that?" Right? It's not everybody, like, 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

7. 25:52 – 29:00

   The importance of a narrow target audience

   1. MMMichael Margolis25:52

      or these needs."

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky25:53

      And to follow that thread real quick, I imagine people's natural inclination is not to narrow it too much 'cause there's always like, "Why would we exclude this big market opportunity?" Like, why would it have to be like so narrow? Can you just speak a little bit to just like why it's so important to get very, very narrow. Someone once described Andy Johns on a newsletter post I just, I wrote once. He described it as it should feel comically narrow. Does that resonate?

   3. MMMichael Margolis26:18

      I love that. Yeah. I hadn't heard that phrase, but I love that. Yeah. Um, comically narrow is exactly what it is. And there are times that teams will just be like, "Oh, for God's sake, Margolis. Like just, like this is too much." The reason that I do that is I'm pushing them to identify a person who they all would agree this person... If, if we present this value prop that we think we're going to build and this problem we think we're solving, we are all convinced or, or it's our best guess, like it's fine if you're not sure, but we are pretty convinced that that's the person who will say, "Yeah, I'm in. Like I need this thing." And so it's a way... I'm kind of running an experiment, right? So it's a way to reduce variables for me, um, and then to get that specific, and then I recruit a bunch of the people who match that very particular characteristic, set of characteristics and they're still gonna... They're people so there's still some variation, but it's a way for us to, to test that, right?

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky27:19

      Well-

   5. MMMichael Margolis27:19

      And if there's too much variation, then what happens at the end of the day, you're like, "That was kind of a mush. Like, I don't... I'm not really sure what we learned." Like was it because it was just people had mixed feelings or was it because there was just not enough consistency? Like we had too many variables in there and like I don't know what we learned here.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky27:38

      So I think what's nice about this is this list, this initial list you're making of bullseye potential customers and attributes is not exactly going to be who you go after once you figure this out. It's you want to be very confident this group will absolutely love what you're presenting because you're trying to learn as much as you can from the people that most love it. And then from that you can get a little less narrow to actually pitch your product to.

   7. MMMichael Margolis28:02

      Right. And, and most often what happens is we do this, we define it our best, right? It's, it's our hypothesis. It's our best guess. The team is always very expert. I, I'm not, right? I'm always showing up as the noob in whatever this business is. And so the team is expert. And so this is very informed. It's not like we're guessing. But we go through this and by the time after we've done these interviews, the goal is to figure out was this right or not, or in what ways do we need to adjust? Like that's the... A big piece of the outcome is adjusting that definition of your bullseye customer. And often what happens is through the course of that bullseye customer sprint, you learn, oh, it turns out like there's actually this other distinguishing characteristic we didn't realize, or maybe, maybe it validates what we knew, but often we didn't quite realize that. Like this other thing is popping up where we're seeing heat from people. Like, oh, well that's interesting. Like let's dive in a little more.

8. 29:00 – 38:24

   An example of step two in action

   1. MMMichael Margolis29:00

      I mean, I can walk through an example if you want.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky29:01

      Yeah. That'd be awesome.

   3. MMMichael Margolis29:02

      Can you illustrate this?

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky29:03

      Yeah. Yeah. And I think even just like what are some examples of attributes, like what's the list of attributes you should be thinking about?

   5. MMMichael Margolis29:09

      Let me just give you an example. I think a lot of this stuff we're talking about, it starts to get a little abstract. So, um, I was working with a company that, um, was developing a, a new delivery service for people who have, uh, specialty prescriptions, medications. So these are the kinds of medications that are expensive and for very like, uh, specialized like chronic diseases. So this is not the kind of thing you're getting at Rite Aid. Um, and so, uh, and there's something kind of very special about this company and I can mention that afterwards, but the fundamental thing for them to figure out was before they can build out the logistics of this, they're trying to figure out like do we need to target something that is for delivery like ASAP, right? These are really important medications for very serious diseases. Is it like, "Oh my gosh, I need the next pill. Like get it to me like as fast as you can"? Or is it like, "Well, I can wait till a day or two, but I need it between like 2:00 and 2:15 PM," like if I knew that. And then who exactly is this bullseye customer? We want to know like what is... What's really the fundamental issue or problem that we're solving here? And so they wanted to, to answer those questions. And so we go through this process and so those are the key questions and then the, the customers that they're after, I know like, okay, well, it's not going to be everybody with specialty medications. And so as we start teasing through that and thinking about it, I want to think about...What are examples of other products that somebody has used that would make them more likely? So a good example there is, have you had other things delivered, food... Have you had, like gone through this kind of process before where you've used like Uber Eats? Like, 'cause if you have never had anything delivered like that before, that's like gonna be too many humps to get over to get the person to accept their medications coming by delivery, right? So they've probably used Uber Eats or- or something like that, and they've been on the medication for a certain amount of time. So it's somebody who this is kind of a chronic thing, it's not like a- a- a one-off acute situation. They needed to find people who had a certain kind of density. So was it, how rural were they living? How- how urban was it, because of the way they were gonna do the deliveries. Somebody who was responsible for their own medication, so we don't want somebody who's in some kind of a- a healthcare setting where somebody else is taking care of it, or maybe their spouse or partner is kind of managing their prescriptions. So these are the kinds of things that we're starting to look for. We... A- and another typical exclusion criteria is I don't want somebody who knows too much. So your- your core bullseye customer, I want somebody who's pretty typical. So in this case, like if I were to find out that somebody was a pharmacist or worked in healthcare, I'm like, "Oh, y- yeah, that's probably not like a typical customer." If I just have these five precious interview slots, I probably don't want that, so I'm gonna exclude those people.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky31:48

      Mm-hmm.

   7. MMMichael Margolis31:50

      So we went through and did this and then generated, um, these different prototypes to- to express kind of a- a range of different recipes of- of value props, of what this might be, right? So the range is things from, it can be delivered in an hour or, you know, or it can be delivered over a four-hour window, or it can be delivered, it'll take, you know, we'll get it there as soon as we can get it there, but we're not quite sure when it'll be coming. You just have to be home and available, right? These kinds of things. So went through this exercise and what- what rose to the surface as we were doing these is that there were certain customers for whom this was a much, much bigger issue, for whom they needed to be there and know when this thing was showing up. So it turned out having that distinct window, a narrow window of when, a predictable narrow window of when this was gonna arrive was much more important than ASAP. These are important medications, they're not waiting until like the last pill is gone, like that's not what's happening here, but knowing when it was arriving. And it turned out that the scenarios where that was critical was things like, it's a refrigerated medication. This can't be sitting out on my stoop, right? It's cold chain. Or there's for some reason an issue where I'm especially worried about theft or something, like because of what the medication is or where I'm living or weather. So there are these very particular scenarios. So then going back to this idea of the bullseye customer, you realize, "Oh wait, so it's a subset of customers who n- have like refrigerated meds." Like, that seems like a- a much higher value problem that we're solving here, and so we ended up running this again. So we, you know, I re-recruited with people who were, had a, that subset of kinds of medications and issues and also were dissatisfied with the status quo of their existing service and were not available to just kind of be around, right? So they, they were busy and whatever, and they needed this window, and so we rented again. We're like, "Oh yeah, there it is," right? So that second group of people, you just start building this confidence of- of- of in- in- in the match between what you're building, what the problem is you're solving, and who exactly you're building it for. And in that case you could see, oh yeah, that is the right bullseye. That's why there's this very narrow specific group who's much more likely to adopt this than like everybody who has specialty medications, 'cause the need is just much more acute.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky34:23

      I love this example. Uh, like intuitively it all just makes sense as you describe what you landed on, and like this is what people call product market fit what you're describing where somebody has a pain that you are solving and they need it badly. What do you, what does it look like when you find that group of like, what is it, what do you notice qualitatively just like this tells you this is it, this is the pull that people talk about when you say product market fit?

   9. MMMichael Margolis34:49

      I- I avoid the phrase product market fit with this stuff, and we can talk about that 'cause I think that's- that's kind of interesting. When you find this match, what happens in the qualitative interviews is that you can sense the energy and the excitement and the enthusiasm. It comes across. Um, especially as you do a bunch of these, you can tell there's a difference. And so that's what you're looking for is people who are then start like, "Wait, is this available? Can I, is this a thing? Like can I, can I sign up for this?" Like the, it's that kind of thing or they're- they're really leaning into it and you can just qualitatively, you can just see it. One of the things I thought was very interesting was, uh, I was recently speaking to a founder, um, whom I'm doing another round of this with a new set of concepts. We had done a project a while ago and actually killed the project, so through going through bullseye customer sprint with something that he was doing, we did three rounds of it and finally he was like, "Yeah, I, this is not, I'm gonna focus on the other part of my business." And he said, "We killed the project." And what he told me was two things that were really interesting to me. One was, "This saved me a huge amount of pain." Like we ran through this, like we had to do some work to the bullseye customer sprint, but the product that he was gonna build, it was hardware, it was software, it was this whole subscription model, like it was gonna be a big complicated thing to build. We had mocked up a bunch of prototypes and I'd used some free prototypes when we interviewed, like it killed the project. That was super valuable to him. He saved a huge amount of time and effort. The other thing that he's mentioned to me was that through going through the process, he learned what no looked like.So he, he could see, oh, like I'm getting kind of this neutral obj- like, positive encouraging feedback. And as we did this, he, he reali- it's like, "Oh, that's... They don't, they don't want this."

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky36:48

       Right, it's not that big of a deal to them.

   11. MMMichael Margolis36:50

       It's not that. And he, and it was by doing this and you see it enough times and he felt like that was one of the most valuable outcomes for him, is like, "Now I know what no looks like."

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky37:00

       That makes so much sense. Like, it feels like that's almost, you could al- almost argue that's the biggest value of this, is just s- waste, avoid wasting time building something nobody wants.

   13. MMMichael Margolis37:09

       Totally. And, and as a, as a researcher and as a VC, like if I can save a company and a founder and a product team, like from going down some path or too far down a path, that's huge for everybody, right? They have so much energy to do... Like, go do the other thing.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky37:27

       Yeah.

   15. MMMichael Margolis37:28

       Yeah.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky37:28

       And again, this is, uh, another reminder of why it's so important to go so narrow, because if you can't find anyone that is thrilled this exists, eh, y- like, you're, you're in trouble. This is your chance to find the most thrilled people, the most specifically pained. And if you can't find that, that's a problem.

   17. MMMichael Margolis37:44

       Yeah. In, in the same way, we define this bullseye and then when I go recruit and try to find them, if I can't find them, I usually take that as a sign of something also. I mean, like, I, I don't, I don't know if these people exist. And it could be sometimes like, well, we went too narrow. I'm like, "Okay, well let's, let's go back and, and like, we'll see which of these are, are flexible." You know, how do we soften some of these requirements? But if in fact, I just can't, like, I can't find these people, these people that you're imagining exist who want this thing, I, I'm not sure how you're gonna sell to them. Like, not that I'm like the final arbiter of like whether these people exist, but it's something you should go check.

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky38:23

       Yeah.

9. 38:24 – 43:28

   Narrowing attributes and exclusion criteria

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky38:24

      Okay, so to give people a little bit of a mi- m- framework of how to help them identify these narrow set of attributes, share some of, like, a list of attributes, uh, to think about to help them narrow. And how many, how many, like, narrowing attributes would you recommend? Is it like roughly heuristically, is it like three? Is it five? Is it seven?

   2. MMMichael Margolis38:46

      It probably gets down to, yeah, it's more like seven, rough- I mean, that's, you know, roughly. It depends.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky38:54

      Yeah.

   4. MMMichael Margolis38:55

      Um, what I, the way I think about it is kind of in these three groups. So there are inclusion criteria, there are exclusion criteria, and then there, what we found is very important are triggers. So by inclusion criteria, this is usually pretty easy 'cause the team is like, "Yeah, these are the people we want in the group," right? It's people who are taking specialty medications, um, you know, for these particular conditions. Like, we can build that out. The exclusion criteria I find are, is, is a place to dwell and help a company really think that through a bit more, to brainstorm that. Because as we talked about, it's harder for teams to set people aside, right? And so it's thinking about like, what are reasons why somebody maybe is not the best customer here? Not yet. And that could be things that we talked about was, maybe they have too much expert knowledge here. They're not really a typical person. That's not who I want to talk to. Maybe they're using a competitive product and they're already, like, s- locked into that. Like, I don't need to talk to them. Or they've had some other personal past experience that's gonna just make them not a good candidate. Like, I'm working on fintech and this person is in bankruptcy or has had identity stolen. Like, that's... I want to help them, but that's not like our first place to start. So these inclu- exclusion criteria are critical. And then, um, these triggers are specific events or situations that somebody's been in that makes them particularly ready or ripe for the solution. So sometimes the way that looks, sometimes the, the examples of that can be, um, you're selling a new cybersecurity, um, platform for something and it, there's a new CSO has come in. You know, there's a new sheriff in town and they're looking to revamp things and rethink, and so it's a time when somebody's open to considering new options. Or something's gone wrong, right? Somebody's in a situation where something's gone sideways and they, they need a new solution for that kind of thing. There's, um... Or we were working for an insurance tech company, um, and they were targeting millennials. So the idea was that people who are in this particular, um, demographic in this t- time of life, they would be building li- buying life insurance. And what we found was everybody was saying like, "Well, we, we should buy life. Yeah, yeah, it's one of those things, like, I should take care of that. Yeah, yeah, I should take care of that. Oh, yeah, I really need to get life insurance." But people who had, the trigger was, "Oh, you just had a baby?" Or, "You just got married?" And now people are like, "Oh, this is actually on my to-do list. Like, I, I need to, I need to go get this done. And so I'm in a completely different mindset." That's the person who now is your bullseye. Mm-hmm.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky41:36

      It's a, a, an em- an example of a trigger that somebody's like, "Oh, yeah, like, now I need to go do this thing." Awesome. Uh, I know in the jobs to be done framework, there's a term for that that's like the, like it kicks off the vector to get them to do something and like, I forget there's a term in that framework. So I have your book up, uh, in my hands right now, and I'm looking at the list of attributes and questions that you ask to help narrow down. So let me just read this 'cause I think it might be helpful just for people to hear, like, if I'm trying to narrow, how do I narrow them? So it's like, uh, are they new or an existing user of your product? What sector or industry are they in? What's the size of their organization? Have they used a competitive product? Is there disqualifying personal experiences, as you described? Is there dis- disqualifying professional experiences? What's their title, role, and responsibility? What's their geography? Are they the buyer? Are they the end, the end user? Are they distributed? How is their team organized? Their budget and income? Uh, their life and work settings? Trigger events, as you described?... uh, are they a VIP? Like what does, w- what does that mean real quick?

   6. MMMichael Margolis42:43

      Yeah. So, um, I was having this conversation yesterday with a company.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky42:46

      Oh, cool.

   8. MMMichael Margolis42:46

      I met with them and, and so what I asked them was, "What makes one customer or another more valuable to you?"

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky42:52

      Oh, okay. Yep.

   10. MMMichael Margolis42:53

       Yeah.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky42:54

       Got it. So it's like are they... Like, yeah, what, are they especially important?

   12. MMMichael Margolis42:59

       Yeah. Uh, is there something about... It's a, it was for them, it was this really interesting, again, kind of way to start thinking about distinguishing characters. Like, uh, yeah, what, what is a valuable customer to us? Like, we're, we're, they're at an early stage and they were attracting a lot of people in different kinds of personas, and they're trying to figure out what's the pattern here, like who matters more to you or not?

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky43:16

       Awesome. So you, basically you answer all these questions, you see which, uh, seven-ish attributes seem to be most right, and that's your bullseye customer that you start with.

   14. MMMichael Margolis43:26

       Right.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky43:26

       Awesome. Okay, uh,

10. 43:28 – 56:11

    Step three: Recruiting and compensating participants

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky43:28

       should we move on to the next step?

    2. MMMichael Margolis43:29

       Sure.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky43:30

       Let's do it. What comes next?

    4. MMMichael Margolis43:32

       So once I have that set of criteria and the team is all aligned and agreed on what that is, they're like, "Yeah, yeah, those are our people," so then I start thinking about how do I recruit them. So to do that for most people, unless I'm looking for something that's very, very specialized or, or hard to find, what I do is I create a screener questionnaire. So I translate these criteria into essentially a set of questions that will help me filter out people to know if people respond to this questionnaire, who are the bullseyes in there? And so part of the trick there is to write a questionnaire in a way that I'm not telegraphing the right answers, um, and so that it... I kind of am in the, in the control seat, so I can pick out and identify the people. So what I mean by that is if I were to s- to say, "I will pay $125 to anybody who, you know, is a product manager who listens to Lenny's podcast," and all of a sudden I'm gonna get a bazillion people who is like, "I will take that $125." I'm like, well, I don't know, do you actually listen to the podcast? Like, I don't know. Hopefully you do, everybody does. But if I can ask the question in a different way in terms of, um, you know, what are some of the podcasts you listen to, you know, what are the kinds of people you follow, these kinds of things, and then see like where does that show up? Or even ask it as an open-ended question, right, like where do you get, um, your, your most trusted information as a product manager? And start to see and then be able to pick those people out. Um, because what I wanted to do, one of the key things in those bullseye, um, criteria are that they're very concrete and very measurable things. It's not just, oh, this person is a, is an active shopper. Like, that's not very helpful to me 'cause I need to translate it into this questionnaire. So I need to know what is a active shopper? That means somebody who is purchasing certain kind of item, whatever we define, three times a week. Like, yeah, that's, that's active, right? So we have some very particular, very measurable concrete things, and so then I'm writing this questionnaire, um, and typically what I do is I rely pretty heavily actually on user interviews.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky45:33

       Mm-hmm.

    6. MMMichael Margolis45:33

       Um, Respondent is another one of these kind of services. Um, so I can post that questionnaire and get responses depending on what I'm looking for pretty fast. So I can recruit in a matter of three, four days typically, depending on what I'm looking for. Um, and I've been able to get surprisingly specific people, um, that way and so that, that, um, is a huge shortcut for me to be able to recruit that way.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky45:56

       This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all your customer interactions from Gong calls, to Zendesk tickets, to Twitter threads, to App Store reviews, and makes it available for analysis. It's trusted by leading product orgs like Canva, Notion, Loom, Linear, monday.com and Strava to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process, helping you build best-in-class products faster. What makes Interpret special is its ability to build and update customer-specific AI models that provide the most granular and accurate insights into your business, connect customer insights to revenue and operational data in your CRM or data warehouse to map the business impact of each customer need and prioritize confidently, and empower your entire team to easily take action on use cases like win-loss analysis, critical bug detection, and identifying drivers of churn with Interpret's AI assistant, Wisdom. Looking to automate your feedback loops and prioritize your roadmap with confidence like Notion, Canva, and Linear? Visit E-N-T-E-R-P-R-E-T.com/lenny to connect with the team and get two free months when you sign up for an annual plan. This is a limited time offer. That's interpret.com/lenny. Where do you find these people? How do you, how do you contact them? (laughs) Where are they?

    8. MMMichael Margolis47:11

       Uh, so through User Interviews. They w- work with a panel and they basically-

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky47:14

       Userinterviews.com?

    10. MMMichael Margolis47:15

        Yeah. Userinterviews.com.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky47:17

        Oh. Amazing. That's, uh, very easy. (laughs)

    12. MMMichael Margolis47:20

        Yeah. It's super easy.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky47:20

        So it's not like cold, it's not like LinkedIn cold email, cold things like Twitter DMs, things like that?

    14. MMMichael Margolis47:24

        No. I mean, in, in previous days I used to use Craigslist and I did a lot of some pretty crazy shit recru- recruiting people through Craigslist, um... I had people once, you know, meeting me at a hotel room to test a robot in a, uh, through Craigslist.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky47:38

        (laughs)

    16. MMMichael Margolis47:38

        But, um, no, User Interviews is much more legit and very fast, um-

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky47:42

        Amazing.

    18. MMMichael Margolis47:42

        ... and there are other services like this now-

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky47:44

        Yeah.

    20. MMMichael Margolis47:44

        ... um, but it's been one of the big changes that, that speeds a lot of this stuff up.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky47:48

        That's way too easy. And how many people do you reach out to to go through a screener roughly to get to five?

    22. MMMichael Margolis47:56

        Uh, so it will depend on, on what I post and how much response I get. So there are times, and it's, it has been somewhat hard for me to predict, there are times I do it and I'll just, they just, um, th- the responses just start rolling in. So there are times I get like 400 responses, basically download it into a spreadsheet and just start sifting through. As a reference, I have my criteria and then I'm just trying to find who matches, who doesn't.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky48:19

        Okay. So it goes to hundreds.

    24. MMMichael Margolis48:21

        It can be hundreds. Sometimes if I'm looking, like I did one recently, I was looking for a very particular group of AI engineers-

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky48:27

        Mm-hmm.

    26. MMMichael Margolis48:27

        ... that was, did not get 400 responses. That was a very hard one to find. That was an example where there was this very particular group that we were looking for and I was like, all right, do these exist? Like this thing that you're solving for, I don't know, I'm not su- this is pretty hard to find these people. I'm not sure they're existing.

    27. LRLenny Rachitsky48:42

        Yeah. And to your point, that's a sign. Like, I think there's a, uh, a nuance here of...If th-this group is hard, not only hard to find, but hard to reach and get them to talk to you at all, that's already, uh, gonna make your life hard building this company.

    28. MMMichael Margolis48:57

        Right. The caveat there is there are times when you need to talk to somebody who's just very hard to find or hard, they're not gonna be on user interviews. So like I've done a lot of work in the past with oncologists with Flatiron Health. So oncologists are not on user interviews. They don't care about my $125. Like, they're- they're busy doing something more important. And so if I'm doing that, I need to find a different way to approach that. So then I'm thinking about where do these people kind of cluster online or in person that I might be able to target them? There's certain forums, there's certain conferences, these kinds of things. Or I'm doing snowball recruiting. If you're building a product for oncologists, you hopefully probably have some contacts with oncologists and you can kind of have, work through their network, have, find one person, they can recommend another person. You still want to filter them and make sure that they are matching your core criteria, but th- it requires different kinds of techniques to find those kinds of folks. Professional associations.

    29. LRLenny Rachitsky49:55

        I almost want to go down that track 'cause I feel like there's a lot to learn there. But I wanna, I'm gonna stay focused and keep going through our steps. But let me take a quick tangent. So as you were talking, I actually wrote a post in the past on how to identify your ICP, and I put together, uh, a table of the very first ICP for some of the biggest B2B SaaS companies that I pulled up here. So let me just give a few examples of how narrow some of these companies were when they went out to sell their product. So let me do a few. Uh, so Gong, which is one of the biggest B2B SaaS companies, their first, uh, bullseye customer as they describe it, was... Look how narrow this is. Software company, their customers were, ideal customers were software companies selling in English, selling via video conferencing, selling software that cost 1,000 to $100,000. Uh, Linear, their focus was two to five person startups using GitHub and Google Auth at a founder-driven product company. And let's see, one more. Gusto was really funny. Companies with less than five employees in California who have no contractors.

    30. MMMichael Margolis51:05

        See, what's interesting to me about those is that I would go even deeper and more specific.
11. 56:11 – 1:01:10

    Step four: Creating effective prototypes

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky56:11

       Okay. Uh, what's the next step?

    2. MMMichael Margolis56:13

       So then the next step is to figure out your prototypes. And so what I want to do with those is I want to create, again, these three distinct examples, three distinct recipes of, um, the possible features and, um, distinct variables that we want to present in these, in these, um, interviews. And so, as I said before, ideally, I can find product- uh, competitor's products and use those as free prototypes. Like, that, I love doing that. It's, it's surprising to me that often people don't do more of this, and I think that there's sometimes a sense that like it's cheating or they're worried they're gonna copy it or something. I'm like, well, whatever. If you haven't studied your competitor's product, and not just gone through it but, like, seen how people respond to them, you're just missing something, right? So what we do is work out, um, the details of, of the variables that we're gonna spread across these prototypes. So there are certain features and then certain variables across that I, I kind of imagine spread across, uh, these different things. So, um, for example, we were talking about delivery of specialty medications. So imagine, um, one of the attributes is, uh, who's delivering it? So maybe one version is a pharmacist is gonna come, one is a, um, uh, it's just a, a delivery, um, courier guy, and then another one, in this case actually it was a drone company, so a drone is dropping this thing off. And so we could talk more about what it was like to test that. But there are different variables here. Um, the other option is, say, um, the size of the window, of the delivery window, right? So this will... It'll come in two days, but you can narrow down in a 15-minute window. This one is like, "As soon as possible, you'll just have to be home to wait," this kind of thing. So we're s- we're developing this range and then creating these prototypes that are very simple. They're just PDFs really with very flat... There's no functionality. In fact, a lot of it is really a, a writing exercise to articulate what's the distinct value prop and what's the brand promise and the problem you're solving for each of these prototypes. Um, so you want to make it look as real as possible. So it looks like a homepage for the product. So you're s- right, it's a box around this thing. So you don't have to build anything, you're just describing it and putting whatever you need to illustrate and convey that. But they need to stand alone. I'm not gonna pitch them or narrate to them, and just create those so that I can present those three distinct recipes.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky58:42

       And these are... These calls are usually over Zoom in your experience at this point? Cool. So these are kind of just like, uh, in Figma or exported just images you're showing people?

    4. MMMichael Margolis58:52

       Exactly right.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky58:52

       Sweet. Uh, more and more on this podcast, people are sharing ways, uh, just how AI is making prototypes, like actual product prototypes so much easier to create. So I imagine people are gonna move to, like, functional prototypes more and more.

    6. MMMichael Margolis59:06

       Yeah, they may. I, I think the thing that's important is to not get distracted by that. So here, there is a... The benefit to keeping it simple is that you're not too wed and too committed to anything.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky59:20

       Mm-hmm.

    8. MMMichael Margolis59:20

       So keep it... Build only as much as you actually need to answer the question you're trying to answer.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky59:27

       That's a, that's a great point. So it's like even if you can create an awesome prototype, don't do that probably, just keep it flat design.

    10. MMMichael Margolis59:34

        Awesome means very crisply describing the distinctive value proposition and problem you're solving in a way that people get it. They're like, "Oh, I understand what this one is and then I can compare it to these other ones, and I understand what the features are and I can have that conversation." It's about the value prop. It's about making sure that they understand what it is. It's not this kind of marketing speak where you're like, "Wait, what?" You just have to be super blunt. "This is kind of what it is and why this is awesome and why this one is awesome," and then they're shopping.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:07

        I love that. So basically, as you said, it's a writing exercise. It's like the headline, the positioning seems to be the most important part-

    12. MMMichael Margolis1:00:14

        Right.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:14

        ... now versus, like, the design of it.

    14. MMMichael Margolis1:00:17

        Right.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:17

        Awesome.

    16. MMMichael Margolis1:00:18

        And, and I, I design them enough that they look different-

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:21

        Mm-hmm.

    18. MMMichael Margolis1:00:21

        ... from each other. So it's not version A, version B, version C, because in the course of the conversation with all the observers, I want it to be clear which prototype somebody is talking about. So-

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:33

        Awesome.

    20. MMMichael Margolis1:00:34

        ... the green one versus the blue one versus the red one, right? So then when the observers can keep track... Otherwise you're like, "Wait, what? Which one are they talking about? I don't know what's happening."

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:42

        Awesome. Okay, anything else that is important to note on the prototype step?

    22. MMMichael Margolis1:00:49

        Um, proofread it carefully.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:51

        (laughs) Okay.

    24. MMMichael Margolis1:00:51

        People get stuck on errors-

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:53

        Interesting. Yeah, yeah.

    26. MMMichael Margolis1:00:53

        ... and then it undermines the validity and the credibility of the prototype.So proofread it and make sure, because otherwise people are like, "Oh, that's not right." Like, "Yeah, I know."

    27. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:03

        (laughs) That's such a good tip.

    28. MMMichael Margolis1:01:04

        (laughs)

    29. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:05

        Uh, so just have someone else read it, like someone else that hasn't been working on it, just to make sure there's nothing wrong.

    30. MMMichael Margolis1:01:08

        Just check them carefully.

12. 1:01:10 – 1:08:49

    Step five: Drafting your interview guide

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:10

       Cool. Uh, okay. So what's the next step? So you have these prototypes. You've got the schedules interviewed. Uh...

    2. MMMichael Margolis1:01:15

       Right. So you have people come in.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:17

       Yeah.

    4. MMMichael Margolis1:01:17

       So, uh, you're scheduled, so people are showing up on Thursday. We're gonna start doing interviews, so you have to draft your interview guide. And so what these interviews are gonna look like, in, in the course of that watch party, it's, um, five one-hour interviews. Each interview is a two-part interview. So the first part of the interview is this discovery interview, where I'm asking people about their existing and past experiences and attitudes and opinions about whatever this part of their life is. How did you previously get your medications delivered? What worked? What didn't work? Tell me about a time when it totally went sideways. Tell me about a time it worked perfectly. So we go through that and have that. About halfway through that interview, I shift to comparing and contrasting these prototypes. So the comparing and contrasting is I'm presenting each prototype, and people are kind of responding to that and, like, telling me what they see, what this is. And then they're responding to what each of these prototypes says, what i- what they like, what they don't like, what's important, what's not important. Some parts that they don't comment on is fine. Like, if that just doesn't even register, that's good to know. And then I'm having them compare and contrast. So by having three different prototypes, it's enough for them to then sort of step back and not pick a winner, but be able to say like, "Oh, I like this aspect of this one. I like the fact that this one's being delivered by a pharmacist, but I really prefer that this other one is a 15-minute window," for example. And so they're kind of teasing out, what are the, the best pieces of each of these? And that's really what I'm looking for through the course of this conversation, is I want to, like, grab the best bits and pieces, the best Lego pieces, so I can then go construct the ideal version next, right? 'Cause none of these, again, I'm not gonna build probably any one of those. I'm looking for the best pieces. And through the arc of that conversation, by doing the first half, where I've had the discovery conversation, it gives me a huge amount of context to understand their feedback about the prototypes. Because there will be times when they'll, uh, say things or tell us something, and because we heard the first part, th- s- they'll tell us something about the prototype, and because of what we heard in the first part, we'll understand why. Like, "Oh, it's 'cause they had that other experience in the past where that thing went totally haywire when something like that happened, and they don't have trust in that." Be like, "And now I know why that's the si- situation." And it's very, very, very common that when teams are watching this, they're always like, "For gri- for Christ's sake, Margolis, would you just, like, get to the prototypes? Like, why are you just talking to them about all this other stuff, and you're just, like, chitchatting with them? Like, ugh. Show them prototypes." And so we always have to remind people, like, "No, this is really important." Partly, you're also just learning a lot. You hear those stories, which is what you wanna get, but it provides a lot of context for understanding their reaction to the, to the prototypes.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:04

       I love all that context that you shared. This is the step, I think, where everyone gets kind of scared or afraid or thinking they're doing this wrong, they're biasing people. So in the book that we'll link to, you give them a guide for how to write out this whole interview guide. I have the book here, and I'm just, like, looking at an example where it's, like, uh, like, it's like, there's a warmup, there's the introduction, and then it's like, your current experience with this problem, the cost. It depends on the problem space. But I love, like, in the warmup, big smile. "Hi. Thanks for helping me with this. Uh, thanks for signing the NDA. Uh, where, uh... I'm dialing in from Seattle. Where have I reached you?" And then it's like, "How's the weather where you are?" So it's all these, like, nice little questions you can ask to keep it light. And then it's, and then just a few examples of questions you, like, y- you ask in this example where it's about medication. It's like, "Do you currently have prescription medication that you have to order and refill? How many? If I may ask, what are they? And when was the last time you filled a prescription?" And on and on. So it's kind of this whole set of questions just to help understand the, the, the worldview around this problem and the-

    6. MMMichael Margolis1:05:05

       Yeah.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:05

       ... the context around it.

    8. MMMichael Margolis1:05:07

       And the way that I think about it is that I'm building an arc in that conversation. And so it starts, like you said, as just chitchat about the weather and where you are and whatever. Like, do I care about what the weather? Like, I don't care what the weather is like. But what I'm trying to do is build some rapport fast with somebody. Um, again, it, it gets back to this idea of humble inquiry, where I'm trying to build a connection with the person. I'm trying to make them feel comfortable, um, because they usually are showing up. They're like, they wanna make you happy, but they don't really n- understand. Like, it's awkward. It's super weird. Like, there's this, I'm gonna talk to this weird dude. He's paying me to tell him, like, what turns out to be a bunch of personal stuff, and we're never gonna talk again. But like, am I doing a good job? Like, it's, it's, it's odd. And so I'm trying to put them at ease, and I'm trying to encourage them and make it clear, like, they're the expert in this situation, but they don't really know what's gonna happen. And so I'm building this arc slowly, hopefully not too slowly, to get them talking. So one of the most important things is when you're doing that interview, smile. You have to start with a big smile. Even if you're on the phone, it totally changes the way your voice sounds. And what I'm often looking for in those first few minutes is, are they smiling back? Can I get the person to smile back at me? And then I'm like, "Okay, we're good." Like, I'm getting them responsive and getting them talking.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:28

       I love that tip. And again, I think a lot of people that aren't re- researchers are just gonna, like, "Uh, I don't know. I'm, like, I'm not... This feels weird." Something that should be reassuring is that mostly you're just asking questions, right? Like, it's just, it's on them. Like, you're just asking questions, and then your job is not to sh- not to say anything almost. Just keep asking questions.

    10. MMMichael Margolis1:06:49

        Yeah. And to be really genuinely curious. Like, I think that's really... Again, it's to this mindset, this difference between selling. I'm, I have to genuinely (laughs) want to understand and see the world and my product through their eyes.And you're gonna hear stuff that is wrong, you know doesn't make sense or you're like, "That's weird. What is that?" And you just have to not dismiss that but dig in and try to understand, well, like, why? Why do you think that? And, um, what gives you that impression? That's what you're trying to learn, right? And, uh, just smile. Genuine curiosity and focus on that person in front of you is, will get you pretty far.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:30

        Any other tips on this step for folks that are like, "Okay, I'm gonna try this myself. I'm gonna stop, start interviewing folks." Any other tips? Anything else important you think is, um, worth mentioning?

    12. MMMichael Margolis1:07:40

        Yeah. Practice, it makes a difference. It's- it's a hard skill. It seems like, oh, everybody talks to everybody. But it, it's different. When I do these, and I've done, uh, interviewed thousands of people at this point, um, I have a different character mode that I put my head in. And so I literally, before I start an interview, I stop, I take a deep breath, and I kind of put on that smile and I put on my listener character where I, I am embodying these things, this extreme curiosity, this focus on the person, um, this engagement, which is quite different from my normal kind of more cynical, skeptical, you know, personality to the point where if my kids like have overheard like, "Who is that dude?" 'Cause that does not sound like dad, whoever is talking to that person.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:32

        Mm-hmm.

    14. MMMichael Margolis1:08:33

        Um, but it's a different mode in my head when I'm in interviewer mode. And so you- you might, maybe that's just me, but you- you might develop kind of that other character, especially if you're a founder used to pitching, you can have your- your listener character.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:48

        Okay. That was an awesome tip.

13. 1:08:49 – 1:19:40

    Step six: The watch party method

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:49

       Okay. And so I think then the next step is the final step which is the watch party where you actually do this.

    2. MMMichael Margolis1:08:54

       Yeah. So this is awesome. So this is like our, uh, it's like our magic hack for- for banging all this stuff together, right? So everything is coming together in this watch party. So in this watch party, we have again, I'm- I'm conducting the interview, so I'm- I'm off on Zoom, one-on-one conducting these interviews. In the watch party, um, Vanessa Cho, Kate Aronowitz, my amazing design partners often are facilitating the group there. And so what they're having the team do is take notes and do, go through these debrief sessions in between each interview. And so we have a very particular way that we structure all of that. And it's very important that the team is all in there and watching and doing this together. So I'm in Zoom, I have it set up so it's live streaming to them, so they're not in my Zoom. It's not like 20 of us with a bunch of heads watching the person, right? It's really important to me that it's just me and the- and the customer that I'm talking to directly. So they're all st- live streaming it. Um, they're on, they're taking notes, so they're in a Google Doc or Notion or doc or whatever you want collaboratively doing that, and so people are assigned roles, so take turns taking notes 'cause it's pretty intense. We have people manually taking notes and not using AI to take notes. Um, the reason for this is what we've found is we want people to lean in to this experience. We want you to focus and engage and pay a lot of attention. And if you know somebody else is taking notes, it tends to m- maybe make you lean out a little bit or maybe you check your Slack or you're looking at email or something. And so it's about keeping you really engaged and working. So it's a, it's a, it's a working watch party. So we take turns, we've assigned roles so people know, okay, interview two, Lenny and Margolis are gonna be taking notes and wh- that's fine. And then there's also a Slack channel usually in the background 'cause there's other chatter like, "Wait, what did they say? They were talking about this, they mentioned that product. Has anybody heard of that?" So that's really important kind of going in the background. Vanessa or Kate also monitors that so it's a, that's the way that somebody can pass me notes to answer, uh, to ask specific other questions. I can't, I can't do the interview and track the notes and Slack, like my brain doesn't, can't handle that. So they're in there and then I have a, a chat window open just with Kate or Vanessa, and so they'll pop me questions as they come up. They, we usually ask teams to be pretty judicious about that because if I get a question like that, it's, could go a certain way as you know, right? (laughs) You ask a question, you don't know where it's gonna go. Um, and so if it's really important or you see something where clearly I've misunderstood something, I clarify it. So they're taking notes. This debrief is in a spreadsheet that I've set up so that there are key things that we wanted to learn, and so those are specified in that spreadsheet for each inter- e- each study that I'm doing. I'm like, "These were the key things." And so those are not the questions that I'm asking the inter- in the interview, but they're the things, again, these key questions that we wanted to learn, which is different from what I'm asking. And so we're just capturing. In that half hour, the decider, whoever is kind of owns the product or the founder is leading that, right? 'Cause they're the- the decider and they're- they're leading, getting input from everybody and filling in and answering those questions. So then you can imagine you have that first column is that set of questions and then, you know, so those are the rows or the questions and then each participant is another column. So we're doing participant one, we're capturing it, after the second one. So, so we end up with the detailed notes. We have the recording of my interview, like those are the thickest, deepest levels of this. Then we're s- we're distilling it down into this debrief sheet for each one, and so then you have a spreadsheet that's like the high-level stuff. You can look across it at the end of the day. At the very last thing at the end of the day after the final debrief, we do a big takeaways form. So I create a Google Form and it just, it basically like, "How many interviews did you watch?" just to check. And then, um, "What's your first big takeaway, second, third? How would you adjust your definition of the bullseye customer here? And kind of what do you think are the next steps or what are your big questions, open questions and concerns?" And so each person then takes five, 10 minutes independently, separately, individually, quietly, I mean, just everybody mutes their video and fills that out.And it's a way to grab a snapshot from the whole team of like, what did we really learn? You know, this was the important things that we had set out to do, and what did we learn? And, and it captures that. So then again, that fills out a big spreadsheet and we then review that. The, the decider kind of goes through it and talks about what are the key patterns, what are the things that we've learned here as a team? And there's, there's this remarkable amount usually of consensus, of alignment about like what is this? What do we need to do next? What I love seeing is that quite frankly, one of the most common things across all of these businesses, all these sites, uh, uh, all these, all these, um, studies is that one of the things that people say we need to do next is more research. And so people, it just, even though these are all teams who've said, like, "We talk to our customers all the time." We go through this and they're always like, "Oh, yeah, this looks really different than what we were doing. And we didn't know this stuff." One of the other things I want to mention is we do this thing before the watch party where we get everybody to predict what they think they're gonna learn.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:13

       Oh, I love that.

    4. MMMichael Margolis1:14:15

       And this is really valuable for a bunch of different reasons. So it's a way to capture a snapshot before we do the interviews of, like, what do you actually think is gonna happen? And, and, and we have to push people to be specific. It's not, "Oh, we'll find out how they, what they think of our concept." Like yeah, yeah. I know we're gonna learn that, but like what do you actually think is gonna be the, the outcome? People will prefer, you know, ASAP delivery of their medications and, you know, like whatever, what, like what is your hypothesis of what's gonna happen here? Um, and, and that helps me do a couple things. One is it helps me make sure that I'm tailoring the interview guide and everything the right way, 'cause it's a, it's another check. Like am I f- am I understanding what you want to get out of this? It's a snapshot of what we wanted to learn. And then what happens is after we go through the big takeaways, at the end of the whole study, it's very valuable to go back and say, "How does what we learned compare to what you thought?" Because there's this, any researchers out there listening to this will be familiar with this idea, there's this hindsight bias that happens, which is as you've gone through the process, it's very difficult to remember what you didn't al- you know, that you didn't already know this. Right? And so after you've gone through a research study, very often people are like, "Well that, we, that seems obvious. We kind of knew that that was gonna happen." You're like, "No, no." Like let's look back at a day ago what we all thought. And we actually have, have learned a lot, which is awesome. Like that's the goal. We've learned it an enormous amount. And it's not to catch anybody out, right? But it's, it's really valuable to have this snapshot and to quite frankly just help show the value of the research. Like we learned things. Or maybe we didn't. Maybe you were all right, which is awesome. And now we know and we can move forward twice as fast.

Episode duration: 1:29:38