when you meet the customers.....

In the process of Customer Driven Development(very well described in "The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank"), you go and meet a lot of "customers" to validate your various hypothesis. I have done some amount of that work and This is a list of few things that I don't want to forget when I do it next (some of them are trivial but we *do* miss them)...

1. Have your gadgets, all the devices to take audio/video recordings or pictures, ready. Before turning them on, ask the person if he is comfortable with it.

2. Thank the person for his time and make him comfortable by asking him his day to day activities in business and his role.

3. Tell him why you are there in the first place and what is in it for him.

4. Have it very clear in the mind(you may note them down on paper also) what are the questions you want answered before this meeting is over.

5. If you are getting feedback on a product that you've developed, let them *use* it.. watch their expressions, listen to them and see if it makes sense to them. Do not *tell* them why/how something is good or bad, you're their to know their thoughts and not to *sell* the product to them. The objective for you to speak as little possible and make the other person speak(relevant things) as much possible.

6. Many a times, It happens that the person is saying all the good things about what you have(just because he wants to be good to you) or there are times when you just want to get a sense of pricing for your product. You ask them how much are they willing to pay for it, mostly the answer will be.. "I don't know, Once I use it then I may be able to think of a price." and you say, "Ok, what if it was 1 million $(or some random out of the world price).. would you buy it?".. And its very likely(trust me, I have tried it several times) that the person will say something like, "Oh man, this should not cost more than 2000 $." and you have it. I read this trick in the book mentioned in the start.

7. Its usually a good idea to do one such meeting in a day, so you have time to think, consolidate your findings and store this data somewhere.