Asking Important Questions
A chapter summary from The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.
The chapter teaches the operational mechanics of the right questions. Each is designed to elicit information about past behavior and current pain rather than future hypotheticals or opinions about ideas.
Walk me through the last time this happened. The question forces the customer into a specific recollection rather than a generic statement. The recollection contains the operational details — how the customer actually behaved, what they actually did, what frustrations they actually encountered — that no amount of generic discussion would have surfaced.
What's the hardest part about [activity]? The question shifts focus from the founder's proposed solution to the customer's actual experience of the problem. The hardest part is operationally meaningful in a way that please-rate-this-idea is not. The hardest part is also the part that any successful solution must specifically address.
How are you handling it now? The question reveals whether the problem is being actively worked around — which is the only credible evidence that it is a real problem. Customers with real problems have workarounds: spreadsheets, hacks, expensive consultants, time-consuming manual processes. Customers without workarounds usually do not have the problem the founder thinks they do, regardless of what they say in the conversation. The chapter is the book's most practically valuable: a small set of questions that any founder can deploy and that produce dramatically better information than the conventional alternatives.
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