Kirk Customer Interview Insights
I'm three weeks into @1909's Applied Learning Workshop, a 12-week sprint to validate and grow my business. I missed posting about weeks 2 and 3 because I was busy actually doing engineering work. I'll take that trade.
One of the program requirements is conducting 25 customer interviews over the 12 weeks. This week I did my first one with a past client and it completely reframed how I think about what I'm building.
I asked him the question I was most curious about: "If you were telling another engineer about what I do, what would you say?"
He didn't talk about mentorship, career coaching, or resume reviews.
He said something like: "You're not some outside consultant. You're the team member I didn't know I needed. You just sit down and figure it out with me."
That hit different.
I've been describing my business as 1:1 mentorship for mid-career engineers who are stuck below senior level. That's accurate, but that's not how it feels to the person on the other side of the call.
What it actually feels like is having a senior engineer on your team who will look at your impossible problem, admit they don't know the answer either, and then figure it out with you in real time. No ego. No judgment. Just "let's get it done."
He also told me he tried everything before reaching out. Stack Overflow, Microsoft docs, AI chatbots, his own research. None of it worked because his problem wasn't a knowledge gap. It was a framing gap. He was solving the wrong problem entirely and a chatbot or a google search can't catch that. But a person with experience can spot it in minutes.
The other thing he said that stuck with me: he chose to reach out because he knew I wouldn't care about hurting his feelings and he could come to me without risking the dynamic at work. That "safe third party" thing is something I hadn't put words to before but it might be one of the most important things I offer.
I went into this interview expecting to validate my assumptions and instead I got language I never would have written myself.
That's the whole point of customer discovery. You think you know what you're selling, but then your customer tells you what you're actually selling.
Week 3 down. 9 to go.
#BuildInPublic #LearnWithOJ #CareerGrowth #SoftwareEngineering #TechMentorship
yeah exactly, that is closer to what i want to say. Basically I really valued her insight about the mid-career label language thing and that completely reshaped the way I conducted customer interviews, listening for the specific language they use and incorporating that into my marking and branding copy rather than just looking for validating my idea or whether they had a pivot idea. But I decided to give a low score because I felt disengaged the majority of the session for two main reasons:
- the content of the workshop felt repetitive/redundant for example diving into the individual sections of the business model canvas could've been an opportunity to share other ways of looking at what needs to go into it but what was delivered was essentially the same thing written on the handout and maybe rephrased a couple of times before moving on.
- she clearly has a lot of valuable experience with product based business but I struggled to find a connection between what she shared and how it applies to what I'm building. She could've been dropping gold nuggets the whole time but it was just going over my head.