The Customers Who Walked Away

Think about the last thing you almost bought and did not.

You picked it up, you looked at it, you put it back down. You had a reason for choosing one item over its competitors, and you know exactly what it was.

Did anybody ever ask you why you didn’t choose the loser?

Of course not. And somebody did the same thing to you this week. Something you made, or wrote, or suggested. An idea you put into a meeting that got a polite nod and then went nowhere. They considered it, decided against it, and you never found out the real reason.

Almost everything that comes back to you comes from the people who said yes. Inside a business, the machinery makes that official. Satisfaction surveys go to people who have bought. Reviews come from people who have bought. The customer list is a list of people who have bought. The one who put it back down is invisible to all of it, and that person is holding the answer.

So, where do you point a question to reach somebody who is not there?

Last week, we took a question apart and rebuilt it. But a well-made question aimed at the wrong thing comes back empty. Where you point a question is the other half of the skill.

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Forty-two cards of Killer Questions

A killer question is one that has been tested and proven to spark ideas beyond the obvious. The name comes from the old phrase "killer app," where "killer" meant standout, not lethal. I built this collection of questions the slow way.

I designed structured tests into my innovation workshops, which I was running: specific questions put to specific groups, and a record of what each produced. The rule for keeping a question was that it had to trigger something in that room. Did somebody walk out seeing their customer, their product, or the way they work differently than when they walked in? If nothing moved, the question was cut. If there was a good idea underneath one and I had simply worded it badly, I rewrote it and ran it again in another workshop.

There were hundreds of questions, and most did not survive. Forty-two did.

When I sorted the survivors, they fell into three groups. Not by subject. By where they aim your thinking. 

Three places to aim

Every question in the deck points to one of three things. Who, what, and how.

WHO is the person or organization who will benefit from what you make. Usually, your customer, though the gap between "usually" and "always" is where a lot of new business hides.

WHAT is the product, the service, the solution that creates the value for the WHO.

HOW is the way your organization builds, delivers, and supports the WHAT for the WHO.

Three places an idea can come from, and the questions exist to send you into each one on purpose rather than by accident.

The cards all say "product." Read that as whatever you make for somebody else. A service counts. So does a proposal you hand to your boss.

Thirteen of my cards aim at WHO. Thirteen at WHAT. Sixteen at HOW. That split was never a plan. It is where the questions that kept surviving pointed, and eventually, I stopped arguing with it.

WHO

What are your unshakable beliefs about what your customers want?

The phone companies believed their customers wanted reliability above all else, and they were right. For a century, they built toward 99.999 percent uptime. A dial tone that worked in a storm, in a power failure, always.

Then somebody turned that belief over and looked at it with no assumptions about what the customer wanted. Where were there people who would give up call quality for something else?

That is the question that led to voice over IP, a phone call carried over the internet. In the early days, it sounded terrible. Calls dropped. By the standard the old industry had spent a century perfecting, VoIP was not a serious product. But underneath it sat an idea nobody in that industry had allowed themselves to consider: that many people would trade call quality for price and mobility, and would do so happily.

They did. That market opportunity existed before anyone built it, waiting for someone willing to challenge the old standard on its head. 

WHAT

What is surprisingly inconvenient about my product?

It does not ask whether the product is good. Your team will defend that all day, and they will be partly right, which will only make the conversation worse.

Surprisingly inconvenient means some part of using your product that nobody inside your company has ever seen a real person struggle with. The fifteen minutes with the instructions. The step everyone on your team skips automatically because they built the thing.

On the back of that card sits the shortest useful question I own: "Do you use your own product yourself?"

Hold on to this one. In a few minutes, it turns up at a Best Buy, and the strange part is that I wasn't aiming at it when I found it.

HOW

What do people not like about the buying experience for my product?

For the whole time I was CTO at HP, I spent nearly every Saturday in a Best Buy. While traveling, I found a local electronics store in whatever country I was in. I was not shopping. I was standing in the aisle watching strangers choose, because this question has no other answer. You cannot survey somebody who did not buy. 

My family called it my “digital stalking”. My kids would have done almost anything else rather than be seen with me in a Best Buy on a Saturday.

When somebody picked up a competitor's product and headed for the checkout, I would walk over, introduce myself, and ask what made them choose that one.

I did it long enough that the sales staff around Silicon Valley knew me, and would change how they talked to a customer if they saw me standing there. Stay somewhere long enough, and you stop being an observer. You influence what you are measuring.

Then came the Saturday that changed a product.

A customer set down an HP laptop and bought a competitor's. I asked him why. He told me he could not see the keys. This was during the stretch when every laptop was going aluminum, and somebody in our laptop group had given ours a chrome-looking keyboard. High gloss. On a store shelf, it looked expensive, which is exactly what it was designed to do.

It also meant that anyone whose eyesight had started to go could not read the letters on it.

Sales on that product had been running under plan, and nothing in the data said why. We changed the keyboard back to matte black with high contrast white lettering. Sales went up on that one change.

No survey would have revealed the issue. By the time he told me, he was already somebody else's customer.

Notice what that question actually turned up. I went into the store carrying a HOW question about the buying experience. What came back was a WHAT answer, something surprisingly. Inconvenient about the product itself. You choose where to aim. You do not choose where the answer comes from.

Testing for Great Questions

How do you find and test great questions?

Ask the question, then watch what happens in the next four seconds.

If the room goes quiet, and then somebody says, "Hang on," you are holding a good one. That pause is the sound of a person arriving somewhere they have not been. You just unleashed a great question.

If someone answers immediately and confidently, the question isn't that great. A fast answer means you aimed where the team has already been, and they are reciting. I threw away hundreds that way and got down to the questions that caused impact.

Practice Exercise 

Take a decision you are facing this month and give it ninety minutes.

Start with whichever of the three you are least comfortable with, which for most people is HOW. Take a question from it at random. Do not hunt for the one you like, because the one you like is the one you have already answered. Set a timer for thirty minutes and write down every idea that question produces. No judging, no editing, just quantity.

Then do the same thing with a question aimed at your customer, and again with one aimed at the product. When you have worked through all three, read back over everything and pick the best three ideas to start on.

That is how you run it on your own. If you would rather do it with a team, there is a second version designed for groups of 4 to 6 people. Both are written out step by step on killerquestions.com, so you are not working from memory.

You can buy the deck at innovation.tools, either as printed cards or as a digital download for your phone, tablet, or PC. 

Send me the question that worked best for you. I am also still on the search for new questions for volume 2 of the card deck. Send your suggestions, and they might just be included.

That closes out this three-part series on questions. If you came in at the end, part one is about why you cannot stop yourself from answering a question, and part two is about how a single word inside a question steers the answer you get back.

The next episode is about abductive thinking. Deduction hands you a conclusion you can prove. Induction hands you a pattern you can bet on. Abduction is what you reach for when you have neither and still have to decide, which is most of the time. It is how a doctor arrives at a diagnosis, and it is how most real innovation actually happens.

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