Validating Product Ideas with the Moms Test
Note: It's been a year exactly since I joined Substack and the platform has really grown with a lot of exciting features and new users. I have not published much these past several months, so one experiment to test will be with shorter, and more focused posts. Let's see how that goes. If you scour through LinkedIn or X lately, you will see product influencers who swear by the book The Mom’s Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. And for good reason. I personally learned and implemented techniques from this book several years back when I started my PM gig at Microsoft where my primary function was going to be working with enterprise customers. 7 years have flown by, and the one superpower I have harnessed (that others regularly validate) is my customer obsession and the ability to translate unsaid needs into requirements that matter.
I attribute a lot of that to how I lead discussions and avoid getting biased feedback from customers by asking questions that reveal their real problems, needs, and goals.
What is the Moms Test?
The Mom’s Test is based on three simple rules:
Ask about their life, not your idea
Ask about specifics in the past, not generics or opinions about the future
Listen more, talk less
These rules help you avoid asking questions that might influence the customers’ answers or make them say what they think you want to hear. Instead, when you ask questions that elicit facts and stories about how they behave, think, and feel in real situations, you might gain:
Insight into their problems and needs: You can learn what are the pain points, goals, motivations, and constraints of your potential customers, and how they currently try to solve them. This can help you identify opportunities and validate your assumptions about the value proposition of your product.
Evidence of their commitment and demand: You can gauge how much they care about the problem and how likely they are to pay for a solution. You can also test their interest and willingness to try your product or give you feedback by asking for concrete actions or commitments.
Understanding of their context and behavior: You can discover how your product fits into their existing workflow, habits, and preferences. You can also learn about the influences, triggers, and barriers that affect their decision-making and adoption of your product
Takeaways I took to Heart
Bad data: Data that is misleading, inaccurate, or irrelevant for making business decisions. There are three types of bad data: compliments, fluff, and ideas. They can be avoided by deflecting compliments, anchoring fluff, and digging beneath ideas.
Customer learning: The process of finding out what customers want, need, and value by talking to them and observing their actions. Customer learning helps to validate or invalidate business ideas, identify customer segments, and design solutions.
Facts and commitments: The goal of customer conversations is to gather facts about customers’ lives, problems, goals, and behaviors, and to get commitments from them that indicate their interest, willingness, and ability to buy or use the solution. Facts and commitments are more reliable than opinions and promises.
How I Use it
The Mom Test method is about effective communication with customers. To that end, it’s all about how you ask questions and follow up to take the conversation the right way. Here are some instances of how I applied it to my customer interviews:
I wanted to understand how they searched for information across their organization. Instead of asking “How do you like your enterprise search product?” I asked, “What was the last time you used your enterprise search product?” and “What was the outcome or feedback of your search?”
A couple of years back when I was the lead PM from my team for building graph connectors to ingest data into Microsoft Search, I wanted to validate if they were interested in building graph connectors for specific data sources. Instead of asking “Do you want graph connectors?” I asked, “How do you currently connect your data sources?” and “What are the benefits or challenges of your current approach?”
More recently as I was interviewing customers for our Copilot products, I wanted to gauge their appetite for using generative AI to create content. Instead of asking “Would you use generative AI?” I would ask, “How do you currently create content for your projects?” and “What are some of the pain points or opportunities you see with your content creation process?”
By adhering to these three simple guidelines, you will significantly improve how you communicate with enterprise clients using a combination of confidence and empathy.
I guarantee the effectiveness of these rules, which have repeatedly enabled me to validate my assumptions, prioritize features for our team, and create products that effectively solve real-world problems.
Give them a shot and let me know your thoughts.