The Customer Conversation That Builds Your Product

Everyone tells you to talk to your users. It is the most common advice given to founders. And it is good advice. But it is incomplete.

Telling a founder to talk to users is like telling a cook to use heat. It is necessary but not sufficient. You can burn the food. With user conversations you can get false signals that lead you to build the wrong thing. The danger is not that you will not talk to users. The danger is that you will talk to them the wrong way and feel like you have done your job.

The goal of a user conversation is not validation. It is not to hear someone say your idea is great. The goal is to learn. You are a detective looking for the truth about a user’s problem.

The Cardinal Sin Asking About the Future

The biggest mistake founders make is asking users to predict the future.

Would you use a product that did X? How much would you pay for Y? What features would you want in Z?

These questions feel useful. They seem like you are doing research. But they are traps. The answers are worthless. People are terrible at predicting their own behavior. They want to be nice to you. They will tell you what they think you want to hear.

Compliments are not data. A user saying “That’s a cool idea” is not a commitment to buy. It is a polite way to end the conversation.

The truth is not in the future. The truth is in the past. To understand what people will do you must understand what they have already done. Their past and present behavior is the only real data you have.

A Simple Four Part Structure

Good user conversations are not random chats. They have a structure. You are guiding the conversation to uncover specific information. Here is a simple checklist you can use.

Part 1 The Context

Before you can understand a problem you must understand the world it lives in. Who is this person? What is their job? What does a typical day look like for them? You are drawing a map of their workflow.

Your goal here is to understand how they currently handle the process you want to improve.

Good questions for this part are:

• Can you walk me through how you currently do [the task]?
• What other tools are you using for this process?
• Who else is involved in getting this done?

Listen more than you talk. Let them tell you a story. You are just asking for directions on the map.

Part 2 The Problem

Once you understand the context you can start looking for the pain. Where is the process slow or expensive or annoying? You are looking for the emotional parts of the story. Where do they sigh or complain or get frustrated?

Do not ask “What are your problems?”. That is too direct. Instead ask about the consequences of the workflow they just described.

Good questions for this part are:

• What is the hardest part about that process?
• How much time do you spend on that each week?
• When was the last time something went wrong with this? What happened?

Try to put a number on the pain. Is it costing them ten minutes a day or ten thousand dollars a quarter? The size of the problem determines the size of the opportunity.

Part 3 The Workaround

This is the most important part of the conversation. If a problem is truly painful people will already be trying to solve it. They will have a workaround.

A workaround might be a messy Excel spreadsheet. It might be a collection of scripts held together with tape. It might be hiring an intern just to manage the process. These workarounds are your best evidence that a real problem exists. They are the market demand pulling a solution into existence.

If they have no workaround they might not have a problem worth solving.

Good questions for this part are:

• What are you using today to manage this?
• Have you ever tried to find a better tool for this?
• Did you ever try to build something yourself to fix this?

The existence of a workaround is a huge buying signal. The details of the workaround show you what features matter.

Part 4 The Reaction

Only after you have thoroughly understood their context their problem and their workaround should you even consider mentioning your idea. And when you do you are not pitching it. You are getting a reaction.

Frame it as an idea you are exploring.

A good way to introduce it is:

• I have been working on an idea to help with [the specific pain]. Can I show you what I am thinking about?
• Does this seem like it would address the issues you mentioned?
• How would something like this fit into your current workflow?

Pay attention to their non verbal cues. Do their eyes light up or do they look confused? Their honest gut reaction is more valuable than their polite words.

Three Common Mistakes to Avoid

Beyond the structure there are a few general rules to keep in mind.

1. Selling Instead of Listening. Your goal is to learn not to get a customer. If you find yourself talking more than 20 percent of the time you are failing. Shut up and listen.

2. Talking to the Wrong People. A company might have a manager who approves budgets and a user who does the work. The user feels the pain. The manager sees a line on a spreadsheet. Make sure you are talking to the person who will actually use your product every day.

3. Treating All Feedback Equally. You will get a lot of opinions and feature requests. Do not act on a single data point. Look for patterns. If one person tells you they need a blue button that is an anecdote. If five different people describe the exact same workaround you have found a strong signal.

A good conversation is a discovery process. You start with a hypothesis about a problem and use these conversations to prove or disprove it. The output is not a feature list. It is a deep understanding of your user and the problem you are solving for them.

Now think about the last time you spoke with a user and consider what you learned.

— Rishi Banerjee
September 2025