An interview with Cindy Alvarez. Cindy is Director of Customer Research at GitHub, the world's leading software development platform. Cindy has long experience in customer research with GitHub, Yammer, Microsoft and Kissmetrics. She also wrote the leading book on customer research, 2014's Lean Customer Development which aims to guide teams to build products their customers need.
We speak about a lot, including:
- What it's like doing customer research with the world's largest community of software engineers
- The importance of testing your customer interview questions and working out what does and doesn't work
- The importance of empathy, keeping down-to-earth and being someone customers feel comfortable talking to
- Whether a Bachelor's in Psychology helps her to play mind games with her subjects (mwahahaha)
- Why she wrote the book, how she did it, and whether she's going to write another one
- How to answer some of the common objections to customer interviews, and how ensure you can build a culture of speaking with customers directly
- How to optimise for Continuous Discovery and ensure you get a flow of customer feedback and learning
And much more!
