After studying psychology in the late '90s, Cindy started her product, research, and design career. She has lead many Product, Design, and Research Teams over the last decades. Next to that she wrote and published the book Lean Customer Development.

Cindy speaks in this episode, about how to best do customer research. She shares very practical examples of how to understand customer problems without interviews, and best practices to understand what customers really want and need. One of her key messages is that asking questions is not only important for customers, it also helps inside companies to better understand each other.

Table of content:

0:30 - Intro Cindy Alvarez
3:20 - Day to day business as Customer Researcher
5:05 - Doing research on Twitter, Reddit, and co.
10:25 - Building stakeholder relationships to push research
13:25 - How to get started with research in your company
16:15 - Reducing and avoiding bias
19:15 - Talking and negotiating with customers
21:50 - Understanding customer problems
24:20 - Customer research vs. user research
27:40 - Handling design critiques with founders and managers
31:15 - Stock questions to understand the “why”
36:15 - Documenting research outcomes (TL;DR)
39:25 - The biggest mistakes leaders do about research
42:25 - Debrief Christan & Alex

Cindy on the internet:

Linkedin: @cindyalvarez
Website: https://www.cindyalvarez.com
Cindy's book: Lean Customer Development

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#31 Researching customer problems - with Cindy Alvarez, Director Customer Research @Github