Identify your bullseye customer in one day | Michael Margolis (UX Research Partner at Google Ventures)

1. Define Bullseye Customer First

Focus on a very specific subset of your target market who is most likely to initially adopt your product or service, as this helps prioritize building, feedback, and team alignment.

2. Use 5-3-1 Sprint Formula

Conduct a one-day sprint involving interviews with five bullseye customers, testing three simple prototypes, with the whole team watching and debriefing to quickly gather insights.

3. Make Research a Team Sport

Involve the entire core product team in observing customer interviews and debriefing together to build consensus, alignment, and momentum without needing formal reports.

4. Conduct Deep Qualitative Interviews

Prioritize deep qualitative interviews to understand customers’ stories, motivations, and past experiences, as this provides the biggest “bang for your buck” in learning.

5. Compare Multiple Prototypes

Create three distinct, simple prototypes to present to customers, allowing them to compare and contrast different value propositions and helping your team avoid overcommitment to a single idea.

6. Aim for Narrow Customer

Define your bullseye customer with extreme specificity (e.g., 7+ attributes like inclusion, exclusion, and triggers) to reduce variables and ensure you’re testing with the most receptive audience.

7. Approach Interactions as Learning

Adopt a “humble inquiry” mindset during customer interactions, genuinely asking and listening to understand their perspective rather than selling or telling.

8. Conduct Define Key Questions Meeting

Start the sprint with a 45-minute team meeting to identify key questions, hypotheses, assumptions, and nagging debates about your product and customers, informing the rest of the process.

9. Match Customer to Questions

Tailor your bullseye customer selection (e.g., new vs. existing users) based on the specific questions you aim to answer, such as onboarding flow or new feature adoption.

10. Create Screener Questionnaire

Translate your bullseye customer criteria into a screener questionnaire, written to avoid telegraphing answers, to efficiently filter and recruit suitable participants.

11. Compensate & Engage Interviewees

Pay interviewees sufficiently (e.g., $125/hour for typical consumers) and ensure their engagement (e.g., by confirming NDAs) to maximize show-up rates for your scheduled interviews.

12. Keep Prototypes Simple, Clear

Design prototypes as simple, flat visuals (e.g., PDF homepages) that clearly articulate distinct value propositions, avoiding complex functionality to prevent overcommitment.

13. Visually Differentiate Prototypes

Make your three prototypes visually distinct (e.g., by color) so that observers can easily refer to and track feedback for each specific concept during discussions.

14. Meticulously Proofread Prototypes

Carefully proofread all prototype materials to eliminate errors, as mistakes can undermine the validity and credibility of your concepts with interviewees.

15. Draft Two-Part Interview Guide

Structure each one-hour interview into two parts: first, a discovery conversation about past experiences, and second, a comparison and contrast of the prototypes.

16. Build Rapport with Smile

Begin interviews with a genuine smile and light conversation to quickly build rapport, put the interviewee at ease, and encourage open, responsive dialogue.

17. Practice Interviewing Skills

Develop and practice a “listener character” for interviews, embodying extreme curiosity and focus on the person, which differs from a typical founder’s pitching mindset.

18. Stream Interviews One-on-One

Conduct interviews one-on-one with the customer via Zoom, live-streaming to the observing team to maintain focus and comfort for the interviewee.

19. Assign Manual Note-Taking Roles

Have team members manually take notes in collaborative documents and rotate roles, as this promotes active engagement and prevents passive observation.

20. Use Backchannel for Questions

Utilize a Slack channel for team members to share observations and pass specific, judicious questions to the interviewer, who can then incorporate them into the conversation.

21. Lead Debriefs with Decider

After each interview, have the product owner or founder lead a debrief session using a structured spreadsheet to capture key learnings and ensure alignment.

22. Complete Individual Takeaways Form

At the end of the sprint, have each team member independently and quietly fill out a “Big Takeaways” Google Form to capture individual insights and next steps.

23. Predict Outcomes Before Interviews

Ask the team to predict specific outcomes and learnings before the interviews begin to capture initial hypotheses and provide a baseline for measuring new insights.

24. Counter Hindsight Bias

Compare actual learnings from the sprint to the team’s initial predictions to highlight new knowledge gained and counter the natural tendency to believe insights were “obvious” all along.

25. Prioritize Past Behavior

When evaluating customer feedback, give more weight to their descriptions of past experiences and behaviors rather than their predictions of what they would do in the future.

26. Actively Police Confirmation Bias

Encourage team members to jokingly “police” each other during watch parties, challenging assumptions and biases to ensure an objective interpretation of customer feedback.

27. Know When to Conduct Sprint

Use the Bullseye Customer Sprint before significant building investment, when expanding to new customer groups/markets, or when current product traction is not meeting expectations.

28. Inability to Recruit is Red Flag

If you struggle significantly to recruit your narrowly defined bullseye customers, consider it a strong signal that your target audience may not exist or is too hard to reach.

29. Access Free Learning Resources

Utilize the free book, demo videos, worksheets, and resources available at learnmorefaster.com to deepen your understanding and implementation of the sprint method.

30. Share Your Sprint Experiences

Provide feedback to Michael Margolis ([email protected] or LinkedIn) on how you’ve used or adapted the sprint, helping to refine and improve the open-source methodology.