The Mom Test

How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You

By: Rob Fitzpatrick

Narrated by: Rob Fitzpatrick

Length: 3 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question, and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it, and it's worth doing right.

Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both customer development and lean startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong, and how you can do better.

©2013 Robfitz Ltd (P)2019 Robfitz Ltd

VFPA

Recommended from a friend, and what a great listen this was! Absolute gems throughout. I wish everyone, in every business would read this before doing research. Imagine if everyone didn't waste my time and grew and learnt from every meeting - apply this, use Vision, Framing, Pedestal and Ask to further your conversations, use the Mom Test to get your Ego out of the way and solve real problems! Fantastic read. Highly recommended.

Incredible

This 1 book changed my costumer interview skills from mediocre to very good. Thank you!!

Set yourself up for success when talking to users

As a Product Manager, I’ve come back to The Mom Test multiple times and at various stages in my career. Each time, I have been able to glean new and different insights from it. When I was first starting out doing customer interviews, the framework presented in The Mom Test helped me to avoid leading questions and research bias.

Later in my career, doing discovery for a 0 to 1 product, the chapters on where and how to find the right customers to talk to were invaluable. User research techniques are often highly formal in order to make the data collected more “scientific” but Fitzpatrick makes a case for the importance of informal, yet highly focused talks.

The audiobook is narrated by the author himself, and while he’s not a professional voice actor, his passion for the subject matter really shines through. There are places where as a listener you can tell he’s self-correcting, and while I would find that a sign of poor editing in an audiobook narrated by someone other than the author themselves, the informality and ease of delivery almost makes this feel like an extended TED Talk.

Suffice to say, I really enjoyed The Mom Test and am interested in checking out the author’s other works.

Must Read for All Leaders in Startups

This was very insightful for my team and I. Rob simplifies but yet stresses the importance of this stage. The statistics on the likelihood of Startups failing is probably because they didnt read this and embed it into their initial strategy. I recommend this to any entrepreneur that has the go-getter mindset, and if you don’t have it you should be inclined to do so after reading this.

Chockfull of great practical tips on how to interview your customers

Just a great great book that gets to demystifying how to interview your customers quickly.

Must read for entrepreneurs

Loved the book. Great content and tips to avoid selling ideas and validate them instead.

Love this book

This book is so impactful and needed for all areas, but a huge change maker if applied in Healthcare. Which I will do.

Best book on customer survey

It is concise, easy to follow and full of insights. I am working on developing my startup idea and the book was very eye-opening. I can suggest it to product managers as well

Great for entrepreneurs

I feel like a lot of businesses fail because they ask the wrong questions. This book is good at keeping it simple and making sure you don’t get mislead.

A good reminder on how to do user interviews right

This book is short and to the point. Rob gives examples of the tasks we all fall into when trying to launch a new product or improve our existing offering. Even though I knew about them, I still occasionally fall into these traps. The Mom Test is a good reminder to avoid mistakes and you can get back to it often to keep that approach fresh in your mind.