How to Talk to Customers

The fastest way to build something nobody wants is to ask people if they’d want it. They’ll say yes — they’re being polite, imagining a better version of themselves, and they have no idea what they’ll actually do until the moment arrives. Opinions are free, and they’re worth exactly that.

A customer interview isn’t a survey, a focus group, or a sales call. It’s a structured way to get past what people say and into what they actually did — because past behavior is the only honest predictor of future behavior.

This playbook walks the whole arc: who to talk to (recent switchers, not opinions), what to ask (the three-act interview, the four forces, and the switching trigger), how to make sense of it (one Customer Forces Story per conversation, then the pattern across them), and how to turn a good conversation into a real commitment — the only signal that costs something.

At each step you get a short thing to type into LEANSpark and a full prompt you can hand to any AI assistant, so the grunt work — transcription, synthesis, structure — comes off your plate and your scarce energy goes into the listening and the judgment.