Michael Margolis
UX Research Partner, GV · 1 appearance on the record.
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Michael Margolis joined GV in 2010 as the venture industry's first UX research partner, conducting over 300 research sprints to help portfolio companies identify their core customers. He is a co-developer of GV's design sprint methodology and the author of Learn More Faster.
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Everything Michael Margolis said on Lenny's Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Margolis: Five qualitative customer interviews reach data saturation
“And that idea of just doing five of them
You hit what's called data saturation. And so this is the thing in qualitative research where the kind of the common version of this is everybody after four or five is like, oh, for God's sakes, please don't let me sit …”
Margolis: Teams should take manual notes instead of using AI during research
“We have people manually taking notes and not using AI to take notes. The reason for this is what we found is we want people to lean in to this experience. We want you to focus and engage and pay a lot of attention. And if you know somebody else is taking notes…”
Margolis: Deep expertise leads founders to overestimate customer knowledge and willingness to pay
“And when somebody has deep expertise, it's very difficult to imagine that other people don't know what you know. It's very hard to kind of put yourself in their shoes, right? And you just think, well, doesn't everybody know this? Or maybe even, you know, yeah,…”
Margolis: Successful product building requires starting with a hyper-focused initial customer subset
“Every ambitious founder wants to build a product for everybody and we're investors. So at GV, we want them to be successful and to have these huge markets. But it doesn't start there. So to build successfully, usually you have to be much more focused and much …”
Margolis: Batching customer interviews in one day makes patterns obvious
“If you do them in a clump like that, then the patterns are just much more obvious. You have to, at the end of the day, it's just really clear what were the big takeaways.”
Margolis: Testing multiple prototypes stops teams overcommitting to one idea
“The other big benefit of having multiple prototypes is it helps teams avoid getting too wed to one specific idea. And so you can get a little over committed. There's a risk that you get over committed to one idea.
You're polishing that you're working on it. Yo…”
Margolis has not written a user research report in 10 years
“I don't write a report. I haven't written a report in, I don't know, 10 years because we've at the end, when we capture those big takeaways, that's the team has captured it, right?”
Margolis: Bullseye customer definitions must be comically narrow to reduce variables
“Comically narrow is exactly what it is. And there are times that teams will just be like, Oh, for God's sakes, Margolis, like, just like, this is too much. The reason that I do that is I'm pushing them to identify a person who they all would agree. This person…”
Margolis: Early customer research must exclude industry experts and domain insiders
“Another typical exclusion Criteria is I don't want somebody who knows too much. So your core bullseye customer, I want somebody who's pretty typical. So in this case, like if I were to find out that somebody was a pharmacist or worked in healthcare, I'm like, …”
Margolis: Bullseye customer definitions require inclusion, exclusion, and trigger criteria
“The way I think about it is kind of in these three groups. So there are inclusion criteria, there are exclusion criteria, and then there are, what we found is very important are triggers.”
Margolis: User research requires founders adopt humble inquiry over sales pitching
“Asking questions and being vulnerable and giving the person you're asking the higher status is a difficult thing to do as a founder when you're selling. Right? Because you don't want to be vulnerable and express that you don't know or, and people are always, I…”
Margolis: Low incentives like $20 gift cards cause research no-shows
“You have to make sure they show up, make sure you're compensating them sufficiently. This is something where I'm not giving 20 dollar Starbucks cards because somebody's gonna blow you off. Like when I have those five sessions and the whole team queued up to wa…”
Margolis: Founders must test competitor products with users, not just analyze them
“If you haven't studied your competitor's product and not just gone through it, but like seeing how people respond to them, you're just missing something, right?”
Margolis: Teams must record specific predictions before research to defeat hindsight bias
“We do this thing before the watch party where we get everybody to predict what they think they're going to learn. And this is really valuable for a bunch of different reasons. So it's a way to capture a snapshot before we do the interviews of like, what do you…”
Margolis: Weight past user behavior over user predictions of future actions
“Put more weight on past experiences than on people's predictions of what they would do.”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Identify your bullseye customer in one day | Michael Margolis (UX Research Partner at GV) | Dec 1, 2024 | 59m |