The Ledger
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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: 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 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: 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 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: 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: 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: 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 …”