#31 Researching customer problems - with Cindy Alvarez, Director Customer Research @Github

After studying psychology in the late '90s, Cindy started her product, research, and design career. She has lead many Product, Design, and Research Teams over the last decades. Next to that she wrote and published the book Lean Customer Development.  Cindy speaks in this episode, about how to best do customer research. She shares very practical examples of how to understand customer problems without interviews, and best practices to understand what customers really want and need. One of her key messages is that asking questions is not only important for customers, it also helps inside companies to better understand each other.    Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Cindy Alvarez 3:20 - Day to day business as Customer Researcher 5:05 - Doing research on Twitter, Reddit, and co. 10:25 - Building stakeholder relationships to push research 13:25 - How to get started with research in your company 16:15 - Reducing and avoiding bias 19:15 - Talking and negotiating with customers 21:50 - Understanding customer problems 24:20 - Customer research vs. user research 27:40 - Handling design critiques with founders and managers 31:15 - Stock questions to understand the “why” 36:15 - Documenting research outcomes (TL;DR) 39:25 - The biggest mistakes leaders do about research 42:25 - Debrief Christan & Alex   Cindy on the internet: Linkedin: @cindyalvarez Website: https://www.cindyalvarez.com Cindy's book: Lean Customer Development   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/