Rob Fitzpatrick

Stop asking people whether they like your idea.

If you've worked in product management, you've probably heard of the Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.

Its central argument is simple.

Greater than people often give you misleading answers, not because they're trying to greater than deceive you, but because you're asking the wrong questions.

And even the last lecture, Randy Pouch spoke to you in a way.

And so to recommend another book, Rob Fitzpatrick, he wrote Write Useful Books.

He takes this to an extreme.

His books, Write Useful Books, he has a book on presentations.

And I'll start with because my background is in user experience and talking to people is a critical part of it.

So the first book I would like to mention is The Mum Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.

I'm not sure if it was already in the podcast, but it's an amazing book for people to show them that when we talk to potential users or customers, when we are doing product discovery, or to be honest, it's bigger than that, right? When we are talking to anyone, we want to learn something from their experience.

um there is a trap that we are falling into that's the title of the book is the mom test because usually when we are kids and we go to the mom to the parent right and we are brag about something uh some idea that we just had whatever the idea is and we ask our mom if she likes to this idea to always say from the position of love of course even that was the most stupid idea she heard in the last year right so we surprisingly or not surprisingly as adults we are doing exactly the same when comes to when comes to testing business ideas so we tend to and I've seen that many times we tend to Tell the business idea to the potential user that we are having interview with.

So that's why I've spent a lot of time thinking about that.

And my standard recommendation is a book called The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.

And he talks about how to have conversations with people like your mom who might be being overly kind because they like you and how to ask questions in a way that... allows you to get good quality feedback without people feeling like they might bruise your ego.

The mom test.

So that book really gives a systematic approach on how to build a go-to-market, how to prove and validate metrics that are leading indicators towards a product market fit, which is interesting because it's always inconsistent when you're looking at a company-by-company basis.

The second book that I like is The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, which is a great, great book showing how to really approach and position a given startup idea and how to approach that validation.

Yeah, the mom test is one of my favorites as well.

I just reread that one.

And then I recommend if you really want to dive into the, like a whole book on the questions, there's a book called The Mom Test.

I'm sure you've heard of it by Rob Fitzpatrick.

That is phenomenal.

That is the best.

I think it's a great-

Rob Fitzpatrick, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Um, you probably, guys probably know each other.

There's another wonderful book.

It's called The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.

You're an entrepreneur.

You've been working so hard.