mom-test

Design customer interview questions by applying Mom Test rules to focus on the interviewee's life and past behavior, converting hypothetical or leading questions into prompts that extract facts, alternatives, and constraints.

Validating product assumptions without bias requires steering customer conversations toward past experiences and commitment signals, avoiding opinions about your proposed solution to prevent false validation.

Identify commitment signals during user research by ending conversations with advancement prompts that move toward concrete next steps like trials, intros, pilots, or pre-orders, avoiding zombie leads.

Customers give misleading feedback during idea validation when asked for opinions about a proposed solution, which introduces bias; focusing on facts about real past experiences instead elicits truthful customer learning.

Turn vague user research questions into signal-extracting prompts by using good versus bad question patterns that target facts, alternatives, budgets, and constraints rather than hypothetical scenarios.

Use the Mom Test framework for customer discovery when preparing interviews to validate or invalidate assumptions, ensuring you deflect compliments and avoid manipulating commitments to preserve trust.