I read Cindy Alvarez "A Product That Will Be Bought. Lean Customer Development Method" - about the development of consumers and working with them. The book was not complicated, the whole difficulty was in a large number of life hacks, tips, examples, screenshots and their further prioritization. I wrote down the main things here, now I am sharing my synopsis on this topic.

By chapters:
Chapter 1 ("Why do we need customer development?") - Provide arguments to help overcome your organization's resistance to implementing customer development.
Chapter 2 ("Where to Start?") - You will learn how to develop initial assumptions, formulate hypothetical problems and identify the characteristics of target customers.
Chapter 3 ("Who to Talk To?") - it will be told how to find target customers and get them to talk.
Chapter 4 ("What Do You Need to Know?") - the most important categories of issues are considered in detail, allowing you to understand what today's consumer behavior depends on, identify their problems and identify needs. The author explains why these questions provide the necessary information.
Chapter 5 ("Get Out of the Office!") - Sample scenarios of informative conversations with consumers are presented. You will learn how to introduce yourself correctly, get customers to talk and see the most important behavioral patterns and needs behind general words.
Chapter 6 ("What is a Valid Hypothesis?") - It is about how to summarize the valuable information received and draw the right conclusions that allow you to improve the product and make the right business decisions.
Chapter 7 ("What should be the minimum workable product?") - We will talk about the main types of minimum viable products (MVP) and see in what conditions a particular product should be developed.
Chapter 8 ("How to Engage in Customer Development If You Already Have Them?") - about the development of consumers in large companies.
Chapter 9 (Continuous Customer Development) explores how companies that already have products and customers can integrate customer development into their business processes.

What you need to know
• Who are our customers?
• What are their problems and needs?
• What does their behavior depend on today?
• What new products (even unfinished or non-existent) are they willing to pay for?
• How do our customers make decisions: how do they shop, find suppliers, choose and consume goods?

Why we should know it:
An hour of effective communication with the consumer will save 5, 10, 20 hours of planning and developing an unnecessary feature.

Lean consumer development includes five components:
• development of a hypothesis;
• search for potential consumers with whom you will negotiate;
• Asking the right questions;
• correct interpretation of the answers to these questions;
• Understanding what product you need, taking into account the information received.

In the Build-Measure-Learn cycle (from Eric Ries' book Lean Startup), customer development is responsible for forming the most appropriate hypothesis for further testing and studying.

Development of a hypothesis.
Cindy Alvarez suggests doing three consecutive exercises:
Exercise 1. Formulate initial assumptions.
Exercise 2. Formulate a hypothetical problem.
Exercise 3. Formulate the features of your target customers.

Exercise 1.
The initial assumptions can be formulated by the answer to these questions:

• Consumers have problems (what?) _______.
• Consumers are willing to invest in solving these problems (how much?) _______.
• A list of investors who are ready to invest in the product or its buyers _______.
• A list of partners who are ready to participate in the development and distribution of the _______ product.
• What resources are needed to manufacture and maintain the product? _______.
• If consumers do not buy and use the product, what product will they buy and use? _______.
• What will consumers get from using the product? _______.
• What problems do consumers face? _______.
• Consumers will use the following products: _______.
• What influences consumer decision-making? _______.
• Where do consumers work? What is their social affiliation? _______.
• This product will be useful to consumers because _______.
• How well do consumers understand the technology? _______.
• How do consumers feel about the changes? _______.
• How long will it take to develop/produce a product? _______.
• How long will it take to reach a certain number of consumers or a certain frequency of use? _______.

If the work is carried out by a team, it is possible to identify internal contradictions and discuss them.

Exercise 2.
A hypothesis should include answers to five questions on which any journalistic investigation is built: "Who?", "What?", "How much?", "When?" and "Why?".

For example: I believe that some people [what?] in the process of [what?] face a problem [what?]. I believe that some people [which?] face such and such a problem [what?] due to the lack of [what?].

The people who face the hypothetical problem are the consumers you'll be talking to. And what this problem is ("what?", "how much?", "when?"), you have to find out. "Why?" is something you need to solve or eliminate.

Examples of developing hypotheses for existing products:
• I believe that [technical development teams] face a problem [wasting time and money] when [trying to predict the network utilization rate of a growing company] (Amazon S3).
• I believe that [small businesses] face the challenge of [not being able to grow] because [traditional marketing platforms (emails) are too expensive and complicated] (MailChimp).

Exercise 3.
You can start with the following questions.
• What is the problem?
• Who is facing this problem?

The task of a startup is to find and concentrate on those who are ready to buy MVPs (Innovators).

And accordingly, the questions:
• What is more important for consumers – time or money?
• Do they make decisions on their own or follow someone else's directions?
• Do they like to lead or are they willing to obey?
• What is their level of technical expertise?
• Do they shop often and how long do they use the product?
• Do they like everything new or prefer time-tested products?
• Do they like thrills or prefer predictability?
etc.

Search for consumers.
As we have already understood above, we are looking for innovators,
those who are ready to take a risk and buy an unfinished, unfinished product (MVP).

The next block of the book is devoted to finding respondents, but it boils down to trivial:
1) Introduce us to the audience through acquaintances
2) Use blogs and forums
3) Use social networks (e.g. Linkedin, Instagram, etc.)
4) Use events, communicate live

Cindy insists that you don't need to pay respondents for interviews, because they should be people who are really interested in solving their problem through our product.

It also describes the fairly obvious pros and cons of choosing a meeting place (home, office, neutral territory) and choosing a method of communication (video call, call, instant messengers, etc.).

Formulation of questions and interpretation of answers.
1) How do you do _________ today?
2) Do you use [tools/products/applications/technologies] ________?
3) If you had a magic wand, what would you do? It doesn't matter if it's possible, just name the desire.
4) When was the last time you did ___________, what actions did you do before starting work? After its completion?
5) What else would you like me to ask you? _________

These are the main five questions (I did not change the translation) that she asks in any case, all the rest are clarifying questions. All of them serve to understand:
• What is today's consumer behavior?
• What upsets your consumers and what motivates them?
• How do your consumers make decisions and spend money? What do they value above all?

Further, she describes the technical aspects of the interview: whether to take a dictaphone, how to organize notes, emotional and psychological aspects, how to get the respondent to talk, why respondents themselves may not know what they want, and the like.

The next chapter is devoted to the skeptical processing of the information received, so that it does not contain what the interviewer unconsciously pushed the respondent to. Basically, it is about emotional intelligence and checking speech patterns.

On the number of interviews required: "By taking five interviews, you will meet the first enthusiastic consumer. If it doesn't, your hypothesis is wrong. If you take ten interviews, you will see behavioral patterns. Question them in follow-up interviews by referring to "other people" who behave differently. Ask the interlocutors if they behave according to a pattern or like "other people". If you don't hear anything new anymore, then you've done enough interviews and you're ready to wrap up."

Formation of the product taking into account the information received

This part describes the types of MVPs, their pros and cons, for which tasks it is better to use which type. I partially touched on this in an article based on the book Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

The following parts describe how to make MVPs in established companies and how to look for evangelical MVPs for new MVPs of such companies. There are no big differences, I was interested in describing in this synopsis how to form a hypothesis and confirm it, through the development of consumers, I will not go deeper.

At the end of the book there is a handy appendix: with a description of the questions and their purpose, for new and existing products, this should be highlighted. The rest are success stories, praises of lean manufacturing, footnotes, advertising, etc.