For years I never walked into a customer conversation without already knowing the answer.
Not once. I prepared my questions, I opened my notebook, I nodded in all the right places. And underneath all that professional listening sat a diagnosis I had already made, waiting patiently to be confirmed.
I can tell you the moment I noticed. Second call of a validation round, a Tuesday afternoon behind my screen. The customer said a sentence that fitted my thesis so perfectly that I underlined it twice and wrote “proof” in the margin. With an exclamation mark. It took me embarrassingly long to see what I had not written down: the seven sentences before it, in which she had patiently explained that the problem barely bothered her.
This is not a story about being bad at interviews. The interviews were fine. That is what makes it uncomfortable.
Somewhere along the way you were handed the assignment “go and validate the problem”, as if validation were a formality. A stamp the market puts on a decision that has already been made upstairs. Nobody said it like that, of course. But notice the word. Validate. Not investigate, not test, not find out. Validate.
And so the conversations become horoscopes. A horoscope works because the text is vague enough that whatever you bring to it will fit. “Customers are frustrated with their current process.” Of course they are. Everyone is frustrated with every process. That sentence has never disqualified a business idea in the history of business ideas. You do not read a horoscope to find out who you are but to recognise yourself.
It took me years to accept. The questions were never the weak spot. You can ask beautifully neutral questions, avoid pitching, ask about last month instead of the imagined future, and still come home with exactly what you left with. Because the filter sits in the hearing. You remember the two sentences that fitted but not the seven that did not. There is a diagnosis in your pocket, someone upstairs waiting for good news, and a conversation that can be read in any direction. Hope reads it for you.
The bias itself I can forgive. What makes me properly cross is that nobody warns you. You were taught how to research a market the way you were taught to present findings: as production. Slides in, slides out. Nobody taught you the first rule of any research discipline, which is that the researcher is the instrument, and this particular instrument arrives pre-loaded. Every lab in the world calibrates its instruments before measuring. Marketing sends the instrument out with a set of questions and wishes it luck.
There is a boring fix, and like most boring fixes, it works. Before the conversation, write down what you expect to hear. Word for word, on paper, where it can embarrass you later. After the conversation, compare. Count the sentences that surprised you. Zero surprises means you were not listening.
That double underline is years old now. I never managed to stop having an answer before the conversation starts. But I did stop letting it do the listening for me. These days the answer goes on paper first, before anyone gets the chance to confirm it.
An answer that cannot lose was never a question.