Problem Interviews

To help with customer development, we're conducting problem interviews, as described by Ash Maurya.

Tips

• Face-to-face
• Neutral location
• Don’t record
• Use this script

Note: As codesy.io founders, we’re looking for the common problems that come up repeatedly across interviewees. Our solution is a marketplace that closes bugs in open-source software, but this interview is not about selling the solution (yet).

When does it make sense to choose open source project over closed?

What are some of the issues keeping the company from doing more open source projects? (both technical and business factors)

Do you use open source for projects with tight, frequent deadlines? Any issues?

On open source projects with time limitations, what do currently do to manage the timeliness? Success level?

Script

Set the stage - tell interview what you’ll ask them (below), and highlight the goal of the interview: To discover their problems using open-source software.

Test the customer segment by collecting demographics

• Job Title & Function
• Company
• Company size
• How many in-house developers? ** open-source vs. closed-source
• How many open-source projects do they use?
• Is there an existing budget for open-source software?
• How do they determine how much to pay for open-source software?

Set the problem context

Tell a story about when you hit a bug in open-source software, and the problems it caused.

e.g., Code for Tulsa working on the Tulsa Transit project and hit a 100 capture limit in python’s regular expression module; we worked around the limitation with a hack

e.g., we hit a bug using django south in MDN code; we forked and used a custom version of django-south to fix

The underlying problems are:

1. We don’t know enough about the code to fix it ourselves
2. We are too busy with other work and/or we don’t have time to wait for our fix to be merged

Test the problem

Ask interviewee if they have the same problems, and have them rank the problems by order of importance:

1. coding around bugs in open-source code
2. using custom forks of projects
3. other problems? (up to them)

Test the solution

Ask interview how they solve their problems now

no more script here, let them talk open-ended to find out how much they care about their problems with using open-source software. They could range the spectrum from “meh” to begging us to solve the problem for them

Ask for something

Tiny pitch for codesy.io: “We’re building a marketplace for the open-source software community that will encourage coders to fix bugs more quickly. You could post a bid amount on the bug, and codesy.io combines your bid with others to encourage the community to fix the bug. Do you want to be a first customer?”

Ask interviewee if they will do a solution interview when a prototype is ready

Ask interviewee if they will refer you to someone else who would want to do a problem interview

Template

Here's the [template for a codesy problem interview](Problem Interview Template)

Interviews

• [Jay Bonci, Akamai Technologies](Jay Bonci Problem Interview)
• [Chris Whitaker, Smart Chicago Collaborative](Chris Whitaker Problem Interview)
• [Mike Damerell, MRC Global](Mike Damerell Problem Interview)
• [Patrick Mee, Inadco](Patrick Mee Problem Interview)
• [Chris DiBona, Google](Chris DiBona Problem Interview)