User research on a small budget

You don’t need a research team to learn what your customers need. You need a question, five conversations and the discipline to write down what people say rather than what you hoped they would say.

Our method fits in a week: two days to recruit from our own customer list, two days of half-hour calls, and a day to sort the notes into a spreadsheet. Five interviews will not tell you everything, but they will reliably tell you what you got wrong.