# Giff Constable's Talking to Humans: polite questions only get you a "yes" > This 2014 book says nothing about models or pipelines, but it teaches FDEs how to sit across from a customer and ask the right questions. Those questions decide whether a deployment solves the right problem. Original: https://fdetimes.net/en/books-courses/talking-to-humans-giff-constable-review/ The worst question an FDE can bring to a customer meeting sounds perfectly polite: "Do you think this tool would help you?" Almost everyone answers "yes". And that "yes" tells you nothing about what to build. *Talking to Humans* was written to cure exactly this habit. The book's official site describes it as a practical guide to the qualitative side of customer development, under the tagline: success starts with understanding your customers. For an FDE, that qualitative side is the first week on a customer site. You have to find the right people to ask, ask in a way that gets them to tell the truth, and then record enough detail for the whole team to rely on. The 2012 blog post the book grew out of already covers all three. ## Who wrote it, and where can you get it? Giff Constable wrote the book in 2014, with Frank Rimalovski. The download page says the ebook is given free to non-profits and schools through a sign-up form. Everyone else buys the Kindle or print edition. The blog post in question is "12 Tips for Early Customer Development Interviews", whose third revision was published in late 2012. If you want a taste before buying, read that post. The three ideas worth keeping below all appear in it. ## Every interview leads to the next one Constable advises against interviewing friends and family, because they skew the answers. On a customer site, the "friend" role usually belongs to the champion who signed the contract. They want the project to succeed, so they tend to describe the best-looking version of the process. His fix is practical: at the end of every session, try to get contacts for 1 to 3 more people. Do the arithmetic: you start with 3 people the champion introduces, and each one leads you to 1 to 3 more. After one round you have 3 to 9 additional conversations, most likely with the people who run the work day to day, the ones the org chart does not show you. On a customer site, the first step is tiny: paste the referral question at the end of your interview script, so you never forget to ask it. ## Ask about what happened, not for opinions The blog post is blunt: the initial goal is to learn, not to sell or pitch. To learn, ask about what people have actually done, not what they guess they would do or how they would feel. Then get them to tell you the story of how they ran into the problem. Imagine you are about to deploy an agent that triages complaint emails for the customer service team of a logistics company. "Would an agent that sorts emails automatically help you?" is both long and loaded with the answer you want to hear, exactly what Constable says to avoid: questions should be short and unbiased. Ask this instead: "The last time you got a difficult complaint email, what happened?" The answer will be a story with detail: how long the email sat in the shared inbox, who forwarded it to whom, how many systems had to be opened. Those details are the spec for the deployment, and also the baseline against which you will later measure its value. **Key point:** Ask customers about the last time they hit the problem, not what they think of the solution. ## Notes fade faster than you think Constable suggests bringing a note-taker if needed. He also warns that the details of a conversation fade very quickly, so if you are not recording, you must write your notes up immediately. For an FDE this matters even more than for a founder. Your notes are not just for you: product, ML engineers and the account team back home all depend on them. A line saying "customer finds email triage slow" helps nobody. A paragraph that retells that complaint-email story accurately, keeping the speaker's own words, is enough for the whole team to argue about what to prioritise. The simplest method: block 15 minutes in your calendar right after each session, purely for writing up. ## What mistakes do FDEs commonly make? The most common is pitching mid-session. The customer has just reached the part where the email was passed through three people, and you cut in: "Our agent handles exactly that." From that moment the interview becomes a sales call, and the customer starts giving the answers you want to hear. Jot the idea in the margin and save it for another meeting. The second is listening only to the champion. The person who signed the contract has reasons to tell the flattering version, just like the friends and family Constable warns against. If, after the first week, all your notes come from one person, that is a sign to ask for introductions now. The third is leaving notes until the end of the day. After four back-to-back sessions, the stories blur together, and all that remains are generic conclusions nobody can use. ## Who should read it, and in what order? The book suits engineers who have just moved into an FDE role, or are aiming for one: people who are good at building but have never led a discovery session. Read the 12 tips blog post first to get the main ideas in an evening, then read the book when you have a real customer meeting coming up, so you can apply it straight away. For your career, look for FDE job descriptions that mention customer discovery or working directly with customers. That is the skill this book trains. On your CV, don't write "good communicator"; be specific: the number of interviews you have led, and one technical decision that changed because of a story a customer told. The book will not teach you to write a single extra line of code. It teaches you which lines are worth writing, and for an FDE that is often the harder part. **Try this week:** - Take your current set of discovery questions and rewrite every one that starts with 'Do you think…' as 'The last time you…, what happened?'. - At your next customer meeting, use the last minute to ask: who else on the team hits this problem that I should talk to? - Schedule 15 minutes straight after every interview purely to write up your notes, before you open email or Slack. ## Sources - [Talking to Humans (official site)](https://www.talkingtohumans.com) - [Talking to Humans (download page)](https://www.talkingtohumans.com/download.html) - [12 Tips for Early Customer Development Interviews (Revision 3)](https://giffconstable.com/2012/12/12-tips-for-early-customer-development-interviews-revision-3/)