How to avoid being awkward when using The Mom Test

Hey Teela
I'm Sal. I started Founder Centric with Rob, the training company where we developed the techniques in the Mom Test (among others.)

You're right. Doing all this stuff at once can be awkward at first. If you find your own genuine curiosity in their life, then, your style of questioning and deflection will be natural. The harder part is recognizing a compliment as it happens. When you get good a catching them, it's natural to just accept it politely and go, "thanks, but I'm really still interested in what you were saying about how you..." You'll find your own words that feel right and aren't rehearsed. It's more about that, and not about committing a load of specific phrases to memory.

As for people wondering what's going on, why is this weirdo asking me so many questions? That depends a lot on the situation. If it's at a party, your interest in another human might be considered flirtatious, if it's at a networking event, it might be considered polite, etc. So at some point, when the attention comes to who you are and what you do, that's your chance to let them know why you're so interested in this topic. I usually say something that shows serious interest, but not too much progress, like, "I've actually been interested in how you guys work in that industry. I was thinking of a few software ideas but I realized I need to understand more about how you work before I think of a good one."

A pro tip: if you end up talking about your idea, you just need to be extra careful in "triangulating" what they suggest to their past behaviour. So if they make product feature suggestions, you can compare those later to what they tried for themselves and why. If you had built that feature, would that have really changed how they did things? If not, well, then it was just a fluffy idea.

At first, don't worry too much about directing everything in a question-answer way, just have interesting conversations with people and look for these moments.

The best way I've found to get people to improve is to review their notes after every 3-4 conversations, or every week, and ask themselves, "what did I miss? what do I now want to know about what they told me?" Then you'll naturally ask better questions the next round, and by the third review, you'll have the magic.

isn't there something inherently awkward about deflecting/ignoring every compliment while doing everything you can not to talk about your idea? At some point don't most people wonder what's going on?

I read the book a while ago so maybe my memory is bad, but here are my thoughts.

You sound like you're referring to a formal user interview or something, where you've intentionally contacted someone to talk about your idea. I think one of the points of the book was that you should be having casual, informal conversations and just digging into the pains that you think exist. If you were doing that, there is nothing to deflect, and no one even knows you have an idea. People just think you are curious and making conversation.

If you have to do a formal user interview, then yes it does get a bit difficult/awkward to not mention your idea. But when I was doing this, I would just try to last as long as I could without them asking "so what's your idea about?". You could also just give an honest answer to that and say "I'll tell you in a bit, but I just wanted to hear more of your thoughts about X first."