Triangulating UX: Why You Need Multiple Lean Startup Tools
Your customers are lying to you. (Well, sort of.)
By Tristan Kromer · Quick Answer: Don’t rely solely on customer development interviews to understand your users — triangulate by combining multiple lean startup tools like usability testing, A/B testing, concierge testing, cohort analysis, and contextual inquiry. Users are often inconsistent or misleading, so each tool gives us only one directional signal. Start by talking to customers first, layer in additional methods to cross-validate, then go back and talk to people again with better questions. And always get a second perspective — as product managers, we can’t see our own blind spots.
- Lean Startup Tools 
I’m a massive fan of 1-customer-development-tips/Customer Development, Steve Blank’s fantastic contribution to creating new businesses. Steve frequently reminds us to “Get Out of the Building” and go talk to customers. But that cannot be the only tool in our toolbox. Users are wily and/or chronically incoherent. Sometimes they say things that just don’t make a bit of sense. Sometimes they say things that make a ton of sense but are completely false. Sometimes we hear what they’re saying but don’t listen to the meaning.
A Toolbox for Lean Startup Tools
Using just one tool like Customer Interviews or a survey gives you one piece of information that represents a general direction and arc of where the ideal User Experience might be. You’ve narrowed your search.
- Usability testing
- Customer Development
- Customer Personas
- Minimum Viable Product
- Concierge Testing
- A/B testing
- Cohort analysis
- Mental Models
- Contextual Inquiry
- Design Anthropology
- …and yes…even surveys.
(Note: I got most of this list from LUXr.co and I highly recommend their stuff on Lean UX)
Start with People, Never End
Please do go out and talk to your customers. It’s critical. It’s the first thing you should be doing. You won’t even know what questions you should be asking on your endlessly fine tuned (and probably useless) survey until you talk to a few customers. But THEN… Now go back and talk to people. You’ll have a whole new set of questions to ask.
Four Eyes Principle
Finally, get a second perspective. A second opinion with different assumptions will ask different questions, hear different answers, and help you zero in on where your product needs to go. We can’t see our own typos, we can’t find the whitespace error that’s crashing our app, what makes us presume that we are the end all, be all opinion on our customers? Be a Minimum Viable Team.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the most important lean startup tools for understanding users?
A comprehensive lean startup toolbox includes customer development interviews, usability testing, customer personas, MVP testing, concierge testing, A/B testing, cohort analysis, mental models, contextual inquiry, design anthropology, and surveys. As product managers, we need to use multiple tools rather than relying on just one, because each gives us only one piece of the puzzle for understanding the ideal user experience.
Why isn’t customer development enough on its own?
While customer development is critical and should be the first thing we do, users are often inconsistent — they say things that don’t make sense, or say things that sound right but are completely false. Sometimes we hear their words but miss the meaning. By triangulating with other methods like usability testing, A/B testing, and contextual inquiry, we can cross-validate what customers tell us and zero in on the real user experience.
What order should you use lean startup tools for UX research?
Start by talking to customers directly through customer development interviews. This is critical because we won’t even know what questions to ask on a survey until we’ve spoken with real people first. Then layer in other tools like usability testing, A/B testing, or cohort analysis to validate and refine what we’ve learned. After that, go back and talk to people again — we’ll have a whole new set of questions.
Why do you need a second perspective when doing customer research?
We can’t see our own typos or find the whitespace error crashing our app, so why would we assume we’re the definitive opinion on our customers? A second person brings different assumptions, asks different questions, and hears different answers. This “Four Eyes Principle” helps us zero in on where our product actually needs to go. As the article puts it, be a Minimum Viable Team.
What is triangulating user experience and why does it matter?
Triangulating user experience means using multiple lean startup tools — not just one — to converge on the right product direction. Any single tool like customer interviews or surveys only gives us a general direction. By combining methods like concierge testing, contextual inquiry, and A/B testing, we narrow our search from multiple angles and build a much more accurate picture of what users truly need.
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