High Level Thoughts

How to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. The Mom Test is an excellent guide to having useful customer conversations. Learn how customer conversations go wrong and what you can do to fix them. Validate the value of your business and find out when your big idea's not going to work, so you can save yourself from tragedy and pivot to a successful business. Learn which type of stakeholders will buy and which will waste your time and turn into "zombie leads". Learn important facts about your customers you can use to build your business.

Lesson Table of Contents

• How to Pass the Mom Test
• How to Avoid Bad Customer Conversation Data
• How to Ask Customers Important Questions
• How and Why You Should Keep Customer Conversations Casual
• How to Get Customer Commitment and Advancement
• Finding Useful Customer Conversations
• How to Choose Your Customers
• How to Run the Customer Interview Process

How to Pass the Mom Test

The measure of usefulness of an early customer conversation is whether it gives us concrete facts about our customers' lives and world views.

We find out if people care about our business idea by never mentioning it. Instead, we talk about them and their lives.

Eventually you do need to mention what you’re building and take people’s money for it. However, the big mistake is almost always to mention your idea too soon rather than too late.

Rules to pass the Mom Test

1. Talk about customers lives instead of your idea
2. Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
3. Talk less and listen more

The questions to ask are about your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals. You humbly and honestly gather as much information about them as you can and then take your own visionary leap to a solution. Once you’ve taken the leap, you confirm that it’s correct (and refine it) through getting commitment & advancement.

You aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

How to Avoid Bad Customer Conversation Data

Three Types of Bad Data

1. Compliments
2. Fluff (generics, hypotheticals, and the future)
3. Ideas

Sometimes we invite the bad data ourselves by asking the wrong questions, but even when you try to follow The Mom Test, conversations still go off track.

Once you start to notice, it’s easy to get back on track by deflecting compliments, anchoring fluff, and digging beneath ideas.

Deflect Compliments

The best way to escape the misinformation of compliments is to avoid them completely by not mentioning your idea. If they happen anyway, you need to deflect the compliment and get on with the business of gathering facts and commitments.

Instead of getting caught up in the emotional high of receiving a compliment, take these opportunities to ask for more detail.

Why is this interesting to you? When has this been helpful to you in the past? What else have you tried which failed to solve your problem? When's the last time you suffered this problem? How much money would this save you? How does this problem fit into your life?

If you don’t know, then you’ve got a compliment instead of real data.

Anchor Fluff

The 3 types of fluff you get in customer conversations:

1. Generic claims (“I usually”, "I always", "I never")  
2. Future-tense promises (“I would”, "I will")
3. Hypothetical maybes ("I might", "I could")

When someone starts talking about what they “always” or “usually” or “never” or “would” do, they are giving you generic and hypothetical answers that are bad data.

Instead of letting these important questions go without useful answers, bring them back to specifics in the past. Ask when it last happened, for them to talk you through it, how they solved it, and what else they tried.

The world’s most deadly fluff is: “I would definitely buy that.”

Folks are wildly optimistic about what they would do in the future. They’re always more positive, excited, and willing to pay in the imagined future than they are once it arrives.

The worst type of fluff-inducing question is, “Would you ever?” Of course they might. Someday. That doesn't mean they will.

Fluff-inducing questions to avoid:

• “Do you ever…”
• “Would you ever…”
• “What do you usually…”
• “Do you think you…”
• “Might you…”
• “Could you see yourself…”

"What do you usually…?" is the most dangerous of these questions because its focus on the past implies it would provide useful answers, but people aren't aware enough of their behavior to provide useful and reliable answers.

The mistake in asking a hypothetical fluff question is in valuing the answers, not asking the questions. Sometimes asking fluff questions can help transition into more concrete questioning.

How to transition from asking fluffy questions to a concrete ones:

“Do you ever X?” → “When’s the last time that happened?” → “Can you talk me through that?”

Customer conversations are like scientific experiments. You should test and try to disprove your hypothesis.

While using generics, people describe themselves as who they want to be, not who they actually are.

To determine if a problem is valuable to solve, you need data on whether customers are motivated enough to take action. Only past behavior demonstrates true willingness to behave this way in the future.

If customers don’t already care enough to try to solve their problem, they aren’t going to care about your solution.

Dig Beneath Customer Ideas

When you hear a customer ideas and requests, it’s your job to understand the motivations which led to it. You do that by digging around the question to find the root cause.

Questions to understand customer ideas and requests:

• Why do you want that?
• What's the pain you experience in your process?
• Why do you bother doing it this way?
• What's the goal you're trying to achieve?
• How are you coping without the solution you're asking for?
• How would that fit into your day?

You should dig around emotional signals to understand where they’re coming from. Any strong customer emotion is worth exploring. Is someone angry? Embarrassed? Overjoyed?

Questions to understand customer emotional signals:

• Tell me more about that.
• That seems to really bug you — I bet there’s a story here.
• What makes it so awful?
• Why haven’t you been able to fix this already?
• You seem pretty excited about that — it’s a big deal?
• Why so happy?

How to Ask Important Questions

Apply The Mom Test to the questions which matter.

In addition to ensuring that you aren’t asking trivialities, you also need to look for the world-rocking scary questions you’re shrinking from. The best way to find them is to run thought experiments. Imagine that the company has failed and ask why that happened. Then imagine it as a huge success and ask what had to be true to get there. Find ways to learn about those critical pieces.

It’s an important question when the answer to it could completely change (or disprove) your business. If you get an unexpected answer to a question and it doesn’t affect what you’re doing, it wasn’t a terribly important question.

Every time you talk to someone, you should be asking a question which has the potential to completely destroy your currently imagined business.

Love Bad News

One of the reasons we avoid important question is because asking them is scary. It can bring us the upsetting realization that our favorite idea is fundamentally flawed. Or that the major client is never going to buy.

If you have an exciting idea for a new product and go talk to a couple customers who don’t actually care about it, then that’s a great result. You just saved yourself however much time and money it would have cost to try building and selling it.

You’re searching for the truth, not trying to be right. And you want to do it as quickly and cheaply as possible. Learning that your beliefs are wrong is frustrating, but it’s progress. It’s bringing you ever closer to the truth of a real problem and a good market.

The worst thing you can do is ignore the bad news while searching for some tiny grain of validation to celebrate.

Some of the most informative (and thus best) responses you can get are along the lines of, “Umm, I’m not so sure about that” and "That's pretty neat." lukewarm responses which tell you they don’t care.

In this context, “best” means learning, not selling.

if you’re trying to decide whether to invest your time and money in developing, building and promoting that gadget, then lukewarm is a terrific response. It gives you a crystal clear signal that this person does not care. It’s perfectly reliable information you can take to the bank.

If customers are still engaged in the conversation after providing lukewarm responses, it’s worth asking a couple follow-up questions to understand the nature of their apathy. Is the “problem” not actually that big of a deal? Are they fundamentally different from your ideal customers? Do they not care about the specific implementation? Are they worn out and skeptical from hearing too many pitches, or are they just plain tired today?

After asking lukewarm respondents your followup questions, say a big thanks and leave them to their day. They’ve probably helped you more than the guy who said he loved it.

Look before you zoom

Another way we miss the important questions is by spending our time on ultimately unimportant details. This can happen when we get stuck in the details before understanding the big picture.

Most people have lots of problems which they don’t actually care enough about to fix, but which they’ll happily tell you the details of if you ask them. Before you have solid evidence that you’re fixing a meaningful problem for your customer segment, you can really mess yourself up by zooming in too quickly.

If you focus the conversation too quickly on one problem area, you can think you’ve validated a “top” problem when you haven’t. You just led them there.

“What are your big goals and focuses right now?” Products which solve problems on this list are infinitely more likely to get bought. We might alternately ask for major annoyances, costs, or joys.

It doesn’t hurt to ask leading questions when you’re about to abort the conversation anyway. If they come back with a positive, just be a little extra careful in making sure they aren’t lying.

Sometimes we know the problem exists as a top priority and we can safely zoom in immediately.

We can immediately zoom in on the problem if we are 100% certain it’s a must-solve problem which people are ready to pay for.

If we aren’t sure it’s a must-solve problem, we start more generic to see if they care at all about the problem category, in which case they’ll mention it.

“Have you looked into what your options are?”

When someone says they suffer from a problem and don't know what to do, it's easy to rush in with a solution, but that usually a mistake. To see if customers actually care enough to pay for a solution, you need to know if they have tried to solve the problem on their own.

When it’s not clear whether a problem is a must-solve-right-now (e.g. you’re selling a painkiller) or a nice-to-have (you’re selling a vitamin), you can get some clarity by asking cost/value questions.

Questions to find out if a problem matters to customers:

• “How much time do you spend on it each week?”
• “Which tools and services do you use for it?”
• “What are you already doing to improve this?”
• “What are the 3 big things you’re trying to fix or improve right now?"

Finding out whether the person we’re talking to is taking this problem seriously. Are they spending money or making money? Is it in their top 3 business focuses? Are they actively looking for solutions?

Find the Elephant in the Room

Successful startups tend to depend on avoiding multiple failure points.

If any of the conditions required to avoid these failing points doesn't exist, we have to significantly overhaul our idea. It's tempting to obsess over the most interesting of several failure points and ignore the others. It's a great way to miss important questions.

Understand the difference between product and market risk

• Product risk — Can I build it? Can I grow it? Will they keep using it?
• Market risk — Do they want it? Will they pay? Are there enough of them?

You don’t want to overlook one or the other.

If you’ve got heavy product risk (as opposed to pure market risk), then you’re not going to be able to prove as much of your business through conversations alone. The conversations give you a starting point, but you’ll have to start building product earlier and with less certainty than if you had pure market risk.

Prepare a list of 3 questions to ask each type of stakeholder

Pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person.

Pre-planning your big questions makes it a lot easier to ask questions which pass The Mom Test and aren’t biasing.

If we go through an unplanned conversation, we tend to focus on trivial stuff which keeps the conversation comfortable. Instead, decide what to ask with your team in a calm environment. Your 3 questions will be different for each type of person you’re talking to. If you have multiple types of customers or partners, have a list for each.

The “right” important questions will change. Just choose the 3 questions which seem murkiest or most important right now. Doing so will give you firmer footing and a better sense of direction for your next 3.

You'll experience overlap and repetition in the questions between the types of stakeholders you talk to, but you don’t need to repeat the full set of questions with every participant. Pick up where you left off from your previous customer conversations and validation efforts and keep filling in the picture.

Take advantage of good customer conversation opportunities when they come up.

Instead of running into that dream customer and asking to exchange business cards so you can “grab a coffee” (exactly like everyone else), you can just pop off your most important question. That goes a long way toward Keeping it Casual.

Keep Customer Conversations Casual

When you strip all the formality from the customer interview process, you end up with no meetings, no interview questions, and a much easier time.

You can go to a industry meet-up and leave with a dozen customer conversations under your belt, each of which provided as much value as a formal meeting.

The structure of separate problem/solution/sales conversations is critical for avoiding bias, but it’s important to realize that the first customer conversation doesn’t actually need to be a meeting.

Formal meetings can cause us to overlook perfectly good chances for serendipitous learning.

Learning from customers doesn’t mean you have to be wearing a suit and drinking boardroom coffee. Asking the right questions is fast and touches on topics people find quite interesting. You can talk anywhere and save yourself the formal meetings until you have something concrete to show.

How long should customer conversations last?

Early conversations are very fast. Chats grow longer as you move from the early broad questions (“Is this a real problem?”) toward more specific product and industry issues (“Which other software do we have to integrate with to close the sale?”).

It only takes 5 minutes to learn whether a problem exists and is important. Learning how someone currently achieves a certain goal or solves a problem is also quick.

Once you have a product and the meetings take on a more sales-oriented feel, you’ll want to start carving out clear blocks of 30+ minutes.

How to Get Customer Commitment and Advancement

In sales, moving a sales relationship to the next stage is called "advancement". It's pushing a customer into the next step of your real-world acquisition funnel. They'll either move forward or make it clear that they're not a customer. Both are good results for your learning.

When you fail to push for advancement, you end up with zombie leads: potential customers (or investors) who keep taking meetings with you and saying nice things, but who never seem to cut a check.

Symptoms of failing to advance the sales conversation:

• A pipeline of zombie leads
• Ending sales meetings with a compliment
• Ending sales meetings with no clear next steps
• Meetings which "went well"
• Customers haven't given up anything of value to demonstrate purchase interest

The difference between commitment and advancement:

• Commitment — Prospective customers are showing they’re serious by giving up something they value such as time, reputation, or money.  
• Advancement — Prospective customers are moving to the next step of your real-world funnel and getting closer to a sale.

Meetings succeed or fail

Every meeting either succeeds or fails. You've lost the meeting when you leave with a compliment or a stalling tactic. A meeting has succeeded when it ends with a commitment to advance to the next step.

If you leave meetings without commitment or advancement, you're probably making one of the following mistakes:

1. You're asking for their opinion about your idea (e.g. fishing for compliments)
2. You're not asking for a clear commitment or next steps

Commitment is important. It tells us whether people are actually telling the truth. The more they give us, the more we can trust what they say.

How to Measure Customer Commitment:

Commitment can be customers giving you cash, but it doesn't have to be.

A better way to think about commitment is what are they giving up for you?

A compliment costs them nothing, so it’s worth nothing and carries no data.

The major currencies of commitment are time, reputation risk, and cash.

Time commitments include:  

• Agreeing to a followup meeting with known goals
• Sitting down to give customer feedback
• Taking action outside meeting that demonstrates interest and can be measured

Reputation risk commitments include:

• Intro to peers or team
• Intro to a decision maker (boss, spouse, lawyer)
• Giving a public testimonial or case study

Financial commitments include:

• Letter of intent (non-legal but gentlemanly agreement to purchase)
• Pre-order
• Deposit

Sometimes, strong commitments combine multiple currencies, such as someone agreeing to run a paid trial with their whole team, thus risking their time, money, and reputation.

Just like compliments aren’t data when you’re trying to learn about a problem, they also aren’t progress when you’re trying to validate a product.

How to Fix a Bad Meeting

You fix sales meeting by forcing a next step (or rejection).

A lost meeting can often be saved by just pushing for a commitment at the end while you're being brushed off with a compliment.

Put them to a decision so you can learn whether you've found a must-have product and a real customer.

Don't pitch blind

Even once you've moved on to more product-focused sales meetings, you still want to start with some open-ended learning to get your bearings.

It will make the rest of the conversation much smoother, increases your chances of closing the deal, and also gives you ongoing learning even after you've got a product.

Hard pitching gives binary feedback: you either nailed it or you didn't. That's okay when you're making fine adjustments (tweak this feature) but bad for bigger questions (does anybody care at all about what I'm doing).

How to spot your first customers:

Keep an eye out for the people who get emotional about what you’re doing. There is a significant difference between: “Yeah, that’s a problem” and “THAT IS THE WORST PART OF MY LIFE AND I WILL PAY YOU RIGHT NOW TO FIX IT.”

Steve Blank calls them earlyvangelists (early evangelists). They are the people who:

• Have the problem
• Know they have the problem
• Have the budget to solve the problem
• Have already cobbled together their own makeshift solution

When someone isn’t that emotional about what you’re doing, it’s pretty unlikely that they’re going to end up being one of the people who is crazy enough to be your first customer. Keep them on the list, but don’t count on them to write the first check.

Whenever you see the deep emotion, do your utmost to keep that person close. They are the rare, precious fan who will get you through the hard times and turn into your first sale.

How to Find Useful Customer Conversations

Going to customers

Drumming up good conversations from cold leads is hard. It’s doable and sometimes you have no choice, but it’s far from ideal.

The goal of cold conversations is to stop having them. You hustle together the first one or two from wherever you can, and then, if you treat people’s time respectfully and are genuinely trying to solve their problem, those cold conversations start turning into warm intros.

If it sounds weird to unexpectedly interview people, then that's only the case because you're thinking of it as an interview instead of a conversation.

If it’s not a formal meeting, you don’t need to make excuses about why you’re there or even mention that you’re starting a business. Just have a good conversation.

Bringing customers to you

When you are finding ways to sneak into customer conversations, you're always on the back foot. You made the approach, so they are suspicious and trying to figure out if you're wasting their time. Instead, we can look for ways to separate ourselves from the crowd so they can find us.

Bringing people to you also makes them take you more seriously and want to help you more.

Organize meetups

For marginally more effort than attending an event, you can organize your own and benefit from being the centre of attention.

Nobody ever follows this recommendation, but it’s the first thing I would do if I got moved a new industry or geography. It’s literally the most unfair trick I know for rapid customer learning. It also instantly boosts your industry credibility.

Speak and Teach

Find chances at conferences, workshops, through online videos, blogging, or doing free consulting or office hours.

You'll refine your message, get in touch with a room full of potential customers who take you seriously, and will learn which parts of your offering resonate (before you’ve even built it). Then simply chat up the attendees who are most interested.

Fitzpatrick, Rob. The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you (Kindle Locations 1206-1208). Kindle Edition.

Write and Blog

If you have a reasonably sized and relevant blog audience, lining up conversations is a non-issue. You just write a post about it and ask people to get in touch. Of course, not everyone has a relevant audience. That’s one big reason to start blogging to your customers today.

Blogging about an industry is also a good exercise to get your thoughts in a row. It makes you a better customer conversationalist.

Asking for and Framing the Meeting

Sometimes a proper meeting can't be avoided.

If you don’t know why you’re there, it becomes a sales meeting by default, which is bad for 3 reasons.

1. Customers close up about some important topics like pricing.
2. Attention shifts to you instead of them
3. It’s going to be the worst sales meeting ever because you aren’t ready.

There are a lot of bad ways to frame the meeting, both when first asking for it and once it begins. Questions like, "Can I interview you" or "Thanks for agreeing to this interview" both set set off alarm bells that this meeting is going to be super boring.

The common, "Can I get your opinion on what we're doing?" sets expectations of neediness and that you want compliments or approval. No expectations at all are set by, "Do you have time for a quick coffee/lunch/chat/meeting?" which suggests you're liable to waste my time.

The Mom Test's Meeting Ask framework:

1. Vision - You're an entrepreneur trying to solve horrible problem X, usher in wonderful vision Y, or fix stagnant industry Z. Don't mention your idea.
2. Framing - Frame expectations by mentioning what stage you're at and, if it's true, that you don't have anything to sell.
3. Weakness - Show weakness and give them a chance to help by mentioning your specific problem that you're looking for answers on. This will also clarify that you're not a time waster.
4. Pedestal - Put them on a pedestal by showing how much they, in particular, can help. Mention their background or expertise with the problem you're facing.
5. Ask - Ask for help.

Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask

People like to help entrepreneurs. But they also hate wasting their time.

Once the meeting starts, you have to grab the reins or it's liable to turn into them drilling you on your idea, which is exactly what you don't want. To do this, I basically repeat what I said in the email and then immediately drop into the first question. If someone else made the intro, use them as the voice of authority.

How many meetings should you have?

Keep talking to people until you stop hearing new information.

That could take as few as 3-5 conversations if you have a relatively simple industry and a focused customer segment. If you’ve run more than 10 conversations and are still getting results that are all over the map, then I’d guess that your customer segment is too fuzzy and could stand to be tightened up.

How to Choose Your Customers

They say that startups don’t starve, they drown. You never have too few options, too few leads, or too few ideas. You have too many. You get overwhelmed. You do a little bit of everything.

When it comes to avoiding drowning and making faster progress, good customer segmentation is your best friend.

Segmentation

If you start too generic, everything is watered down. Your marketing message is generic. You suffer feature creep. Google helped PhD students find obscure bits of code. EBay helped collectors buy and sell Pez dispensers. Evernote helped moms save and share recipes.

When you have a fuzzy sense of who you’re serving, you end up talking to a lot of different types of people, which leads to confusing signals and three problems:

1. You get overwhelmed by options and don’t know where to start
2. You aren’t moving forward but can’t prove yourself wrong
3. You receive incredibly mixed feedback and can’t make sense of it

Before we can serve everyone, we have to serve someone. By thinking about who would be most likely to buy, founders realize how their businesses are most likely to succeed.

Customer Slicing

If you’ve already got a product and users, you can explore your way to a good segment by seeing who likes it and focusing on that group.

Take a segment and then keep slicing off better and better sub-sets of it until you’ve got a tangible sense of who you can go talk to and where you can find them.

Start with a broad segment and ask:

• Within this group, which type of this person would want it most?
• Would everyone within this group buy/use it, or only some of them?
• Why do they want it? (e.g. What is their problem or goal)
• Does everyone in the group have that motivation or only some of them?
• What additional motivations are there?
• Which other types of people have these motivations?

This gives us two groups of segments:

1. A collection of quite specific demographic groups
2. A series of motivations

When we look at them, some will be more generic than others. Go back through the generic ones and keep slicing.

Next look at our groups’ behaviors and figure out where to find them.

• What are these people already doing to achieve their goal or survive their problem?
• Where can we find our demographic groups?
• Where can we find people doing the above workaround behaviors?

Are any of these groups un-findable? If so, go back up the list and slice them into finer pieces until you know where to find them. A customer segment isn’t very useful if there’s no way you can get in touch!

Start off by focusing on the customer slices who seem most:

1. Profitable
2. Easy to reach
3. Rewarding for us to build a business around

Talking to the Wrong People

There are 3 ways founders end up talking to the wrong people:

1. You have too-broad of a segment and are talking to everyone
2. You have multiple customer segments and missed some of them
3. You are selling to businesses with a complicated buying process and have overlooked some of the stakeholders

How to Run the Customer Interview Process

Even if you do everything else right, you can get bad results if you don’t have the right process wrapped around your conversations. If you just show up to meetings and hope for the best, you aren't making a good use of anyone's time. You need to do a little bit of work before and after to extract full value.

When all the customer learning is stuck in someone’s head instead of being disseminated to the rest of the team, you’ve got a learning bottleneck.

Share customer conversation data with your team, not just the insights you made personally from that interaction.

Customer learning has to be shared with the entire founding team, promptly and faithfully. That relies on good notes plus a bit of pre- and post-meeting work.

How to Prep for Customer Conversations

Your most important preparation work is to ensure you know your current list of 3 big questions. Figure them out with your team and make a point to face the scary questions.

If you’ve already learned the facts of your customer and industry, then you should also know what commitment and next steps you are going to push for at the end of the meeting.

It’s easier to guide the conversation and stay on track if you have an existing set of beliefs that you’re updating. Spend up to an hour writing down your best guesses about what the person you’re about to talk to cares about and wants.

Prep questions to unearth hidden risks:

• If this company were to fail, why would it have happened?
• What would have to be true for this to be a huge success?

How to Review Customer Conversations

After a conversation, just review your notes with your team and update your beliefs and 3 big questions as appropriate.

• Which questions worked and which didn’t?
• How can we do better next time?
• Were there any important signals or questions we missed?

Just like prepping, reviewing is so simple that it sounds like a non-step. It’s tempting to skip it. Don’t! The review is important.

Who should attend customer conversation review meetings

Everyone on the team who is making big decisions (including tech decisions) needs to go to at least some of the meetings.

You’ll all learn a ton from hearing customer reactions first-hand occasionally. You’ll also be able to help each other catch and fix your conversation mistakes and biases.

Meetings go best when you've got two people at them. One person can focus on taking notes and the other can focus on talking. As the second person, sometimes you'll notice the lead asking bad questions or missing a signal they should be digging into. Just jump in and fix them.

Don’t send more than two people unless it’s group-on-group or you’ve got a particularly good reason to do so.

Going in solo is fine once you get good at taking concise notes. The main problem of running solo is that it's harder to catch yourself and recover once you start going off-track asking bad questions or missing the point.

You can't outsource or hire someone to do customer learning. There are exceptional team dynamics where it works, but generally speaking, the founders need to be in the meetings themselves.

How to write down customer conversation notes.

When possible write down exact customer quotes. Wrap them in quotation marks so you know it's verbatim.

What to write down:

• Customer emotions. Watch out for emotions show on their face and not just in their words. Shifting of conversation pace also indicates emotion.
• Pains and obstacles. These carry a lot more weight when someone is embarrassed or angry about them.
• Sales process specifics. Purchasing criteria. Money budgets or purchasing process. Mentions of other stakeholders involved in sales decision or competing vendors.

Write down specific names and companies. If it’s someone they know, ask for an intro at the end of the conversation. If it’s a competitor or alternate solution, write it down to research it later.

Put a big star on items to follow-up on after the meeting, especially next steps you promised as a condition of their advancement/commitment.

Customer note requirements:

• Able to be sorted, mixed, and re-arranged
• Able to be combined with the notes of the rest of your team
• Permanent and retrievable
• Not mixed in with other random noise like to do lists and ideas

If it’s totally inappropriate to take notes during the chat, just have the conversation and then immediately retreat to a corner to write down what was said.

It can come across as rude to take notes directly on a computer during a meeting, but it’s way better than losing your learning in an off-topic notebook.

If you do want to use audio, you’ll find people are surprisingly willing to be recorded.