Talking to Humans by Giff Constable, published in 2014, is a short guide to customer discovery for entrepreneurs and people building new products inside companies. Constable wrote it in partnership with Frank Rimalovski, who edited it, and cartoonist Tom Fishburne illustrated it. The book later received a special award from the National Science Foundation and is shared free with non-profit and educational groups.
What is Talking to Humans about?
Constable, a product leader and founder, starts from a simple observation. Founders know they should talk to customers, yet most have never been taught how. They pitch instead of listen, talk to friends instead of strangers, and come back with opinions that confirm what they already believed.
The book opens with a short story about two founders running customer research for the first time, making typical mistakes and slowly getting better. The how-to part follows: choosing which customers to learn from, finding people to interview, running a good session, making sense of what you heard and avoiding the common errors. It is short enough to read in an hour, and the cartoons make the advice stick.
What sets it apart is its practicality for complete beginners. It reads like a field guide you can hand to a new team member on Monday and expect them to run decent interviews by Friday. A sequel, Testing with Humans, moves on to experiments.
What are the main lessons for founders?
- List your assumptions first. Write down what must be true about the customer, the problem and the solution. The interviews exist to test those statements.
- Pick early adopters. Talk first to people who feel the problem strongly and are already trying to fix it. They give clearer signals than the average buyer.
- Find people outside your circle. Friends and family want to be supportive. Use communities, events, forums and cold outreach to reach strangers who match your target.
- Ask about real stories. Questions about the last time something happened get facts. Questions about future intentions get polite guesses.
- Make sense of the notes fast. Debrief straight after each interview, then look for patterns across sessions before deciding what to change.
Who should read Talking to Humans?
It fits founders at the very first stage, students in entrepreneurship courses, corporate teams launching new ideas and anyone who must run interviews without a research background. Because it is so short, it also works as a shared reading for a whole team before a round of interviews.
You can skip it if you have already read The Mom Test and run dozens of interviews. The two books overlap a lot, and this one goes less deep on question technique.
How do you put Talking to Humans to work this week?
- Write your five riskiest assumptions about the customer and the problem.
- Find 8 people who match your early adopter profile through online communities or events, and book 30-minute conversations.
- Run the interviews in pairs, debrief within an hour of each one and note which assumptions held up.
If you have no co-founder to interview with, the AI co-founder Elona on Fe/male Switch can help you prepare questions and sort your notes afterwards.
Where does Talking to Humans fall short?
The brevity that makes it easy also limits it. Complex business sales with many decision roles, regulated markets and consumer products with large audiences all get light treatment. The book stops at interviews, so it says little about turning findings into tests with money on the line. Testing Business Ideas and The Right It take you from conversation to experiment, and The Mom Test goes deeper on how to phrase questions.