Survey Guide

Surveys are a convergent tool, not an exploratory one — see A Note on Surveys in Explore the Community for why. Use this guide when you have a pain hypothesis to measure, in Validate Customer Pain.

Surveys are not just questionnaires — they are structured experiments in convergence.
They work best after you’ve uncovered pains through conversations and observation, helping you measure how widespread frustrations are and which matter most.

When to Use

To validate and rank insights from conversations or observations.
To measure prevalence of pains across a population.
To reach groups you cannot easily interview or observe.

Design Principles

Keep it short — 5–10 focused questions.
Ask about past and present, not hypotheticals or future desires.
Use ranking or rating scales (e.g., “Which was hardest?” or “Rate the difficulty from 1–5”).
Add one or two open-ended prompts (e.g., “What’s the hardest part of X?”).
Pilot test on a few respondents to catch bias or confusion.

The Targeted Poll — Narrowing Inside a Known Domain

A short poll dropped into a community where your people already gather — a Facebook group, a subreddit, a professional forum — is the one survey format that earns its place early. Not to discover a need, but to find the sharpest one inside a domain you have already entered.

What is the worst part of managing the chemicals in your hot tub?

Give four or five concrete options and put “other” at the bottom with a text box. Most respondents will rank what you listed. The chatty, generous few will type something you did not list, and that is where the value hides.

Use it to:

rank tasks or frictions inside a domain you have already been in the field on;
find the deepest of the pains people can already name;
feed an experience map when you cannot observe enough journeys first-hand.

Warning

Know what this biases toward. A poll surfaces the well-known pains and ranks them. That is useful, and it is not what this book is finally after — an unknown unmet need will almost never appear in a list you wrote. Treat a poll as a way to sharpen and prioritise, never as a substitute for time in the field. The “other” box is the only part that can surprise you, so always include it and always read it first.

Common Mistakes

Too long (fatigue → bad data).
Product-centric (“Would you buy this?”).
Future-focused (“Would you want a tool that…”).
Leading or loaded questions.

Success Signal

Your survey has done its job when it:

Clarifies which pains matter most.
Reveals how widespread they are.
Helps you prioritize which hypotheses to test next.