My favourite question when interviewing passionate early adopter users is the Magic Wand Question Amy Jo Kim showed me: “if you could wave a magic wand and change anything about this experience, what would you change?” It’s aspirational and inspirational. Sometimes I preface it with a caveat like “If technology and money were not issues”. Since we’ve spent our time together talking about the problem space and not the solution space, early adopters are already focused on the job they’re hiring this product to do, rather than the features of the product in question. I’ve heard some amazing answers to this question which redefined the trajectory the products took.

I was listening to Reid Hoffman interviewing Airbnb’s Brian Chesky on how to build scalable products by focusing on unscalably good experiences. Instead of the magic wand question, he asks “what could we do not to make this better but what could we do to make you tell everyone about this?” That’s a fantastic start to a new product journey.