Plan - Customer Discovery
Objective
A Proper customer discovery mindset and foundation at the onset of a project is an important factor in whether or not the finished product will be successful. We've witnessed the pain and agony of product teams having an idea, making assumptions about the solution, and convincing themselves that the market will immediately respond with glee to their dream "thing". They spend months and thousands of dollars building the perfect product. They launch it, and nothing happens. Customers don't flock to the product. People won't adopt it. It's a sad sight to watch from the sidelines.
Principles
We do customer discovery so we don't build something nobody wants. Do customer discovery early and often to validate your idea before you waste a bunch of time and money on things that won't produce a return on your investment.
Our Process
Here are the core practices that we follow when doing customer discovery:
- Turn your ideas into falsifiable hypotheses. The scientific method has been responsible for leading to some remarkeable discoveries over the years.
- Figure out how to test your hypotheses.
- Run your tests and obtain validated learning.
- Try not to invest in building a "polished" product until you've validated both your problem/solution and product/market fit.
Services & Tools
There is a ton off stuff out there, but here are some notable tools we like to use:
- Customer Empathy Maps - A great way to get inside the head of your target customers. Literally.
- Analogs, Antilogs, & Risks Board - This board helps you track your market research when it comes to competitors that are doing things worth emulating and those who are doing things you definitely want to avoid. It also serves as a way to prioritize and track the risks that, left unmitigated, would result in failure.
- Experiment Board - This is how we keep track of all the tests we have run, are running, or plan to run in the future; as well as the validated learning gained from completed experiments.
- Ethnio - If you have an existing web presence, this is a great tool for recruiting participants for user experience and customer interview research.\
- Usertesting.com - Get tester feedback in a matter of hours with the ability to select test groups based on demographics and behavioral categories.
- The Phone - Pick it up, call someone, and ask questions.
- Surveymonkey - This is a great tool, but it's only as good as the questions you ask and the people who answer them.
Learning Resources
Here is some required reading to get more background and context on running lean and customer discovery:
*** If adding these 5 books is too daunting for you, we'd recommend not trying to build a technical product.
