2. Customer Discovery

Customer discovery is the deliberate practice of studying the workflow patterns of your typical customer to understand their motivations, logic and frustrations, in order to improve and streamline it using technology.

When this study is done well, a ‘researcher’ will observe key pain points, but also opportunities to delight and amaze a customer subject. They will uncover the ‘sharpest’ problems to solve for that customer.

The best product companies make customer discovery a core part of their DNA. PLG companies need to invest in the ability to continually study customer for insights into what matters most to most of them.

Simple 3-Step Customer Discovery Process:

Customer discovery isn’t just about asking questions, but asking the right questions. This iterative process can be completed in less than a week with the proper focus.

Understanding

Select 5-10 representative customers and schedule them for 30-45 minute meetings.

In these meetings, ask exclusively environment and motivational questions — title, position in the company, what they were hired for, who sets their agenda, how the day flows, how payments are made for current software, what creates toil and pain, etc.

Result: More structured, targeted questions that pinpoint the target workflows that should yield suggestions of the key problems to solve.

Targeting

Select 5-10 representative customers and schedule them for 30-45 minute meetings.

Ask the targeted questions you discovered in Step 1

Make sure to ask the questions in a consistent way to understand variations and see if areas of inquiry are on target or off base.

Result: A sense of parts of the workflow that can be optimized profitably.

Quantifying

Select 20-80 representative customers

Send them a set of even better-refined questions as a survey

Note: the best surveys are actually short

Result: Turn your qualitative insights into data-backed evidence on the sharpest problems to solve.