Publication - Brs29M7UiyS5TxujqJkMDOPcz9k2

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1 | Before We Begin: Slow Down Your Thinking
On any given day, your founder-mind is moving fast, so it doesn’t let you think strategically or creatively. Turning your focus toward an art  piece with ambiguous and complex themes is an opportunity to slow down your thinking and warm-up your analytical mind. Get into a critical-thinking mindset by spending a few moments examining this image with the questions below it. 

Image: 'TIL THE END OF TIME (2022) | Anthony White | American (1994 - ) | PLA (polylactic acid) on panel, 60 x 48 in. | Photo by Scott Leen 

Art looking guide
Why?
Describe the facts and elements


Can I name/identify the pop culture images? What other kinds of images are included, and how would I describe them? What kinds of patterns of theme, style, modalities can I identify? 
By starting with small facts and building up to a bigger perspective, you can pull apart a complex idea or problem. 


New ideas & solutions arise when you reference facts and observations.


Find the composition, systems and patterns
Consider the composition of the piece in terms of spacing, scale and space/volume. Are there clues about the era of the art piece? Can I separate out the layers— How many can I find? Can I find any ‘sections’ or framing within the composition? 
Brainstorm potential meanings
As you widen your perspective, what themes, moods and emotions come to mind? Stop for a moment to name them. In considering that this piece might mean, can I develop more than one possibility? 
State your point of view
Did I make any interesting discoveries by slowing down to examine the details? Do I have a title that goes along with an interpretation? 


2 | Special Exhibit: Customer Discovery Approaches
Customer discovery is where you determine if the problem that sparked your startup idea can actually generate customer value from a product you create.  Ideally, you seek out customer’s perspective, not infuse your own. This prepares you for unexpected insights and pathways that will shape your viewpoint.  Doing this requires lots of active listening and the skill of “reading between the lines” when engaging with prospective customers. Resisting the temptation to describe your product idea or (worse) try to make a sale, takes knowing what comes next – in customer development. 
When you do customer development work, the focus shifts to validating a proposed solution before building too much (or any of it.)  Mixing customer development and customer discovery usually leads to limited learning, confirmation bias and false starts. All of these drain your most valuable founder resource - time.  
For this issue, we’ll focus on customer discovery for enterprise software solutions that plan to solve existing business problems. This is where you are seeking to replace a bad situation/solution with your solution/product/service. Specifically, we’ll focus on how you discover insights related to the product, rather than broader “go to market” questions.
Because big problems don’t exist in tidy isolation, mapping the frequency and severity of adjacent problems and stakeholders may offer wedges and alternate places to build your earliest product as you refine your ideas and assumptions.  
Use these prompts to (gently) interrogate yourself about how you view approaching customer discovery, because it drives your early strategy decisions and use of limited resources. 
Have you found specific criteria for an ‘ideal customer persona” as the basis for your initial solution? Have you learned who is NOT your ideal customer? (But, maybe in the future.) 
Have you been structured about some key repeat questions during customer interviews in order to find patterns? How have you been deliberate about gathering inferences and observations?
How good are your conversational skills? Often, your starting question is “on the tennis court,” but you’re standing too far away from the ball. So, you have to figure out if you’re asking the right question.
For example, we played a game in a master’s level class where one student interviewed another student using a simple question as the starting point: “What is your favorite food to make at home?” 
We learned that the question itself was somewhat flawed. Students may have a favorite meal, but they don’t have a great place to cook. So, you might ‘miss’ that they love the taco truck in their neighborhood. And they could make food at home, but it isn’t their favorite food because their kitchen is tiny. Instead, they care about convenience.  
In addition to product features, have you learned about budget decisions, procurement and spending behavior related to this problem?  Do you know if your solution is tied to CapEx or OpEx? 
Can you describe your ideal customer’s top 2 problems, even if yours isn’t among them?  Asking for their assessment of how “severe” the problem is relative to these.  And why not solve one of these problems instead?
Have you mapped out the different roles and stakeholders involved in the problem, even if they may not directly touch/use/see your potential solution? 
Have you observed the problem first-hand to gather research? Why or why not? Primary research is invaluable for filing information gaps and gaining valuable insights. 
Did you discover what motivates people and processes in this space?  
Have you learned about their receptivity to new technology? 
Conducting a sufficient number of customer discovery interviews takes time and effort.  If you struggle to get enough customer discovery interviews, drill down on why this is. Because it means you’ll likely have trouble sourcing customers.  Creative solutions and putting yourself “out there” comes with the startup territory. Often, outbound cold emails don’t work, and you have to pick up the phone and make cold calls. Or, try something inventive and novel to gain access to their time and attention. 
What might be missing from your customer discovery approach?  
What's your mindset? 
Enterprise customer interviews can be detailed and repetitive, and you may be compelled to start building your intended solution rather than hit your target number of interviews.  Try putting yourself in role of helping your ideal customer– 
a. Get promoted 
b. Earn positive recognition 
c. Not get fired!
This framing sets you on a conversation path that gets  buyers’ attention. (“Not get fired” part means that your new billing solution doesn’t suddenly issue incorrect invoices.)

Practice idea: Interview a friend to practice uncovering problems to solve that would get them promoted, recognized and ‘not fired.’

How do I know when to move forward?
Use the questions below to check for common pitfalls for limiting the breadth and depth of this stage.
Subject matter experts who limit the volume of discovery interviews because they presume to know the problem already.  
Conducting too few interviews and treating it as a one-time exercise
Focusing on a weak problem – low frequency, low severity or both. 
Seeking confirmation of a pre-conceived solution rather than identifying and understanding the details of a problem that exists. 
Demoing a solution or outright selling something instead of learning from the customer. 
Asking customers to speculate about their future buying behavior (h/t the speculation is misleading or useless.) 
Narrowly focused on the systems and software people would be touching in your solution.  Avoiding discussions about other stakeholders and motivations for changing existing systems and spending. 
Good news, bad news. The customer discovery phase never really ends if you’re expanding your value proposition (a.k.a building your company.)  Interviewees who fit your ideal customer profile are also a terrific place to start customer development interviews. 
3 | Where do you go from here?
What would you do more of, less of and change about your customer discovery work? 
Assess your team’s mindset on customer discovery. What might you do to develop this within your team?
Use this short Poll to share your observations and feedback from thinking about customer discovery. 


Self-guided Tour: Customer Discovery (2025)

April 22, 2025 • My Project Name

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