Customer Discovery

Customer discovery is the practice of talking to prospective users to learn whether a problem is real before building for it. The saved material is mostly about how it goes wrong:

• A product-management story thread follows a PM who “diligently talks to customers,” hears yes, gets staffing, and then sees hardly any adoption; the product is eventually sunset with “We haven’t failed, we have learnt.” The thread’s two leading explanations are that the product should not have been built, or that it was ill-conceived from the start.
• Mike Adams’s long-form guide, with a contribution from Rob Fitzpatrick, says “get out of the building” and “talk to your users” are the most common start-up advice, but that users lie. The failure modes include asking the wrong questions and remembering the wrong thing.
• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick is the book-length treatment: how to talk to customers when everyone is lying to you.
• Kyle’s own essays on the first customer conversations: I finally talked to a customer…and it was hard. and Validation Trepidation: Don’t Be Afraid to Do Something. Anything!.

Where this appears

Essays

• I finally talked to a customer…and it was hard.
• Validation Trepidation: Don’t Be Afraid to Do Something. Anything!

Books to read and people

• The Mom Test
• Rob Fitzpatrick

Tweets

• A B2B Product Management Story… (tweet)
• ✨ Dusting Off My Old… (tweet)