022: Lessons for Leaders Part 3, Using the Customer Discovery Process

Customer discovery is a key element of the business model generation process. In fact, customer discovery is probably the most important piece of the whole lean startup puzzle.

To quote The Startup Owner's Manual: “The number one goal of customer discovery amounts to turning the founders initial hypothesis about their market and customer into facts and the customer discovery process searches for a problem, a solution fit.”

Have you found a problem lots of people want you to solve in a compelling way?

In order to answer that question, you have to learn about your customers first. You can make all kinds of assumptions about them, but that's all you have at this point. You have to get out of the building and actually talk to them. In this episode, I will be going over the customer discovery process. I’ll share strategies, some ideas and insight on how to get started with the customer discovery process. 

We’ll dive deeper into these concepts:

What is your hypothesis, who do you want to learn from and about; defining your customer How to conduct a successful customer discovery interview Some sample customer discovery questions The qualitative part of customer discovery  Dissecting the information and making sense of what you learned

My challenge to you this week is two-fold, first take a look at the book, Talking to Humans, because I truly believe it’s a great resource. And second, try out a couple of the ideas proposed in this episode. Let me know how it goes, leave me a note in the comments. Next time I’ll be exploring the topic of describing your offer and connecting it to your customer's story. 

Resources and links mentioned:

The Startup Owner’s Manual

Talking to Humans, Giff Constable

The Ultimate List of Customer Development Questions, Mike Fishbein

The Innovator’s Dilemma

 

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I thank you so much for being here and I’ll see ya next time on Leading the Factory Forward.

— Lynn

 

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