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Also known as: customer development

Customer Discovery

FoundationalProductStrategies

Definition

Customer Discovery: Customer discovery is the process of validating business hypotheses by talking to potential customers. It involves identifying target customers, understanding their problems, and validating whether your solution addresses real needs before building the full product.

Example Usage

“After 50 customer discovery interviews, we realized the problem we were solving wasn't urgent enough.”

Common Misconceptions

Customer discovery ends when you have a product. It should continue throughout the company lifecycle.
Asking customers what they want is discovery. Focus on understanding problems, not collecting feature requests.
You need a product to do discovery. Discovery should happen before significant product investment.

Origin: Popularized by Steve Blank in The Four Steps to the Epiphany

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