discovery
![Brian Piercy](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="%230A66C2"><path d="M20.447 20.452H16.89v-5.569c0-1.328-.027-3.037-1.852-3.037-1.853 0-2.136 1.445-2.136 2.939v5.667H9.351V9h3.414v1.561h.046c.477-.9 1.637-1.85 3.37-1.85 3.601 0 4.267 2.37 4.267 5.455v6.286zM5.337 7.433a1.982 1.982 0 1 1 0-3.964 1.982 1.982 0 0 1 0 3.964zm1.782 13.019H3.555V9h3.564v11.452zM22.225 0H1.771C.792 0 0 .774 0 1.729v20.542C0 23.227.792 24 1.771 24h20.451C23.2 24 24 23.227 24 22.271V1.729C24 .774 23.2 0 22.222 0h.003z"/></svg>)
Many startups chase product-market fit as if it’s a moment of discovery. But for deep-tech founders, the journey is often much longer.
A step-by-step guide to making de novo binders.
Notes from an AI founder taking a swing at a hundred-billion-dollar incumbent.
Your product isn't failing because of bad design. It's failing because your team is designing in clarity while your users are drowning in chaos. The gap between how you think users behave and how they actually feel their way through your product is quietly breaking every flow, feature, and conversion you build. And it starts long before any user ever clicks a button.
A step-by-step path to validate your idea fast by defining the problem, testing assumptions, prototyping the critical flow, and shaping a focused MVP you can learn from.
Founders share the unconventional ways they found conviction in their startup ideas.
Example: Dev = user; CTO = buyer
How do you spot the wrong customer before they burn your roadmap? First Round Partner Meka Asonye digs into how now-massively successful startups cracked the code.
More than a century after the invention of vaccines, a veterinarian stumbled across a technique to boost their efficacy in an unlikely way — by observing wounded horses.
Gain better strategic foresight and turn future possibilities into actionable insights with horizon scanning.
Discovery is challenging; it can be hard to know what to research, how to do discovery as a team, and how to get buy-in. Follow these 7 tips for smoother discovery efforts.
This is a series where we delve into the world of product management. This week we discuss the art of understanding your users.
Embarking on a new software development project is similar to setting sail on uncharted waters. While the destination might be
Lessons learned from a year of startup life.
And how can you figure it out what they really need
Try those 9 techniques and improve discoverability in your product. Make your users happy and create a smooth ux for them.
How Data Scientists can learn from how a Product Manager prioritizes features and requirements to build a successful product.
General Partner Connie Chan on how leading brands are using AI and other technology to combine the serendipitous discovery of offline shopping with the infinite options of online shopping. Today, most of the Western world revolves around search-based online commerce. This means that most shoppers type directly what they want into a store search bar,...
Over the past three years Pinterest has experimented with several visual search and recommendation services, including Related Pins (2014), Similar Looks (2015), Flashlight (2016) and Lens (2017)....
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step Lǎozi 老子 I just had lunch with Shenwei, one of my ex-students who had just taken a job in a mid-sized consulting firm. After a bit of catch…
What is an Opportunity Solution Tree? Learn more about opportunity solution trees and the 4 steps involved in creating them.
Word of mouth is powerful... but this follow-up question allows you to harness that power to supercharge your marketing. Use it wisely and carefully.
In the last year, millions of people have bought a copy of 50 Shades. Here's the thing: they didn't all do it at the same time. Some people bought it when it was a self-published ebook. O…
The product management and startup worlds are buzzing about the importance of "validation". In this entry, I'll explain how this idea orig...
Criticizing Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs is like speaking out against motherhood and apple pie. The last time I criticized VOC programs, someone left a comment chastising me for presuming that a bank could know what its customers wanted without asking them.
Hubstaff founder Dave Nevogt shares how to test your startup idea by analyzing model, market and concept.
Conversations with customers are valuable, but they have to be the right type of conversations – not merely questions about forgotten passwords and the like. They have to add value, for you, and them.
Hits are more valuable than ever, mostly because they're more rare than ever. The Zipf Distribution, also described in Chris Anderson's Long Tail, helps us understand just how valuable hi…
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It's OK to ask a B2B prospect if they would use your product during customer discovery. Just don't to stop at "Yes" and assume validation or a likely sale.
Teams that build continuous customer discovery into their DNA will become smarter than their investors, and build more successful companies. — Awhile back I blogged about Ashwin, one of my ex…
An online Game of Thrones quiz got a million online hits for HBO.
Pricing is one of the most challenging decisions for any startup. One of the simplest ways of discovering customer willingness to pay is simply to ask them. At first blush, that might seem a reasonable and effective solution, it is prone to wild inaccuracy. Absolute pricing judgments are hard without reference points. For example: How much would you be willing to pay for a new iPhone? It’s a very challenging question to answer in the abstract.
Apple has carefully guarded the podcast directory, persuading podcasters that ‘winning’ here is the shortcut to building a popular podcast. But they’re terrible at introducing pod…
Preface: the assumption for this essay is that you're building a B2B app, and you have something built but you're having trouble getting people to pay for it There are three problems with getting your first few customers: You (probably) don't know how to sell things You don't know who you're selling to You don't even really know what you're selling Nobody tells you how to answers these questions, and so most people go out
Michael Sippey has been building tech products for over 20 years. His most valuable ideas, though? They came from speaking with customers. Here's how.
‘The Problem with…’ series covers controversial topics related to efforts to improve healthcare quality, including widely recommended but deceptively difficult strategies for improvement and pervasive problems that seem to resist solution. The ‘5 whys’ technique is one of the most widely taught approaches to root-cause analysis (RCA) in healthcare. Its use is promoted by the WHO,1 the English National Health Service,2 the Institute for Healthcare Improvement,3 the Joint Commission4 and many other organisations in the field of healthcare quality and safety. Like most such tools, though, its popularity is not the result of any evidence that it is effective.5–8 Instead, it probably owes its place in the curriculum and practice of RCA to a combination of pedigree, simplicity and pedagogy. In terms of pedigree, ‘5 whys’ traces its roots back to the Toyota Production System (TPS).9 It also plays a key role in Lean10 (a generic version of TPS) as well as Six Sigma,11 another popular quality improvement (QI) methodology. Taiichi Ohno describes ‘5 whys’ as central to the TPS methodology:The basis of Toyota's scientific approach is to ask why five times whenever we find a problem … By repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear. The solution, or the how-to, is designated as ‘1H.’ Thus, ‘Five whys equal one how’ (5W=1H). (ref. 9, p. 123) This quote also makes the case for the technique's simplicity. Asking ‘why’ five times allows users to arrive at a single root cause that might not have been obvious at the outset. It may also inspire a single solution to address that root cause (though it is not clear that the ‘1H’ side of the equation has been adopted as widely). The pedagogical argument for …
I’ve been working on a marketing automation tool (more on that at the end of the post). Or rather, I’ve been working on an idea for a marketing automation tool as I don’t want a single line of code written before I’d experienced a notable pull from target customers. (This may sound like I am clever/…
A conversation with Bruce La Fetra on customer interviews. We compare notes on how to organize findings and take best advantage of the insights gleaned.
Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.
Great insight moves your career, organization, or business forward. The problem? Most people are terrible at asking questions. Learn from the pros how to do it right.
Forrester is a leading global market research company that helps organizations exceed customer demands and excel with technology. Learn how Forrester can help.
There has been a lot of discussion in the design world recently about "change aversion." Most of the articles about it seem to be targeting the new Google redesign, but I've certainly seen this same discussion happen at many companies when big changes aren't universally embraced by users.
If you are building a product, you should always speak with customers and test your idea before. But you probably don’t know that *you *might be making some of the most common mistakes when running your experiments. Mistakes include testing the wrong aspect of your business, asking the wrong questions and neglecting to define a criterion for success. In this article, Grace Ng will show you a guide to designing quick, effective, low-cost experiments.
If you’re worried that your employees are eyeing the door, it’s time to start having some important career-defining conversations. In this piece, executive coach Susan Peppercorn outlines five questions to start asking your direct reports so that you can get a better sense of how they’re feeling about their positions: 1) How would you like to grow within this organization? 2) Do you feel a sense of purpose in your job? 3) What do you need from me to do your best work? 4) What are we currently not doing as a company that you feel we should do? 5) Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? When managers make checking in with these five questions a regular part of how they interact with their employees, it helps ensure that people feel seen and valued. And when managers help individuals on their teams feel that way, they’re more likely to be rewarded by employees who become advocates for the department and organization, no matter how long they stay.
Common mistakes to avoid when you’re getting started with experimentation
From the high-level perspective of what makes for a great design leader, to the tactical suggestions around the slide that needs to be in your portfolio presentation, Twilio & Segment's Hareem Mannan shares useful advice for every stage of a designer's career.
Almost exactly a year ago, I started a little boutique software company called Report Card Writer. As the name suggests, my flagship software product does pretty much one thing: it helps teachers write report card comments faster. Its core technical functionality is part survey form, part template-filler-inner, with a few extra bolt-on features that make it easy to create and populate the form and template, respectively.
Every week, I talk with CEOs who tell me they want to speed up innovation. In fact, they want to schedule it. Recently a product leader shared with me an OKR to ship one major innovation each quarter, measured as “users will give each innovative feature a top rating.” This
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How to ask better questions.
And why your data science team needs it.
It’s so important to test your new product idea long before you feel ready.
Unlock valuable insights for effective discovery by decoding product metrics. Learn how to leverage these metrics to make informed decisions and optimize your product development process.
After more than 45 years as an off-pricer, the retailer hit the skids when COVID-19 forced its doors shut and zeroed out revenue. Now it hopes to slim down in Chapter 11.
We should invest at least as much time in understanding our customers as we do in optimizing our product development process.
Google, Microsoft, et al continue to perfect their search engines – but too often search is not enough. The watchword
Confirming what people already believe can sometimes help organizations overcome barriers to change.
Dear designers/marketers (and innocent person reading this note), So, you’re doing customer interviews and user research, good for you! You’ve joined the fold of responsible, empathetic, and effective product design and marketing professionals. But you sound like a robot when you email me. Here are some questions from user testing emails & surveys I’ve received […]
or, Competitive Research the Creative Founder Way For a long time, I’ve been disappointed by competitive research approaches. Most strike me as a bunch of bumbling around and seeing what you see… s…