Should startups assume they already know how their product delivers value, or must they discover the granular, customer-specific job it is being used for?

David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022

Good customer discovery is repeatedly asking why and situating the question in context — when did you last have this problem, what did you do without our product — rather than asking pointed questions about a screen

Users are real human beings with holistic lives, and their answer to a narrow question may depend on unrelated things happening that morning, so you need to understand their problems holistically

19:41 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb

Marty Cagan · Dec 7, 2022

Qualitative research should hunt for all the reasons customers would not use the product rather than seek affirmation, because that is far more useful for accelerating to something that resonates

Reasons for rejection are more helpful input to the team's model than validation; naive founders do the opposite and look for affirmation

Scope: it doesn't directly tell you what to do; there is no guarantee you ever get there

22:12 20 Product: Marty Cagan on The Four Questions of Great Product Management, Product Lessons from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and eBay's Pierre Omidyar & The Difference Between Truly Great Product Teams and the Rest

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Good customer research questions explore the customer's life around a problem area rather than asking about the problem or pitching a solution directly

Customers don't realize when they're using workarounds or making do; you have to observe around the problem and synthesize it yourself

8:44 20Product: Nubank's CPO on Why Product is 90% Science and 10% Art, Why Execution is Overrated and Strategic Clarity is Under-Appreciated, Why You Should Never Fall in Love With Your Own Ideas & Nubank's Biggest Product Challenges Scaling to 80M Users

Geoff Charles · Dec 6, 2023

PMs often run discovery badly because they come in with an idea and ask questions designed to validate it; they should instead ask open questions like what success looks like, what the worst part of the job is, and what takes the most time.

The idea being validated is often the wrong idea, so leading questions confirm a false premise.

3:16 20VC: Ramp's Product Playbook: How To Hire Product Teams, How to Run Sprints, How to Increase Product Velocity, When and How to Go Multi-Product with Geoff Charles, VP Product @ Ramp

Martin Gontovnikas · Feb 14, 2024

Horizontal products should build a template library and per-use-case content, then infer each new signup's use case from which templates and blog posts they viewed beforehand and tailor the in-product experience accordingly

The main value of templates isn't the templates themselves but that they self-servingly reveal who the user is and what they care about, letting you fine-tune the product

22:40 Infer use case from template and content engagement then tailor onboarding

David Meyer · Nov 1, 2023 · hedged

When a customer comes in with their own point of view, the approach is to interrogate them from a position of knowing nothing until you understand their job well enough to do it, and then vector their vision into yours

Customers arrive with a point of view about your product or their business; you have to understand it and the 'why' behind the steps they describe before redirecting them

5:32 Understand the customers existing point of view then vector it into your own vision

David Meyer · Nov 1, 2023

Purely open-ended questions often can't get you where you need to go, so mildly leading 'open-ish' questions are better than either pure open questions or pitching a demo

Open-ended questioning often fails to reach the area you need to explore; asking 'how would it feel if it happened this way instead' beats talking at the customer

6:35 Mildly leading open ish questions beat both pure open questions and pitching a demo

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

Founders don't actually know how they deliver value at the outset, because the real value is far more granular than the problem statement they started with

Ask ten SMBs how to make managing finances easier and you get ten different answers; each customer is trying to do one specific thing in a specific situation where their existing tools fall short, and you have to find that specific thing

17:34 Founders must discover granular customer specific value rather than assume their initial problem statement

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

The way to find messaging for a horizontal product is to interview existing signups using jobs-to-be-done technique and assume whatever they think you do for them is what customers want

Using survivorship bias on your side: people who already signed up reveal the real problem and desired outcome

26:54 Jobs to be done interviews with existing signups reveal true messaging for horizontal products

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Product managers should enter research with sharp hypotheses but remain agnostic about them — approaching as a judge rather than a lawyer

Vague general questioning is useless, but advocacy for your own hypothesis biases the findings; the difficulty is that keeping distance from your own idea runs contrary to human nature

9:47 Enter research with sharp hypotheses held agnostically like a judge not a lawyer