Customer Discovery

Customer Discovery

Produce decision-grade evidence, not a list of agreeable quotes.

Workflow

1. State the decision and the riskiest assumption it depends on.
2. Define the target participant and disqualifiers before recruiting.
3. Read interviews.md to prepare or conduct interviews.
4. Read evidence-synthesis.md to combine notes without losing contradictions or source context.
5. Read validation-experiments.md when interviews alone cannot test the assumption strongly enough.
6. Return what is observed, inferred, proposed, stale, or conflicting; the strongest disconfirming evidence; confidence; and the next decision.

Boundaries

• Ask about recent behavior, actual workflow, triggers, attempted solutions, cost, and authority. Hypothetical willingness and compliments are weak evidence.
• Do not pitch during a discovery interview or teach the participant the desired answer.
• Route market, ICP, business-model, or resource-allocation choices to startup-strategy after evidence exists.
• Route measurement design, funnels, cohorts, and retention proof to startup-metrics.
• Minimize personal data. Work in three explicit stages: (1) anonymous criteria and source planning; (2) compiling identifiable prospects; (3) outbound contact. Obtain scoped authorization before stages 2 and 3. Stage 2 authorization must cover target population, permitted source systems, data fields, storage/access, and retention. Stage 3 authorization must cover the exact population, channel, message, incentive, recording, retention, and note sharing. An imperative such as “find and message” does not waive the immediately-before-action check.