How do you do customer discovery, and what is the hardest thing for you about it?

How do you go about figuring out what the most impactful problems are for you to solve for your customers? How do you validate that they are really problems and how many users have those problems?

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3 Answers

Product Roadmap & Prioritization Product Innovation

Pavan Kumar

Gainsight Director, Product Management | Formerly Cisco • 1mo

Customer discovery, for me, is about separating what customers say from what actually drives behavior, friction, and willingness to change. The goal is not just to collect feedback, but to identify patterns, validate severity, and decide which problems are worth solving at scale. Start with outcomes, not feature requests I rarely begin with “what do you want built?” Start with: what are you trying to achieve, where does the process break, what workarounds exist today, and what is the cost of tha ...Read More

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Sirisha Machiraju

Level AI VP of Product • 1y

Customer discovery should never be treated as a 1-time planning activity. It should be an ongoing process to define a running backlog of opportunities. Customer discovery should be done across all available & valid channels - customer interviews, competitive intelligence, product usage analytics, support interactions, customer facing team interactions to name a few. The hardest thing is to identify and keep an eye on all valid channels to build a holistic view. This can be very time intense ...Read More

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James Heimbuck

ATG Group Product Manager | Formerly Doppler, GitLab, Twilio/SendGrid • 1y

Talk to customers, talk to customers and talk to customers!! Any time you have a chance to talk to a customer or a potential customer take it! I find that mixing qualitative discussion and validating with quantitative research that we are not solving a problem for a loud customer or the most recent account review helps ensure you are working on a problem with real reach and that solving it will have real impact for customers. For me the best signal of a customer with a real problem is one who is ...Read More

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