Are you a manufacturing leader whose company is introducing new products or possibly trying to redefine your business into a new area? Or are you working in an organization and looking for new ways to reframe how you work with customers, or people you work with every day? The customer discovery process can help you zero in on vital details so you can focus on success instead of wasting time and money by moving forward in ways that don’t meet your customers’ needs or solve their problems.

Customer discovery is a key element of the business model generation process. And it is also probably the most important part of the lean startup methodology. The book The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, says, “The number one goal of customer discovery amounts to this: turning the founder’s initial hypothesis about their market and customer into facts. The customer discovery process searches for a problem-solution fit.” So, you have to talk to customers to ensure you are going down the proper path. You need validation that your idea about what your potential customers need or the solution you think you have to their problems, is actually correct. 

The customer discovery process has various elements. It involves defining your customer so you know from whom you need to learn, finding potential customers to interview, creating some good questions to ask customers, interviewing customers, truly listening to their answers, compiling the data you gather, and then dissecting that information so you can understand and use the information you have from them. 

You will have to decide how to make sense of all of the information you gather. You will be looking for patterns in the responses to your questions so you can determine if the product you have in mind is a good fit or if you need to pivot and change your plans to provide the solutions the customers need.To get good information for analysis, you’ll want to plan to talk to about 100 customers. We have found the magic starts to happen around 60 customers, but then we see truly rich information once we get up to around 100 customers.

As you plan your customer discovery process, some of the questions you could ask could be about what product customers wish they had that does not yet exist, what the hardest part of their day is, what value they see getting from your product, what an ideal solution to their problem looks like, and what key elements should be included in the product. This is just a sample of some of the questions you could begin to consider as you plan your interview strategy. 

The customer discovery process is key to your business. Take your ideas, and talk to your potential customers. Gather their input, ideas, and suggestions about their needs and problems. Then, when you progress with your new product, you can have confidence that you are on a good path to helping your customers and that you are leading your factory forward!