3 Questions for Stronger Customer Discovery

A vital skill to grow as you enter Product Management is Customer Discovery. Customer Discovery is the act of thoroughly understanding your customer and their problems so you can create the best possible solution and drive the most value.

But all too often, Product Managers aren’t taught how to do Customer Discovery and unfortunately can develop inconsistent habits or worse, forget to do it at all.

Customer Discovery is also somewhat scary. You are expected to go talk to someone that you don’t know, and ask them about their problems. Why would someone want to tell you about their problems?  

What you’ll learn as you get further into Product is that people LOVE to talk about their problems, especially if they think you can help fix them. But you need to have a few key questions ready to make for a smooth conversation.

“Tell me about the last time when…”

I picked this up from the customer discovery master Teresa Torres but this is an amazing way to start a discovery session.

Imagine you are trying to understand more about inventory systems. You go talk to some customers to understand how they do inventory now.

You could ask “How do you do inventory today?” and the customer will gladly show you the system they use and will provide a few nuggets of details. You’ll probably hear what they like or don’t like about what they do today. You may also learn who else helps them with this process.

But if you reframe the question to “Tell me about the last time you took inventory” you’ll get a whole new outlook. Now you’ll learn what time of day they do inventory, where they are when they are doing it, and other atmospheric or feeling details around the process that you would have missed with the original question.

Having a customer tell you about a specific time they took an action is much stronger than the general task of completing the action. It can highlight outside elements that impact their experience.

“Walk me through how you do X...”

Similar to the above example, having someone literally show you how they do their work is amazing.

When a person explains a process to you, they shortcut details. They will explain how they complete a task going from A to B to C and it sounds simple.

But WATCH them do the process and you’ll notice at step A you first have to print out a paper before you can go to B. Then after B you need to get someone else’s approval before moving on to C. The list goes on and it’s far from simple.

Watching someone complete a task also shows you frustration points. People may become flustered or even embarrassed when the task doesn’t go as planned or when they have to do work arounds to get through a flow. These are key learning areas for a Product Manager.

Take note when an experience becomes uncomfortable for your user, that is an opportunity to improve. Listen when their tone changes, that is a feeling you don’t want your users to have, another opportunity to improve their experience.

Having someone walk you through their steps (or even better if you can walk it with them in person) will give you another level of detail and empathy you need for creating valuable product solutions.

“If you could change anything, what would it be?”

You may have also heard something like “If you had a magic wand, what would you change?” This gets your customer thinking about the impossible. Technology can make the impossible possible and many times your users don’t know what can be accomplished with the right team.

As Henry Ford once said, “if I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Customers have no idea what is possible but you and your team do!

Approach discovery as anything is possible and hear what they come up with. Sometimes the ideas they toss out are very realistic and will be extremely eye opening for your team.

Sometimes their ‘magic wand’ wish list is far from possible but your team now understands your customers ultimate goal and can start incorporating pieces to help eventually get there.

Be patient with yourself and your tactics for understanding your customers while you are learning Customer Discovery. What other discovery questions have you heard or used and have become staples in your discovery toolbox?

PS: You can pick up on Customer Discovery techniques by being part of the PM School program.