Making Sure You're Solving A Real Problem

A Playbook for Effective Customer Discovery

In my earlier article, I talked about the general process of Customer Development and why it’s such a pivotal exercise to get right. The first step in this process is customer discovery: identifying real customer needs and pain points. Unfortunately, this is where most entrepreneurs, founders, and Product Managers get fundamentally wrong—they assume they already know what their customers need.

In this article, I’ll share how to break this habit and give you the templates you need to objectively discover who your customer is and what challenges they face.

Let’s Get Into It

Customer Discovery is how you test whether the problem you’re solving is real, urgent, and worth paying for—before you spend months (or years) building something nobody wants. It’s not about validating your idea. It’s about understanding your customer’s world so deeply that the right solution becomes obvious.

So, how do you do it? Let’s break it down into a simple, actionable playbook that helps you find the right people, ask the right questions, and get insights you can actually use.

Define Your Target Customer