Customer Discovery: Crucial Product Management Skill 9/20
24 November 2024 ‧ 3 min read
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills.
What it means
Customer discovery skills are about being able to employ the practices and tools to understand customer needs and identify opportunities to address these needs. A product manager skilled in customer discovery effortlessly employs tools such as continuous user interviewing, observational studies, surveys, and desktop research.
Customer discovery is distinct from Customer Domain Knowledge in that customer domain knowledge is expertise about your company's specific customers, whereas Customer Discovery is the knowledge of the tools and methods to establish and update knowledge about your customers.
Why it is an important skill
As mentioned in the article about Customer Domain Knowledge, you simply can't build a great product without an in depth understanding of your customers. However, an intuitive understanding of your customers isn't enough – your customers' needs evolve over time or as your company extends into different market segments. Therefore, constantly updating your understanding of your customers and their needs is paramount.
What great looks like
Product Managers with great customer discovery skills regularly talk to customers, period. They know that however strong their understanding of customers and their needs is, there is simply no substitute to keep talking to customers. There is simply no way around it – to become and stay great at customer discovery, you need to regularly exercise the muscle of talking to customers – ideally, every week.
These product managers also know how to ask good questions that minimize bias and maximize the signal they are getting to uncover the customers' real needs (and not just pitching their product as a solution). They go beyond the obvious to understand not just the immediate feature request or pain point, but also the relevant context, the underlying goals and motivations, as well as the relative priority.
They form hypotheses and research questions that they want to test when they talk with customers, but they are also flexible enough and excited to learn in case the real problem the customer faces is unrelated to the hypothesis or research question.
While they form a mental model of customers and their needs over time, they also are able to update it very quickly in the face of new information – they know that the faster they learn, the more chances they have of building a product that truly solves the customers' problems.
Lastly, they are not doing this work in isolation. They both collaborate with others (eg. with a product trio of PM, Designer, and Tech Lead, or in partnership with a UX Researcher) to execute customer discovery activities, and they share the results effectively with their cross-functional team as well as across the product development organization to continuously build up customer understanding and empathy.
How to improve your Customer Discovery Skills
If you have a UX research or customer research team in your company, the best bet to improve at customer discovery is to partner very closely with them – have them help you develop and execute research plans, and stay closely involved. Observe how they define the questions to be answered, how they ask questions, how they document and share outcomes.
If you don't have a dedicated team, the good news is that there are a lot of good books and other resources about the topic. My personal recommendations would be Continuous Discovery by Teresa Torres, The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, and SPRINT by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz.
Armed with that knowledge, the only way to get better at Customer Discovery is actually doing it – ie. talking to customers on a regular basis to better understand their needs. If you don't have easy access to customers to talk to, then the most important step is getting access, or at least finding proxies / similar personas that you can talk to.
I hope you found this article useful. If you did, feel free to follow me on Twitter where I share thoughts and articles on product management and leadership.