Lean Customer Discovery Needs Design Research
When you are in a startup, under the gun, trying to execute – how do you find time for empathy?
Lean launchpad simulates entrepreneurship by requiring founders to get out of the building…and into their customer’s world.
Teams succeed when they start talking to people, and find the magic in actually validating their hypotheses with customers, potential partners, and even fellow founders who may have tried to pursue the same dream. But it’s hard to get underneath.
What we heard:
“I think I only scratched the surface, and never really got to the core problems.”
“I don’t know if my customers really understand what they need enough to articulate it to me.”
“Customers said they would pay, but then they didn’t when it came time to pay.”
The truth is that when you are just TALKING – you fail to yield anything but the obvious facts, the surface level insights. For greater learning, Ajay Revels and I reviewed all of the design research literature. Not all of ethnography or design research is relevant for a startup founder – but there are critical skills and techniques that will radically accelerate your ability to understand the pain for which you are trying to solve.
In this slideshare, we highlight the core techniques we’ve curated from D-School, Steve Portigal’s great source, Interviewing Users, Universal Methods of Design, and Ajay herself from Polite Machines.
Have you used design research techniques have you used to get to the underlying needs of your customers?