Preparation & Setup

This process is designed to help you and your team find (or regain):

Customer Focus

• Who are you building for? Why? Why now? How do you know?
• What do you know about them already and how can you learn more?
• How can you continue learning about them as they, your product, and the world continue to change?

Product Focus

• What is your best opportunity to serve this customer with a new product or feature? How do you know?
• How can you test your solution ideas in the market without overbuilding them first?

A Strategic Plan

• What resources and roles are required in order to start testing solutions?
• What are the clues you should be looking for along the way that will indicate you’re on the right or wrong track?

Who this is for

We've run this process with our clients who are solopreneurs and early-stage teams just getting started, with seed-stage startups whose first idea failed to find product market fit, and with companies who are over a decade old and whose software is used by thousands of people every day.

We've yet to find a team that doesn't benefit from discovering who their best customer is and focusing their efforts on that customer.

How to run the playbook

We’ve found that a dedicated team can run the entirety of this process in 4-8 weeks. Individual exercises can also be valuable on their own in a single day or a single week.

However you decide to run it, we recommend having as much of the team involved in as much of the work as possible, especially interviewing customers. Nothing drives team alignment and momentum like shared empathy for a customer’s pain point.

Background reading

These concepts and tactics were informed both by our own product work over the last 20 years, and by ideas explored in these books:

• The Right It by Alberto Savoia
• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
• Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres
• Sprint by Jake Knapp

We recommend reading these books, in this order, before beginning the activities.

Project artifacts

These are some of the artifacts that will result from these activities:

• Assumptions Board
• Segmentation Matrix (see Customer Focus for examples)
• Critical Path
• Outreach Messaging
• Interview Scripts
• Interview Videos, Transcripts, & Insights
• Product Prototype

The ones not linked are because we haven’t generated good examples yet. We’ll add them once we have.