Every team dreams of finding a burning problem, building a product and launching a platform that goes on to change the world. There's no greater feeling than watching your idea turn into reality and impact the lives of countless people. The reality is that 75% of new businesses fail and 80% of product features are rarely or never used. The number one reason for these failures? Lack of demand.

You might think that entrepreneurs, user researchers and design thinkers solved this problem a long time ago. Most companies have adopted a methodical customer discovery process as the first step in their design process. They understand they must build empathy for their users, listen carefully to what they have to say and build products that meet their validated unmet needs. This has surely helped them to identify what users really want, increasing the likelihood of product success. Right?

While customer discovery does increase the likelihood of success, most companies take an approach that is fundamentally flawed. Their discovery research is often doomed to failure before they even begin.

A Silent Killer

The source of this flaw emerges so early that many think they haven't even started the research process yet. Whether that research project involves user interviews, diary studies or an online survey, the scope of their exploration is set in concrete from the earliest stage by assumption mapping. This short step at the start of a new project can lead the most experienced researchers and design thinkers astray. The process involves a few common steps: brainstorming the factors they think will be the most important to be discussed during user interviews, debating the importance of each one, designing research questions to validate or eliminate each assumption and visualising the entire process using post-it notes, journey mapping and whiteboards.

Assumption mapping leaves researchers chasing unvalidated directions, often driven by anecdotal evidence or worse, 'a hunch'. They enter user interviews with a discussion guide which limits their discovery to pre-determined topics of interest. How many teams have failed because their assumptions blinded them from an unbiased exploration of participants' true priorities and lived experiences? How many researchers have been left wondering "Where did we go wrong?"

The flip-side of this is researchers that skip assumption mapping. Instead, they are left scrambling around the edges of a broad research scope for weeks or even months, slowly but surely narrowing in on their participants' priorities. Sounds great on paper, but how many teams have the time for this? I certainly don't have the luxury of these open-ended timelines.

Any experienced researcher can see why assumption mapping is a flawed practice. As a profession, we rally together to dissect survey questions and discussion guides for hints of leading questions while wilfully ignoring the bias introduced on day 1. Pre-determined priorities will lead us to pre-determined destinations. Eliminating assumptions is essential for truly impartial insights.

A Better Alternative

Imagine if you already knew which issues were most important to participants before you even started your research. You would be able to eliminate the points that had the least impact, dig deeper into the highest value topics, make the most of your participants' time and finish your research project weeks ahead of schedule. This is all possible with priority mapping.

Priority mapping uses mixed methods research to understand the topics that are most important to participants before you even begin your research project. Sounds like a fantasy, right? Well, new discovery research platforms like OpinionX enable you to carry out priority mapping in just a matter of hours. By adding OpinionX as the first step of your discovery project, you can set your research scope on validated user priorities using data-driven methods that are accessible to everyone and save weeks of unfocused probing.

OpinionX surveys surface the issues that are most impactful to users, written in their own words. With these insights upfront, you can write better discussion guides, clearer research objectives and dig deeper on the most important issues in fewer user interviews. You're then free to reinvest your saved time in higher leverage activities, like that strategic research project you were struggling to get around to or democratizing research with upskilling workshops for your internal partners. And the best part? You never have to make assumptions again. Instead, you have certainty that you are exploring the correct research areas.

Priority Mapping in Action

Niamh De Búrca is the founder of SproutPlans, an early-stage startup that's building a new personal finance platform. Niamh recognized that young digital-first professionals rarely pay for in-person financial advisors. In February 2021, Niamh decided that she needed to conduct discovery research with her target audience to understand their pain points, motivations and behaviour when it comes to personal finance. The findings of this research would inform everything from the SproutPlans' product roadmap to their core value proposition and positioning. Getting this first step right would be a defining decision for Niamh.

But SproutPlans quickly faced a common problem; they needed to conduct discovery research but as a young startup they didn't have the luxury of spending weeks carrying out the usual process of interviewing tens of people and manually analyzing all the data. Niamh understood that entering into user interviews without any idea of what mattered most to people would leave her with a wide research scope. For this approach, Niamh would need a large volume of participants to take part in lengthy interviews just to surface insights on the biggest pains and unmet needs before she started to dig deeper into further research. She also didn't want to make any leap of faith assumptions that would narrow the scope of her interviews too early and cause her to overlook important insights.

Catalyzing Discovery with OpinionX

Niamh decided to run an OpinionX social survey before jumping into customer discovery interviews. OpinionX would enable Niamh to learn new things about her target users by collecting user opinions at scale just like a traditional open-ended survey. At the same time, by letting respondents vote on each other's answers, Niamh could also understand how much these opinions represented the whole group's perspective.

These insights would then give Niamh the ability to dig deeper into the issues that her target users felt were most important to them in user interviews rather than starting off from a much broader position and needing much more time for this research. A couple of weeks saved makes a huge difference in the life of a startup!

Niamh set up her OpinionX survey to explore what is most important to young professional's about personal finance and their financial focuses over the next three years. She added a handful of sample statements to test her existing hypotheses and to inspire participants to share their own opinions.

Surfacing the Most Important Insights

As a result of her OpinionX survey, Niamh found that the biggest concern for her participants was their inability to find trustworthy financial advice. This participant-generated statement was voted as most important by participants, validating SproutPlans' original hypothesis about young professional's unmet need related to financial advice.

The Road to Product-Market Fit

With this insight, Niamh was able to jump into user interviews with the knowledge that trust was the primary differentiating factor for her target customers. This saved Niamh months of research by enabling her to focus on clear priorities during interviews and achieve deeper discovery research in a fraction of the time. By using OpinionX at the very beginning of discovery research, companies like SproutPlans can drastically reduce the time needed for discovery research without making any assumptions.

OpinionX has saved me months in research and building time, along with thousands in costs. I am blown away by the outcome. The OpinionX approach to customer discovery is essential in uncovering true and uninfluenced pain points when searching for product-market fit.

Niamh De Búrca, Founder of SproutPlans.

Data-Driven Discovery

The next time you are preparing for user interviews, think about the impact of assumption mapping on your outcome. Where have these assumptions come from? How will I justify the initial direction of this research to the broader team? Could I be using better research practices to prioritize exploring the most impactful issues within this brief? When we allow ourselves to base the earliest direction of a research project on uninformed assumptions, the damage is already done. We are forfeiting the opportunity for truly comprehensive and insightful research.

Platforms that enable priority mapping like OpinionX can be your research crystal ball. Leverage these research methods to understand your users' biggest unmet needs, pain points and motivations before your research even begins. Conduct your discovery research 4x faster with more depth and accuracy than ever before with OpinionX. Start your first priority mapping project for free or check out how OpinionX works for more info.

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