Customer discovery is about uncovering the unmet needs, pains and desires driving people’s behavior. The best way to do that? Ask good questions. Here are some suggestions…

Everyone loves conjoint analysis — even if they don't really understand it. Here's what conjoint is actually for, how it works, and what most people mistake about it.

Which of my features do customers think enable the most important capabilities but have been adopted by the lowest percentage of users? The answer to this question is an untapped goldmine of opportunities in your existing product. Here’s how to find them…

7 techniques to help your team brainstorm problem statements, problem ideas, customer problems, user problems, UX problems and more.

We spend too much time on “customers have all this pain and we need to understand the pain” when most of the time our software doesn’t actually solve 9,000 pain points, it solves a very limited number of them. We have a product that just does these four things and we should just focus on that.

Most blog posts will bore you to death with 5,000 words on *why* you should validate your product ideas before building. This post skips all that and jumps straight to the *how* part, with specific steps and examples to help you validate your next big product idea.

On April 12th 2023, we shipped new ranking algorithms for Pair Rank and Order Rank questions on OpinionX. This post explains why we made that change, the math behind the new methods, and what this means for your stack ranking surveys going forward.

A simple 5-part framework for researching people’s priorities, how that determines the right customer segments to target, and what the right acquisition channels are to match their search intent.

Discussion guides are a poison apple for discovery research. They’re so common in UX interviews that they’re often prescribed for all user research — here are three reasons why you should think twice about using them for customer / product discovery.

North Star Metrics were meant to help startups focus on building great products — so why are the some of the best companies today actively avoiding them? And what can we learn from the startups that famously failed due to this North Star Seduction?

7 principles for writing great problem statements for user research, plus 7 brainstorming methods to help you turn your blank page into a list of UX research problem statements.

Why *The Gift of Details* — a principle of improv acting — is perfect mental model for defining your Unique Value Proposition — and thinking about your startup generally.

In the gap between finding traction and PMF is full of vague advice like “just build something people really want.” This is the framework I use to take my startup one step closer to PMF *every single week.*

MVPs have given countless founders and product teams a free ticket to jump straight into building overscoped prototypes that don’t address any real customer need. It’s time to we define what a good MVP actually is.

According to The Lean Startup, the best way to figure out if your product idea is any good is to jump straight into building a prototype. This is terrible advice. Here’s what founders should do instead…

The Discovery Sandwich is a three-step product- or customer-discovery research framework for identifying the set of possible options, prioritizing which to focus on, and gathering rich contextual insights to inform the right decision.

In survey research, ranking is used to compare and rank a set of options. Forced Choice Questions are when participants aren’t given a nonresponse option like Skip or Not Applicable.

David Friedberg sold his 7-year-old startup WeatherBill for almost $1 billion in 2013. But WeatherBill almost didn't survive to see that day. If it wasn’t for one finely-tuned pivot in May 2010, which I deconstruct in this essay, the company was destined for certain failure.