Customer discovery is mostly listening for what people avoid saying.
The useful information in customer discovery is rarely in the direct answers. It is in the things people skip, soften, or talk around.
I ran 30 discovery calls for a product. The direct feedback was positive: 24 of 30 said they would use it, 19 said they would pay for it. We built it. 4 people used it. 1 paid.
I went back through the notes and looked for what I had missed. In 22 of the 30 calls, when I asked "what do you currently do about this problem," the person described a workaround that was clearly painful, and then immediately added some version of "but it works fine for now." I had recorded that as a neutral statement. It was actually the answer: they had already decided the problem was not worth solving.
The signal was not in what they said about my product. It was in how quickly they defended their current situation.
What is the tell you have learned to listen for in a discovery call that a problem is not real?
Replies
This is a really good point sometimes the way people describe their current workaround tells you more than their direct feedback about the problem
Fair point! I’ve seen that in onboarding too, people say a flow is fine while skipping the part that matters. I tend to watch the workaround before trusting the answer. What was the clearest one you missed?