Reflections on Customer Discovery
November 13th, 2023
This year I joined two separate client teams that participated in National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program and assisted them with their customer discovery. One was the national, 7-week program, and one was a shorter, regional, 4 week program. For those unfamiliar with the program, it is “an immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact.” It guides participants through the process of assessing commercial feasibility using the Customer Discovery Method developed by Steve Blank, and the Business Model Canvas, co-created by Alexander Osterwalder. In a nutshell, I-Corps teaches scientist entrepreneurs how to assess the commercial viability of their technology early on, so that they don’t end up spending valuable time and resources building a product, only to realize too late that no one wants them.
Two key questions that entrepreneurs must work to answer about their innovation are 1) what is the value, and 2) to whom?
The answers have huge implications for the company - they will drive how the company presents itself, who it partners with, its revenue model, what key investments it makes and when, just to name a few. While the road of entrepreneurship is full of uncertainties, founders can minimize the risk of making costly mistakes by taking off the blindfolds. I-Corps helps them do exactly that.
While my role was mainly to support the founder/CEO’s efforts to identify and refine their value propositions, both sessions turned out to be great learning experiences for me personally too:
I have known about the business model canvas, but have not had a chance to apply the concepts outside my own business, or in a team setting. Using it with teammates and coaches within a structured framework, with real technology innovations in the background anchoring the customer interviews and analysis, was invaluable.
The only way to really learn how to talk to potential customers is by doing it.
I got an inside view of how value propositions are formed, tested, and modified in the early stages of many companies, including other teams in both cohorts. The team leaders are working on very unique technologies that they think can change the world. But where do they start? When do teams know to pivot versus dig deeper? It turns out that insights do emerge, sooner or later, during the interview process. The most meaningful learnings come up organically, from talking to people outside our own bubbles.
The national program required teams to complete at least 100 customer discovery interviews within the 7 weeks. It was initially daunting, considering the fact that I rarely respond to cold calls/messages myself. How many people will we have to contact in order to get 100 interviews?
As the coaches mentioned, attending the right conferences is well worth the effort - the people who are potentially highly interested in your value proposition and want to learn and network have already self-assembled in a convenient location!
Separately, I relied on, and was surprised by, the power of “dormant ties”. My teammates and I racked our brains and individually went through our mental rolodex of friends, acquaintances, and collaborators in search of experts who could share their experience on various very niche topics. I ended up reconnecting with several former colleagues, who have all gone on to build different businesses of their own since we’ve last worked together. I also grew to know a friend better, in a context completely different from where I met her. The personal lesson: always make an effort to connect with people.
Reflecting on this effort from a lean perspective, there are several aspects of the program that reminded me of concepts that are often discussed in the problem-solving context:
Grasp the situation
One team leader mentioned that he hears contradictory advice from different potential investors on what he ought to focus on. The I-Corps coach promptly pointed out that one needs to distinguish between opinions and facts. We all need to recognize that investors are quite removed from where the actual work, and the problems to be solved, take place. Start, instead, by focusing the players in the ecosystem who live with the problems every day. Whether they would find the value proposition compelling should be tested via QRST (Quantifiable, Relevant, Specific, Testable) hypotheses. Don’t simply take other people’s words for it. Find out for yourself.
Go to the Gemba
My team started the discovery process with a broad range of different customer segments that we wanted to survey. The initial round of interviews was illuminating - decision makers in a particular industry showed much higher interest and enthusiasm compared to others. However, it then became immediately clear that beyond adjusting our focus towards this particular industry, we needed to go deeper and identify which specific part of the problem can the technology actually solve. In order to do that, we should go to the factory floor and learn about how work is currently done. We need to talk to the operator. “Go to the gemba” is the perfect analog to the I-Corps program’s motto, “get out of the building”.
Not everyone publishes their problems on the internet - why would they? To really learn about the customer’s pains, and how an innovation could possibly help alleviate them, we need to go and see.
PDCA
“What did you learn?” was the most frequent question asked by the coaches. During each session and office hours, teams were asked to share their latest BMC and hypotheses, which evolved over time. Often, an answer begot more questions, which became new hypotheses. This back and forth reminds me of the PDCA (plan-do-check-act) cycles that are fundamental to continuous improvement. The program was built around the iterative process of coming up with a hypothesis, gathering data, assessing whether it is true, and improving upon the hypothesis before testing it again. Looking back, the BMC at the end of the program had evolved significantly from the initial one after several revisions. Each revision was driven by data gathered from the interviews. Learn iteratively and stay nimble.
By the end of their cohort, both clients emerged with a new understanding of where to focus next to continue refining their value proposition. Obviously, customer discovery doesn’t end with the conclusion of the cohort; it, and entrepreneurship in general, continue like an endurance sport. The concepts and methods we learned from I-Corps, however, help founders surveil and navigate the unknown terrain. To quote cycling legend Greg LeMond, “it never gets easier, you just go faster”.
Let’s go.