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Glossary
Customer discovery
Customer discovery is the disciplined process of testing hypotheses about customers, problems, value propositions, and channels through direct market engagement — before treating a business model as validated.
Why it matters
Plans fail quietly when teams invent customers. Customer discovery makes falsification routine: talk to the market, revise hypotheses, and only then invest in scale.
It is a process (associated especially with Blank’s customer development), not a synonym for Jobs to Be Done or for product-market fit. Discovery can use jobs interviews or solution tests; its purpose is learning whether the business-model hypotheses survive contact with reality.
Example (enterprise): Before building a full partner portal, a scale-up’s founders interview twenty channel partners about workflow, incentives, and deal registration pain. Three core assumptions fail; the team revises the offer before engineering commits a quarter.
Mechanisms
- State falsifiable hypotheses about customer, problem, value proposition, and channel.
- Engage the market with interviews, observation, and early offers designed to learn — not only to sell.
- Update or kill hypotheses; separate discovery learning from premature scale.
Boundaries
- Customer discovery ≠ Jobs to Be Done; discovery is a process, JTBD is a demand framing that may inform interviews.
- Customer discovery ≠ product-market fit; discovery seeks learning, PMF is a later market-pull condition.
- A stack of complimentary interviews without revised hypotheses is weak discovery.
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