with your team. If nobody wants to listen, you can decide at that point if you want to continue working on that project or with your current team, or with your current employer. But at least get out there and discover evidence that might make your product better in the time that you have to work on it. Own your destiny. We’ve already touched on some reasons why product makers become very protective of their ideas. They put a lot of energy and love into them. If you’re a UX designer, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Clients such as Paul typically come to you with an idea for the product that they want to build. They’ve assumed that customers want their product. But as I’ve already stated, the UX strategist wants to know whether those assumptions are correct. As you’re learning in this book, you don’t want to get too attached to any ideas, especially without proper validation that real customers want the solution. Fortunately, Bita and Ena aren’t emotionally attached to the value proposition I generated off the Internet. They just need to validate their initial assumptions. And that’s exactly what they’re going to do. They’re going to get out of the building (office or classroom) to conduct problem interviews. The problem interview During customer discovery, the goal of the interview is to talk to real people. My students have personas, and they need to talk to the people who match those personas. Let’s remember Tenet 3: Validated User Research. You want to use the approach of the Lean Startup, which means research should be meaningful, effective, and swift. You want to get into the Build-Measure-Learn loop as quickly as possible (see Figure 3-6). That loop begins with the smallest build of an idea. This build leads to some form of data that can measure what the customers say. Based on that, you then learn from that feedback about how to make the build better. And at this infancy stage of a value proposition, this means getting out of the building to validate provisional personas.