Ena paint a clearer picture of their hypothesized customers. Now they just need to find those customers in real life and see what the brides really think! Step 4: Conduct customer discovery to validate or invalidate your solution’s initial value proposition Customer discovery In 2005, Steve Blank, a long-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur, published The [30] Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win. Although his methodology revolves around four phases, I’m going to ruminate on the first one, customer discovery, as part of your UX strategy. Customer discovery is a process used to discover, test, and validate whether a specific product solves a known problem for an identifiable group of users; it is essentially conducting user research. However, you don’t want to just watch people, empathize with them, and then make judgments. Instead, you want to “get out of the building” and get customer validation, which is foundational to the Lean Startup business approach (and Tenet 3). You want to actively listen to people and engage them because your goal is to uncover the specific problem that they need solved. This might sound like an obvious thing to do, but shockingly, the majority of stakeholders whom I work with in startups and enterprises don’t talk to customers. In fact, before Lean Startup, the norm was that companies would just build the product without talking them. Much like Paul the movie producer, the stakeholders or product team assume that if they have the problem or associate with it, this means that they understand it. I think the real reason stakeholders don’t talk to customers is fear. Product visionaries are like screenwriters sweating away at a script that they never show anyone. They’re frightened of what their real customers might think — nobody wants to hear that their baby is ugly. In an ideal world, customer discovery is a collaborative process involving as many members of the product team going out into the field as possible. Collaboration will also help organically build consensus on what exactly the vision is for the product. If the people you work with don’t want to do customer research, do it for yourself. Do it on the sly without waiting for permission from your boss, the client, or any naysayers. What is crucial is that it is attempted. You can come back from your research and share your discoveries anecdotally