Unstructured discovery is just expensive noise

Discovery doesn't start when you talk to a customer.

It starts when you define what winning looks like.

I learned this in a conversation with a PM last week — and the way he described his pain was so specific it stopped me cold.

"Even though I spoke to customers, I built product that didn't work."

You don't have to run into this problem.

Here's what's inside:

• Why discovery without an outcome is just expensive noise
• The moment a PM realized his engineers were losing faith
• The one thing to define before you talk to a single customer

Be the PM who Ships a great product. That's the only thing that gets you promoted or poached. Join Cohort 5 next week. I'm in.

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When access to customers is limited, make every moment count

He's a PM at a B2B software company selling into large financial institutions.

Getting access to customers is hard. You can't just throw them an Amazon gift card. This makes it critical to run structured discovery, or else you'll build the wrong features.

He took what he learned from his limited conversations and used them to build the roadmap. That's the thing to do, right?

But once they shipped the features, the metrics and business results did not come pouring in. It was clear to him that he was just shipping outputs. He felt like he was building in a vacuum.

I asked him what the implication of that was to him and the company.

He got quiet and said it was costing him his credibility. His engineers started pushing back and asked,

"What's the due diligence on this feature? How do we know we're building the right thing?"

He didn't have a good answer.

Not because he wasn't working hard.

Because he didn't know what outcome he was building toward.

Discovery is an experiment, not an exploration

When I asked him what winning actually looked like for his product, he knew immediately.

Corporate onboarding was taking 48 hours. It should take 2.

That single number changed everything.

When I asked him if he ran discovery with this in mind, he simply said, "No, I thought the calls were meant to be exploratory"

That's the miss. If you go in with an "exploratory" mindset, you'll come out with vague answers not true customer behaviors.

So I told him he should run discovery focused on understanding this specific outcome: how to reduce corporate onboarding from 48 hours to 2 hours.

"Wow, 2 hours would be the dream outcome", he said.

Let's find out what's standing between you and 2 hours.

That's a completely different conversation.

Claude Skills for structured discovery

I built a chain of Claude Skills to take PMs from Idea to Decision and handed it to him.

He's going to start by Defining Assumptions around the onboarding process.

Then, he'll run internal and as many external conversations as he can to test his assumptions.

The conversations are now focused on reducing onboarding because that's a metric that moves the business forward.

You can run the same exercise he ran. Copy/paste the prompt into Claude and let Vera guide you through your own discovery sprint. See below.

Or bring your hardest discovery problem to my next workshop and we'll work through it live.

From Insight to Action

• Building your Product career in Climate? Join my talk with Tom Mercer, VP of Product at Rewiring America.

• In my product career, wish I had a place to ask dumb product. Join my free Office Hours and ask me and other PMs anything: ​April 16, or April 23​
• The only thing that matters in your product career is what you ship. Check out my free webinar: "Stop Guessing. Ship the right product with Claude Skills."
• ​Here's my Claude Skill you can use to de-risk your launch. Copy/paste it into Claude and press enter. Let Vera guide you.