Letting the Customer Prove You Wrong
Why good discovery is designed to disagree with you.
At this stage, you have a specific customer in mind, a one-page model, and a list of untested beliefs. Now, we take that list to the people who can confirm or challenge it. This is not open-ended exploration. It is structured hypothesis testing. Before asking questions, we write down our assumptions, rank them by the risk they pose if wrong, and decide what evidence would disprove each one. The challenge is that customers do not always act as they say, and well-meaning people often tell us what we hope to hear. If we design discovery to collect agreement, we gather the wrong evidence and do so with confidence. By the end of this chapter, you will know which beliefs held up with real customers, which ones did not, and whether the need you identified is matched by anyone ready to act. Where there are structured tools to help, you will find a note pointing to them.
The Meridian Team had moved beyond the business-model stage. They carried forward a set of hypotheses, and one finding they had worked hard to earn: the decision to buy compliance tooling was split between the compliance function and IT procurement, and the line between the two sat in a different place at almost every company. What they had not yet tested was the risk hiding inside that split. Could compliance, the people they could reach most easily, actually move a purchase, or would IT and procurement decide it? Five colleagues had worked together to design a compliance platform for mid-market supply chains. Their model now fits clearly on a single page. At this stage, their main task was to test this with real customers.
The first conversations went well. The team met with compliance leads and operations managers at the types of firms they hoped to serve. They described the problem and shared their vision for a solution. The people across the table agreed. They said the problem was real and their current tools were a mess. One person said it sounded like exactly what her team had been waiting for.
The Meridian Team returned energized and ready to validate the opportunity. On the surface, it seemed they had succeeded.
In reality, they collected agreement, but agreement alone does not confirm a real opportunity. The people they spoke with were supportive and recognized the problem, which was never in doubt. The more important questions were left unasked. Would these firms actually change their behavior? Who would approve that change? What would it take to make it happen? This is a good moment for us to pause and reflect on what we might be missing.
Most importantly, that risk was never tested in any conversation. The team knew the decision was shared, but they chose to speak with compliance leads, who were easiest to reach. They let those friendly conversations take the place of the harder question: who can actually move a purchase? When they asked, ‘Compliance would own this, right?’ the compliance leads agreed. It is easy to accept an answer that matches our perspective, and even easier when it matches what we hope to hear. This reminds us to dig deeper, even when the answer seems clear.
In the end, the team spent a week confirming what they already believed instead of testing those beliefs. The real purpose of this stage is to challenge assumptions. This is a common pitfall, and one we can learn from as we move forward.
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Why Discovery Goes Wrong
How Careful Teams Talk Themselves Into the Wrong Answer
What happened to the Meridian Team is common. It rarely comes from lack of effort. Most teams who lose their way in discovery are working hard and meeting real customers. The problem is in what they listen to and what they accept as proof. Three patterns explain most of these missteps.
The say/do gap. What people tell us and what people do are not the same. We met this in the first stage as the intention-behavior gap. Here it shows up in the room. Someone can describe a frustration in vivid detail and then go right back to the workaround they have used for years. They are not lying. They simply do not know their own future behavior as well as they think they do. When we ask, “Would you use something like this?” we are asking them to predict a future self. That self is optimistic, agreeable, and unreliable. So we ask about the past instead. What have you done about this problem? What are you doing now? What did you try the last time it came up? Behavior that has already happened is the only behavior we can trust.
The comfort of agreement. People want to be kind, especially those closest to us. A customer who likes us or sees our commitment to the idea will often encourage us. Agreement can feel like validation, but most of the time, it is simply politeness. Earlier, we warned about noise that feels like a signal. This is that same noise, just in a friendlier form. The warmer a conversation feels, the more carefully we should read it.
Hearing what we came to hear. We enter these conversations hoping our idea will work. That hope is natural, but it quietly shapes our questions. We ask in ways that can only return a yes, and then we record the yes as evidence. Discovery done this way does not test anything. It only seeks permission. The purpose of this stage is the opposite. We are here to find out where we are wrong, while mistakes are still inexpensive.
We are here to find out where we are wrong, while mistakes are still inexpensive.
None of these patterns mean our customers are difficult or dishonest. They show us that we must design the conversation with care, because the easy path will mislead us every time. That care begins with knowing exactly who we are talking to.