Do a lot of customer discovery work! Don’t start with a solution in mind! Start with intense curiosity to deeply understand the problem and the customers. Conduct in-depth interviews and ethnography with customers (people whose problem/needs you are want to address)

Ethnography: Observe and interview people in the context of their everyday lives where the unmet needs occur (at work, at home, out shopping, etc.)

At this stage you are trying to understand the customer’s unmet needs (these could be functional, social, & emotional), their world/environment/realities, how they feel, what existing solutions they use and why they work well/don’t work well (maybe even their cost), and how/why customers decide what solutions to use

<aside> 🧠 We do not recommend using surveys at this stage, because they do not provide in-depth insights on the customer

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Learn more about customer discovery as part of the widely used, proven design thinking process for creating great products from readings in this folder