Chapter 10. The Customer Playbook

Conducting Customer Visits to Learn More About Your Customers

We believe [type of customers] are motivated to [motivation] when doing [job-to-be-done].

This playbook is organized into three sections that align with the Customer-Driven Cadence:

Formulating
  • Capture your team’s assumptions about the parameters of the Customer hypothesis [type of customers], [motivation], and [job-to-be-done].

  • Turn those assumptions into testable hypotheses.

  • Generate a Discussion Guide to be used during the customer visit.

Experimenting
  • Organize and prepare for your customer visit.

  • Conduct a customer visit.

  • Debrief after the customer visit is complete.

Sensemaking
  • Use a structured method to derive patterns and meaning out of the customer data your team has collected from the customer visit.

  • Share your customer insights with your organization.

Formulating

Formulating Customer Assumptions

1. Capture assumptions.

Before jumping into formulating your hypotheses, you’ll want to capture your team’s assumptions about the type of customers you’re targeting, their motivations, and job-to-be-done.

  1. For each of the assumption prompts listed below, write your response on a Post-it note. You may have more than one response per prompt—that’s expected! Capture one response per note.

    Assumption prompts for [type of customers]:

    • We are targeting ____________ [type of customers].

    • These [type of customers] work in teams/organizations that are ____________.

    • These [type of customers] are skilled in ...

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