Customer Discovery

In continuation to the previous post of Solution architect journey, let us now understand what is Customer discovery session.

Customer discovery is an ongoing journey that takes place at various stages—before a sale, during project initiation, and throughout the iterative development of your solution. Understanding your customer, their thought process, and their needs is crucial to a project's success.

One of the most valuable questions you can ask during discovery is: "Why?"

However, this question often needs to be framed differently.

For instance, if a customer requests, "We need a button on this screen to perform this action," a more insightful approach might be to ask, "What outcome do users need after completing their tasks on this screen?"

Initial discovery (before discovery meeting):

Learning about the customers can be done by

• learning from customers themselves
• learning from outside sources.
• Company website - Vision , line of business , getting to know the key people
• Socialmedia sites like Linked In
• News outlets - Helps us to tailor interactions and demonstrate awareness of the customer’s broader context.
• Learn from RFQ - Understand the priorities ranging from cost savings to feature richness
• Develop customer questions - probe questions that go beyond the RFP, aligning the solution with the customer’s goals and adding business value.

Customer discovery meetings:

There are various types of discovery meetings - to gather actionable requirements and intangible needs.

Workshops - Publish agenda before the meeting to stay on topic. Invite the target stakeholders to gather necessary information

Survey with questions - To understand the priority for certain features , and also feedback to get insight on the needs.

Job shadowing - Understand the daily activities of the user.

Understand the industy vocabulary and making note of customer specific term.

Fill in the gaps of your pre-discovery:

• Evaluating the customer's data architecture
• Where does the data reside now, where should it reside,integrity concerns,keeping historical data and its volume, access for historical data .
• Examining the customer's line of business
• What overlaps in the process between lines of process, what new lines of business are in roadmap, understand other business process
• Determining the impact that apps have on a customer's solution
• Apps/solutions to be replaced, apps to be kept, API or connector is needed?
• Discovering the customer's pain points
• The difference between an objective and a pain point is that an objective defines desired results and pain points identify problems.

Additional components:

• Job shadowing different users/departments
• Reviewing automation that is already in place
• Looking for pain points as processes run their course
• Asking the customer directly about their processes
• Connect with all levels of the organization
• RFQ can be supplemented with additional details by including how to replace or enable integration in the existing system.
• Draft a project plan summary
• Problem statement, business objectives, project objectives
• Scope (what's in scope and what's out of scope)
• Governance plans
• Timelines
• Deliverables

As we discover details about the customer, the next step should be to begin plan a solution to their requirements. Early in the process, when issues aren't actionable yet, is the time to listen and learn.