The expense of building the wrong thing is easy to pinpoint: you paid x engineers, y designers, and z managers to spend h total hours on the not-right product. The cost of not building the right thing is less precise but will determine your success or failure.

‍Customer-driven means you put customer success at the center of everything you do. Not the periphery, the center. To do this, you have to understand your customers’ needs, wants, and motivations. Oftentimes, you have to understand their customers too. 

Discovery and delivery are distinct processes with separate end goals. One is about learning and the other is about launching.

Most founders start with building; they assume their idea is fact, jump straight to delivery, and rack up enormous opportunity costs building the wrong thing. Then they “release and pray,” hoping the product is valuable. Most of the time, it’s not. Sometimes this kills the startup.

The problem with not shipping consistently is that for our work to actually be valuable, it needs to be usable, it needs oxygen. 

Mapping the JTBD journey means identifying not only the customer’s context, but important factors within that context. Such as struggling moments, driving forces, potential solutions, motivations, and the desired outcome.

Hundreds of consultants pander “growth hacks” that supposedly 10x your business. These hacks are flashy, quick, and attractive. But quick rarely translates to high-impact. Most of these hacks simply don’t work. At least, not in any meaningful way. 

Learn to user interviews to understand the job to be done customers hire your product to do.

When an idea strikes, many founders buy a domain name, build a product, show a few friends (who tell them “it’s cool!”) and launch on Product Hunt. But they rarely expect what happens next: nothing.

See how instead of defaulting to industry norms leveraging crossover skills can help you skip steps and make faster progress.

It's easy to find excuses to not create and ship regularly. Here are 5 tactics to avoid shipping fatigue.

The one thing that I know I can do today to help my future self is to invest in creating assets that compound over time.

A helpful handbook for running customer interviews that provide insight you can take action on, without falling into common traps.

Conversion rate optimization expert Jon MacDonald tears down the ButcherBox homepage using insights from a customer interview.

Understanding why your customers buy and the words they use to describe their emotions and motivations provides the puzzle pieces you need to craft an effective content strategy,

What we can learn from Glossier and their relationship with customers.

We know customer research can impact the bottom-line in theory, but how can we get results in practice. We explore 4 ways to turn voice of customer data into revenue.

Choosing the right discovery method is hard. Here’s how to get it right.

We lay out 6 actionable steps to avoid common survey pitfalls and ask the right questions to capture valuable customer insights and make confident strategic decisions.

Product-led growth is gaining traction. But is it, as the name implies, actually about the product?

Learn how to increase your speed to learning and sidestep huge opportunity costs in the process.

What does your interaction with customers look like? How do you do customer discovery to find the perfect copy and the experiences that resonate with customers?

Too many founders get stuck in a cycle of continuously adding features without every launching. This not only drains the founder of resources, it robs customers of ever deriving value from the product.

It's easy to spend months and tens of thousands of dollars building the perfect version of an idea. Design sprints provide a fast track to learning and gather concrete insights to help you build the right product faster.

Increase the value of your effort, skyrocket your shipping velocity, and shorten the feedback loop that drives learning with this simple trick.

Building a product people love requires going beyond functional features and crafting holistic experiences for our customers.

A research-driven narrative can ensure our focus remains on solving real customer problems rather than projecting our own solution bias on the features we build.

Markets don’t buy products. People with specific desires and goals buy products and use them to improve their lives.

Learn how to write a one-pager that sets parameters around what you’re exploring (benefits and results), without outlining exactly how to do it (features).

The problem with taking weeks or even months to ship something new is opportunity cost. What can we ship today that enables an outcome our customers want?

If you want to help your customers be successful, there's one thing that needs to happen first: stop measuring success by internal measures of output.

A recap of 2018, goals for the new year and thoughts on working remotely full-time.

Instead of showing someone how to use your product, simply observe their actions and provide guidance as they need it to learn without projecting your own bias.

Concierge onboarding can not only guide each new user to success with your product, but also provides the feedback you need to improve how future users interact with your product.

The more time you spend getting your product to market the greater the cost of development and the more time you could spend building in the wrong direction.

What makes a great payment experience for clients? I outline the UX design process we used to inform the initial version of the Sail product.

Validating your solution concept BEFORE you build software, means you can ship earlier and learn faster. Step-by-step screencast inside.

It's easy to start by designing solutions or writing code. But the best products start with a clear understanding of customer problems.

I'm challenging myself to build a web application generating $1000 in revenue in 3 months and share everything I learn.

I did a lot of different things in 2017 and learned from a lot of amazing people. Here’s my year in review and some goals for 2018.