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😊 ProductFeeling

Customer Discovery

You cannot design a feeling for someone you have not met. Every strategy and Tool, Technique, or Practice (TTP) in this handbook assumes you know whose experience you are designing—who the customer is, what state of need they arrive in, and how they already work, talk, search, and buy. The Feeling North Star has an owner; this section is how you find that owner before you lock the feeling.

Customer discovery (Steve Blank) means testing hypotheses about the customer’s problem outside the building—listening in real context—before committing to a solution, a funnel, or a north star. Each page below teaches the idea in full (definitions, mechanisms, practice), then offers worksheets and an agent path. The worksheets are tools; they are not a substitute for the knowledge. This is not a discovery textbook, but it is the minimum emotional product design cannot skip.

flowchart TD
  Interview[Interview method]
  Interview --> Who[Who: ICP and personas]
  Interview --> Why[Why now: need states]
  Interview --> Work[What without you: workflow]
  Interview --> Talk[Talk, search, and buy]
  Who --> Synth[Synthesis]
  Why --> Synth
  Work --> Synth
  Talk --> Synth
  Synth --> North[Feeling north star]
  North --> Strategies[Strategies and TTPs]

Interview method runs through every question. Synthesis is the gate: validated findings become durable project docs (DocSlime / docs/) before you lock a north star or run a strategy.

Page Question
Ideal Customer and User Profiles Who gets the most value—and who has the experience?
Need States and Awareness Why now? Circumstance, emotional charge, awareness stage
How Customers Work Today What without you? Workflow, tools, workarounds
How Customers Talk, Search, and Buy In whose words, which channels, what buy process?
Interview Method How do you ask so you get evidence, not politeness?
Synthesis What becomes durable—and where does it live for agents?

Skill path: /productfeeling sequence → Customer discovery playbook (init → persona → jobs → map → tone → handoff). No external discovery skill—ProductFeeling + DocSlime.

Further reading

Section titled “Further reading”