How modern teams learn the truth about their customers.
A field guide to product, UX, and market research — built from leading practitioner literature and our experience helping hundreds of research teams. Practitioner-grade and free.
Start here
Three reading paths depending on where you are in your research journey. Pick one and we'll suggest the next step at every turn.
I'm a founder validating an idea
Start with the Mom Test, customer slicing, and the MVBP. You'll learn to have conversations that produce real signal, not polite applause.
Start with Customer DiscoveryI'm a PM running continuous discovery
Go to Opportunity Solution Trees, assumption mapping, and continuous interviewing. Build a practice that is weekly, not quarterly.
Start with Problem FramingI'm a UX researcher building a practice
Ground your methods selection in the four research types, then operationalise recruiting, screeners, and synthesis across your team.
Start with FoundationsFeatured interactive
Explore an Opportunity Solution Tree
Teresa Torres's core discovery visual. Click any node to collapse it and see how the tree reshapes.
The 12 Chapters
The full arc — foundations, framing, validation, strategy, execution. Read it end-to-end, or drop in wherever you need help today.
Part I — Foundations
Why Research Matters
The case for systematic product research, what it is and isn't, the cost of skipping it, research types, the research mindset, cognitive biases, and who should do the work.
Customer Discovery — Finding Truth in Conversation
How to extract honest signal from customer conversations despite the human tendency to be polite, vague, and speculative. Covers the Mom Test, story-based interviewing, bad data types, continuous discovery cadence, and who to talk to first.
The Craft of Interviewing
Practical techniques for conducting customer interviews that produce honest, actionable insight — from preparation and opening to question patterns, handling difficult moments, note-taking systems, and debriefing.
Part II — Framing the Problem
Problem Framing & Opportunity Mapping
How to structure customer insights into a clear opportunity space, using experience maps, opportunity trees, sprint maps, and disciplined problem statements.
Segmentation, Personas & Target Customers
How to divide markets into actionable segments, build research-grounded personas, select a beachhead, and avoid the most common targeting mistakes.
Part III — Validation
Assumption Testing & Validation
How to identify what you are betting on, design the smallest possible test, interpret results honestly, and build confidence through structured validation.
Prototyping & Rapid Testing
How to build just-enough prototypes, run design sprints, test with real users in five days, and connect rapid testing to continuous discovery.
Part IV — Strategy
Positioning & Market Strategy
How to position your product so its value becomes obvious: the five components of positioning, the 10-step process, three positioning styles, competitive analysis, and translating positioning into a sales narrative.
Analysis & Synthesis
How to turn raw research data into decisions: affinity diagrams, collaborative analysis, mental models, gap analysis, quantitative methods, reporting findings, and avoiding common analysis traps.
Part V — Execution
Research Operations & Planning
How to plan, resource, recruit for, and operationalize product research — from method selection and screener design to stakeholder management, agile integration, ethics, and budgeting.
Go-to-Market & Business Model
How to validate the business around the product — TAM sizing, pricing, unit economics, sales motions, channel strategy, the AARRR funnel, and the connection between product uniqueness and sustainable growth.
Building a Continuous Practice
How to move from doing research as a project to building research as a permanent organizational habit — the keystone habit of weekly interviewing, anti-patterns, measuring impact, and scaling the practice.
Frameworks
Standalone reference cards for the named frameworks you'll see referenced throughout the guide.
5segs / 9segs Customer Map
Nishiguchi's customer segmentation pyramid that classifies people into five behavioral tiers (and an extended nine-segment version) to focus strategy on the segments with the highest growth leverage.
Assumption Mapping (Importance x Evidence 2x2)
A prioritization tool that plots assumptions on a 2x2 matrix of importance (how critical to success) vs. evidence (how much you know), surfacing the riskiest unknowns to test first.
Beachhead Market Selection
Bill Aulet's structured process for choosing a single initial market to dominate before expanding — the first and most critical decision in disciplined entrepreneurship.
Commitment and Advancement (Currency of Conversations)
Fitzpatrick's framework for measuring whether customer conversations are producing real signal by tracking tangible commitments rather than verbal enthusiasm.
Dunford's 10-Step Positioning Process
April Dunford's systematic process for positioning a product by starting from competitive alternatives and building outward to a market category and relevant trend.
Five-Day Design Sprint
A structured five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing with real users.
Four Types of Research (Generative, Descriptive, Evaluative, Causal)
A classification of research approaches by their purpose — helping teams pick the right method by first identifying what kind of question they are trying to answer.
LTV and COCA (Unit Economics)
The unit economics framework from Disciplined Entrepreneurship that ensures a business can sustainably acquire customers by comparing Lifetime Value (LTV) to Cost of Customer Acquisition (COCA).
Minimum Viable Business Product (MVBP)
Aulet's upgrade to the MVP concept — the smallest product that delivers enough value for a customer to actually pay for it, covering the full business use case rather than just a technical demonstration.
Opportunity Solution Tree (OST)
A visual map linking a desired outcome to customer opportunities, potential solutions, and assumption tests — used to structure continuous discovery.
The Mom Test
Three rules for asking questions in customer conversations so that even your mom would give you useful, honest data instead of polite encouragement.
The VFwPA Meeting Request Framework
A formula for requesting customer conversations that avoids triggering sales defenses — using Vision, Framing, weakness, Pedestal, and Ask.
Techniques
Step-by-step guides for the hands-on methods you'll use week to week.
Affinity Diagramming
Collaboratively cluster individual data points into emergent themes to find patterns across qualitative research.
Competitive Audit
Systematically assess competitor products across consistent dimensions to identify gaps, positioning opportunities, and market standards.
Customer Slicing
Narrow broad customer segments into specific who-where pairs so you can find and talk to real people.
Experience Mapping
Visualize a customer's end-to-end journey by creating individual maps first, then merging them into a shared team artifact.
How Might We
Reframe problems and observations into open-ended opportunity questions that invite divergent thinking.
Interview Snapshot
Create a one-page post-interview artifact that captures key insights, quotes, and opportunities from a discovery conversation.
N1 Analysis
Conduct a deep, detailed analysis of a single customer's journey to uncover insights that aggregate data obscures.
Pre-mortem
Imagine a project has already failed and work backward to identify the most likely causes, surfacing hidden assumptions and risks.
Screener Design
Build a participant screening questionnaire that filters for the right research participants without revealing qualifying criteria.
Story-Based Interviewing
Elicit concrete past behaviors by asking participants to recount specific instances rather than hypotheticals or generalizations.
This guide is published with structured metadata and an llms.txt manifest so AI agents can cite it accurately. Claims are grounded in practitioner literature — see the sources page for the full bibliography.
