Module 7: Customer Discovery as Ethnography

Welcome to this module. In the previous module you built the toolkit; here you learn to use it, and the frame is discovery as finding value that markets overlooked. Customer discovery is the practice of going to real people and learning what they actually value, how they actually behave, and where the current answers fail them. The word to carry throughout is ethnography: you are not running a survey or hunting for a "yes." You are studying how people really live with a problem, with the care of a researcher who expects to be surprised.

Here is the Seminar's central question from this week's angle: do we find, unearth, or create value? Aimed at discovery, it lands hard on finding. Value that markets overlook is real value sitting in plain sight, waiting for someone alert enough to notice it. So the question sharpens into this: how do you pay close enough attention to real people that you notice the value everyone else walked past? Discovery is finding, done as a discipline.

By Sunday you will have several things: an empathy map and a journey map for your problem, your first real interview transcripts, a Customer Discovery Plan with concrete action items, and your Chief Discovery Officer agent, the agent that will manage all your discovery work from here on.

If you are joining here, you have lost texture, not prerequisite knowledge. You need a problem and a few questions to ask; the question bank from Module 6 helps, but you can draft questions fresh here. The "Ask Wren" panel can orient you. Wren Calloway is your course concierge.