Part III: Making It Real: Customer Discovery as Ethnography
Module 8: The Live Business Owner Case
Class dates: Mon Oct 19, Wed Oct 21 · Badge: 🏛️ The Consultant
Recap Atom (2-min orientation)
Welcome to this module. You have practiced discovery on your own venture; now you turn the same tools outward, onto a real, external problem that is not yours. A real business owner joins the class as a live case, and you point your discovery skills and your agents at their actual problem. Working on someone else's problem is a different discipline: you cannot lean on your own assumptions, and you have to earn an understanding of a business you did not build. It is also the best possible rehearsal for the real world, where you will constantly be asked to be useful to problems you did not create.
Fractal Prompt
Here is the Seminar's central question from this week's angle: do we find, unearth, or create value? Aimed at a real owner's problem, it sharpens into this: when the problem belongs to someone else, whose reading of where the value lies do you trust, and how do you find value in a business you are only now learning? You are practicing discovery without the crutch of already caring, which is exactly the skill a consultant, an employee, or a co-founder needs.
What you will make this week
By Sunday you will have two things: a findings package for the business owner (what you honestly learned about their problem, with evidence, recommendations, and a clear account of what you are still unsure of), and a set of agent performance notes (what your AI agents got right and wrong when pointed at a real case).
Where you are
If you are joining here, you have lost texture, not prerequisite knowledge. You need your discovery toolkit and your CDO agent; if you do not have the CDO built yet, you can still do the case work by hand and build it after. The live owner is confirmed. The "Ask Wren" panel can orient you. Wren Calloway is your course concierge.
Fallback-only build note
The North Loop Print & Pack packet remains hidden during the normal live-owner path. It may render only when an instructor or administrator explicitly activates fallback mode because the live owner is unavailable.
Your notes for the week
These save on this device only. Once you are enrolled, your lab work saves to your course record.
The rest of this week is for enrolled students
You reach the gated sections when three things are true: you are signed in with a ProvenanceAI account, you hold an active ProvenanceAI Studio subscription, and you have redeemed the course access code your instructor gave your section. All three are required.