A UX Research Crash Course for Founders — Customer Discovery Tips from Zoom, Zapier & Dropbox

The window when founders are pre-product, exploring ideas is one of the most consequential periods in company building. You may have noticed that we’ve been covering these topics more frequently as of late here on The Review. That’s because we always find that the nuts and bolts execution of exactly how to approach each item on the starting-a-company punch list is more messy in practice.

Take talking to users, for example. In our experience, we’ve found the customer discovery cog to be one of the most challenging aspects on the startup assembly line (which is precisely why the First Round team launched Discovery Assist last year). Speaking with potential customers so you can figure out what to build sounds straightforward enough — but there’s so many opportunities for this process to go sideways.

Here’s just a handful of the challenges: finding the right sort of folks to talk to — and getting them to reply to emails. Asking interview questions that avoid common biases yet still yield actionable takeaways. Synthesizing insights and pulling out themes from conflicting answers that point in different directions. Getting helpful feedback on prototypes and troubleshooting why an early version isn’t landing with users.

Of course, while this may be new ground for first-time founders, there are plenty of experts and seasoned startup operators with deep wells of experience in this arena: UX researchers. But this function is usually only spun up at a certain scale, and even then, its role can be unclear and undervalued. Certainly in the -1 to 0 phase of company building, founders have to shoulder this crucial UX research work on their own — typically with very little previous experience, no training, and a fuzzy sense of where to start.

We think Jane Davis is the perfect person to turn to here. Currently the Director of UX Research and UX Writing at Zoom, she previously led UX Research and Content Design at Zapier, and managed the growth research team at Dropbox.

In this exclusive interview, Davis walks us through the end-to-end research process in incredible detail, covering everything from clarifying your goals and structuring interviews, to selecting participants and synthesizing insights. 

Even though Davis gets into some big concepts — like confirmation bias or stated and revealed preferences — she does a spectacular job of diving into the brass tacks of how to approach this work, from the specific go-to questions she always asks in customer conversations, to why you should pay for transcripts of your user interviews.

It’s an excellent crash course for budding founders looking to cultivate a researcher’s mindset as they talk to potential customers, but it’s also a useful guide for product builders and designers looking to sharpen their own skills. 

As always, thanks for reading and sharing!

-The Review editors

Recommended resources: 

A Twitter thread on the 7 questions you should ask in reference calls.

This read on the growing specialization of product management.

The dangers of the "TikTok spike."

A sampling of marketing org charts.

This reminder to think of jobs as verbs, rather than nouns.

Trending this week — Review Reads:

We love feedback! How would you rate this week's newsletter? 📋

Great • Good • Meh