What if every product decision your team made was grounded in what an actual customer told you?
Most teams build on good intentions and gut feel. And the instinct is usually close, but close doesn't close. A 5-person team debating who they're building for burns roughly $40K a month in misaligned work. That's not a people problem. That's a signal problem — and silence is expensive.
We can fix that in a few ways. The Bullseye Customer Sprint settles the debate in 5-6 weeks: 10 live customer interviews your whole team watches together, a locked customer definition, and validated positioning you can actually act on Mon morning. Or a Listening Cycle, keeping the clarity from going stale while you're head-down building — weekly interviews, immediate debriefs, no waiting for a report nobody reads.
"I think" becomes "they said." And you're building with clear customer signal.
Book a 25-min intro call — no pitch, just a conversation about where you're at.
Select clients












SERVICES
What services does How This Works co offer?

Product strategy & design
Create products customers want using tested methods that turn insights into business results

Workshop facilitation
Turn ideas into action through focused sessions — from our signature Bullseye Customer Sprint to a Listening Cycle to a Design Sprint

Team development & coaching
Build stronger teams that solve problems together through structured coaching and proven frameworks
Why work with us?
We help teams move from founder intuition to evidence-based conviction. That shift — from guessing to knowing — is what unlocks real momentum. We’ve conducted hundreds of customer interviews across dozens of industries. We know what to listen for, how to help your team see patterns together, and when to pivot versus push forward.
- Surviving a market collapse
At Shep, we built a browser extension for business travel compliance. Our first hypothesis — small and medium businesses — failed after a year of iterations: fragmented budgets, impossible unit economics. We pivoted to enterprise. Then COVID killed 92% of business travel overnight. Instead of folding, we went back to listening. Enterprise still had duty of care problems. We retooled around safety and health notifications, piloted with Adidas and Discovery Channel, and Flight Centre acquired Shep in 2021. - Finding the customer with real stakes
Replay's hypothesis: ops managers need help building automation apps but a Bullseye Customer Sprint with five (5) discovery/user testing interviews told a different story. The customer who actually buys is an independent builder with a production app (not a test) and real money on the line — someone who needed to understand what broke and why, not just have it auto-fixed. So we shifted the Bullseye definition, validated with a Listening Cycle, and they relaunched as Replay Builder. Specificity creates clarity. Clarity creates focus. Focus creates revenue. - Listening past the CFO
A tier 1 bank-integrated fintech's pipeline had stalled — sales down 23% over 18 months. We ran a Bullseye Customer Sprint targeting CFOs at $50M+ SaaS firms. By the third Listening Cycle interview, a CFO handed us the real answer: "That's an audit problem — I kick it to my controller." Right pain, wrong customer. We repositioned for controllers at $30–$100M firms and ran 13 more interviews to confirm. Higher retention, shorter sales cycles, wider swathe of accounts.

READY TO WORK TOGETHER?
See if our approach fits your needs
Book a 25-min call to talk through your situation. We'll be straight about whether our approach makes sense — and what working together might look like (if we work in tandem).
Recent posts, media
- The $400 method that saved Sesame’s launch, a healthcare startup
- How talking to 10 customers over two (2) weeks unlocked $2M for a Fortune 500 co
- Mixtape Friday: Really really light, vol 5 • fall 2025
- Jen Blatz
- Interviewing customers: a lightweight framework that actually works
- Interviewing customers: the unsung superpower that your product company needs right now
- Dr. Chui Chui Tan
We write about product, strategy, design, workshop facilitation, team dynamics, technology, and other current topics (like AI), plus episodes of the How This Works show.

Phone: +1 917-720-6388
Email: heythere@howthisworks.co
How This Works show, our podcast
Subscribe to our newsletter, How Might We...
Not spammy or salesy, just ideas worth your time — written and assembled weekly-ish
© 2017-2026 How This Works, Inc. All rights reserved.

