Customer evidence for early-stage teams making consequential product decisions
Your team talks to customers on the regular — and may still be picturing different ones
Sales calls, support tickets, surveys, demos, and product feedback all count as customer contact. But they rarely give the people making the decision the same evidence.
That's how teams end up building from slightly different pictures of the customer. That's one main reason for conflicting product priorities, muddled positioning, and eventually wasted time, money, and team effort.
A Listening Cycle keeps customer evidence current while you build through six weeks of weekly interviews and immediate debriefs. And if the customer direction itself still needs pressure-testing, the fuller featured Bullseye Customer Sprint helps your core decision team test one hypothesis at a time through five live interviews and turn what you hear into a documented direction and next actions.
Less “we think.” More “they said.”
Book a 25-min intro call. We want to hear about what decision your team is trying to make and what evidence you already have.
Clients & collaborators
Teams that have done the work
Services
How we help founding teams move from customer evidence to clearer decisions
Customer strategy & product direction
Clarify who you are building for, which problem matters, and what deserves to move forward
Strategic facilitation
Use structured working sessions — including the Bullseye Customer Sprint to a Listening Cycle to a Design Sprint 2.0 to turn uncertainty into a decision and next actions
Team development & coaching
Help leaders and teams improve clarity, decision-making, and how they work together through structured coaching, facilitation, and practical operating frameworks
Perspective from other humans I've worked with
The How This Works co approach
What turning customer evidence into direction looks like
Finding the customer with real stakes
Replay began with a reasonable hypothesis: operations managers needed help building automation apps.
The Bullseye Customer Sprint weakened that assumption and surfaced a stronger signal — independent builders shipping production apps with real economic stakes. They did not just need problems fixed; they needed to understand what broke and why.
Across five Listening Cycles, we tested each shift in the customer hypothesis using interviews, existing customer conversations, developer-relations input, and patterns from their Discord community. The evidence helped narrow the customer definition and sharpen the messaging heading into Replay Builder.
Pivoting when the market vanished
At Shep, the original focus on small and midsize businesses did not hold. Enterprise organizations had the stronger need because business-travel compliance and duty of care carried more serious consequences.
Then COVID erased most business travel almost overnight.
We returned to customer conversations and found that enterprise duty-of-care problems had not disappeared; they had changed. The product shifted toward safety and health notifications, leading to pilots with Adidas and Discovery Channel. Flight Centre acquired Shep in 2021.
Finding the right problem with the wrong buyer
A bank-integrated fintech had seen sales decline 23% over 18 months. The initial hypothesis focused on CFOs at SaaS companies, but the interviews revealed a more specific pattern: CFOs recognized the issue, while controllers dealt with the operational consequences.
That shifted the customer hypothesis from CFOs seeking lower processing costs to controllers at $30M–$100M firms trying to reduce reconciliation and audit problems. Thirteen additional interviews pressure-tested the revised direction and informed updated positioning, product priorities, and go-to-market choices.
Early observations suggest a stronger fit with the revised audience and clearer sales conversations. The expected benefits were higher retention, shorter sales cycles, and access to a broader set of qualified accounts, but those outcomes have not yet been fully confirmed.
This is a no pitch zone
Tell us what decision your team is trying to make
We’ll talk through where you are, what evidence you already have, and whether the Bullseye Customer Sprint, a Listening Cycle, or another approach makes sense.
If we aren't the right fit, we'll say so.
Insights & perspectives
Stories from inside the work
- Your discovery calls have a revenue problem
- Your discovery calls have a revenue problem
- How to build a Bullseye Customer one-liner
- Where do customer conversations come from?
- The questions that inform the Bullseye Customer one-liner
- How to build a Bullseye Customer one-liner
- The question is always about the past
Stories and conversations on customer discovery, product strategy, facilitation, and the messy middle of building and making right now — including the How This Works show.
Phone: +1 917-720-6388
Email: heythere@howthisworks.co
Book a call: howthisworks.co/start
Based in San Francisco, CA, working globally
How This Works show our podcast
Subscribe to our newsletter, How Might We...
Weekly-ish dispatches on customer discovery and product strategy — sensemaking from inside the work and from home, with AI in the mix
© 2026 How This Works, Inc. All rights reserved.
