DISCOVER: A New Guide to Customer Interviews and Product Insight

DISCOVER, a new book by Scott Burleson, is now available.

Its full subtitle is From Customer Noise to Product Signal: A Jobs-to-Be-Done Guide to Customer Interviews and Product Insight. The book is now available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover formats.

DISCOVER is best understood as complementary to Blueprinting. It begins with the same central premise: successful innovation begins with disciplined customer understanding.

The book explores several questions that often arise before, during, and after customer insight work:

• How should an innovation team frame the market it wants to study?
• How can customer interviews stay grounded in what customers are trying to accomplish?
• How can teams probe beyond surface-level answers while preserving the structure of the interview?
• And after customer insight work is complete, how can different forms of evidence be combined into a clearer product signal?

Built on Jobs-to-Be-Done

The foundation of DISCOVER is Jobs-to-Be-Done, which serves as the common language for understanding customer behavior.

Customers do not simply buy products. They are trying to make progress. They have jobs to accomplish, outcomes they want to improve, and circumstances that shape what success looks like.

This language helps teams avoid becoming trapped by current products, current categories, or internal assumptions. Instead of beginning only with what the company sells, the team can begin with what the customer is trying to get done.

That perspective supports stronger customer conversations and better interpretation of what those conversations reveal.

Framing the work with a Market Lens

One of the most important early decisions in an innovation effort is deciding whose reality the team is trying to understand.

DISCOVER introduces the Market Lens as a structure for defining the people being studied, the job they are trying to accomplish, and the contexts that shape that job.

This may sound like a planning detail, but it can have significant implications. A poorly defined lens can cause a team to combine customers who are not truly comparable. It can expand the project in ways that increase cost, timeline, and complexity. It can also make later findings difficult to interpret.

For example, buyers, users, engineers, operators, maintainers, and approvers may all matter in an innovation project. But they may not be performing the same job or evaluating success in the same way.

Similarly, adding one more geography, application, customer type, or operating context may sound like a small scope change. In practice, it can create a new comparison group that requires additional interviews, deeper analysis, and, in quantitative work, a larger sample.

The Market Lens helps teams make these choices deliberately rather than discovering too late that the project has become broader, more expensive, or less coherent than expected.

Strengthening customer interviews

DISCOVER also includes practical guidance for customer interviewing.

Customer interviews are not simply conversations. They are structured learning exercises, and the way questions are framed and sequenced can significantly affect what the team learns.

One challenge is confirmation bias. Teams often enter customer conversations with strong assumptions about the problem, the solution, or the opportunity. Without care, an interview can become a search for validation rather than a search for understanding.

DISCOVER is best understood as complementary to Blueprinting. It begins with the same central premise: successful innovation begins with disciplined customer understanding.

DISCOVER emphasizes the importance of countering this tendency by allowing customers to describe their experience in their own terms before introducing the team’s hypotheses, concepts, or solution ideas. In general, questions should progress from less aided to more aided, so the team learns as much as possible before revealing too much of its own thinking.

The book also discusses the value of a deliberate interview flow. A strong interview begins by setting the customer at ease, builds rapport, clarifies the purpose of the conversation, moves through the learning objectives, and ends by confirming understanding and closing on a constructive note.

This kind of structure helps interviewers stay purposeful without making the conversation rigid. It also helps teams conduct interviews more consistently across customers, which improves the quality of the evidence they collect.

This reinforces key tenets of New Product Blueprinting such as customer interviews should be conversational, uncover real customer experience, and improve the quality of the decisions that follow.

From customer noise to product signal

The most distinctive idea in DISCOVER is the Signal Translator.

Most companies already possess more customer evidence than they realize. They may have findings from a completed New Product Blueprinting project, prior interviews, surveys, customer complaints, support records, sales feedback, win-loss notes, market research, and internal expertise.

The difficulty is that these sources often remain separate.

Each may use different language. Each may come from a different moment in time. Each may reflect a different method, sample, or business question.

The goal is not simply to collect more research. It is to improve the quality of the signal available for product strategy, positioning, concepts, priorities, and specifications.

The Signal Translator is designed to help teams connect these sources around a shared set of customer outcomes. Its purpose is to make it easier to see where evidence converges, where it conflicts, where gaps remain, and which signals deserve greater confidence.

This can be especially valuable after a Blueprinting project.

A strong Blueprinting effort can produce valuable customer insight. The Signal Translator can help preserve that insight and connect it to other sources of evidence over time, so that customer learning becomes more cumulative.

The goal is not simply to collect more research. It is to improve the quality of the signal available for product strategy, positioning, concepts, priorities, and specifications.

A practical guide told through a story

DISCOVER is written in an unusual format.

Rather than presenting only frameworks and instructions, the book follows Shelton and the team at Big Sky Outdoors as they work through a discovery project involving a new backpacking tent.

This narrative structure allows the methods to appear in context. Readers see the team wrestle with an unclear market, imperfect interviews, conflicting evidence, and the challenge of turning customer learning into direction.

The story is supported by practical explanations, examples, and tools that product managers, researchers, innovators, and leaders can apply to their own work.

Extending the value of customer insight

New Product Blueprinting helps B2B teams conduct disciplined voice-of-customer work, uncover important customer needs, and identify opportunities for new product development.

DISCOVER was written in that same tradition of practical, customer-centered innovation.

The book explores several surrounding challenges that often shape the value of customer insight work: how teams frame the market before conversations begin, how they stay grounded in what customers are trying to accomplish, how they conduct stronger interviews, and how they connect evidence from multiple sources after the work is complete.

These topics matter because customer insight is most valuable when it continues to inform decisions beyond the initial study. Findings from Blueprinting projects, prior research, market analysis, customer feedback, and internal expertise can become more powerful when they are connected around a shared view of customer outcomes.

In that sense, DISCOVER supports a broader goal that has always guided AIM’s work: helping teams turn disciplined customer understanding into better innovation decisions.

The book is now available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover formats. Click here to access DISCOVER.