TIAP Voices: From Insight to Innovation — Ensuring Your Discovery Process Includes Discovering Your Customer

By: Mobeen Lalani, TIAP Senior Analyst, Technology and Venture Development

In the dynamic world of health innovation, technology developers must navigate a plethora of complex hurdles, from data generation/acquisition to technical, regulatory, and financial challenges, and ultimately, getting your product adopted by a risk-adverse customer: the healthcare system. One of the most critical but somewhat overlooked steps in this journey is robust customer discovery. This is a fundamental strategic process that must be undertaken in as deep a manner as possible during the early stages of research and development as it will undoubtedly be a major influence on not only successful product market adoption, but a start-up’s overall trajectory.

Customer Discovery

The goal of customer discovery is to strengthen your understanding of your potential market  to ensure that product development aligns well with actual user needs and demands.

Health solutions must address specific problems within a highly regulated and nuanced field. Without a deep understanding of key issues such as customer pain points, willingness to pay, integration into workflows, etc., a start-up risks developing a solution that is technically innovative but practically irrelevant. Deep customer discovery strengthens an innovator’s understanding of these and other issues, and confirms the technology being developed is not only cutting-edge but also genuinely helpful and applicable in clinical or patient settings.

The Process

To ensure thorough and effective customer discovery, it is essential to implement a structured approach that importantly, includes interacting with healthcare professionals, patients, and other stakeholders to gain insights into their experiences and challenges — and thereby uncovering market insights that might otherwise be missed. This includes:

1. Identifying Key Stakeholder(s): Determine who will benefit from or be affected by the proposed solution. Once defined, segment the target audience, such as patients, healthcare providers, payers, administrators, or executives. Focus on prioritizing stakeholders based on relevance (whether the customer discovery is related to the business model, product, problem statement, etc.) and impact.
2. Creating a Hypothesis: The goal is to define and quantify your objective and establish one or several hypotheses. During customer discovery, these hypotheses should be tailored to your company’s needs to mitigate risks, refute any early assumptions, and guide your development. Each step of your customer discovery should then either further validate or refute your initial hypothesis.
3. Conducting Research and Interviews: The three key data points through the process are needs, pain points, and existing solutions. When conducting interviews, ask questions about experiences, challenges, and preferences. Here’s the key: you want to understand the pain and how the customer currently addresses it. How can your product/solution be the gold standard?
4. Analyzing and Synthesizing Insights: You have the data; now unlock the common themes. This is more of an art than a science. Review the feedback to uncover any patterns or insights and map out major issues and opportunities. If you don’t quite understand something, review it with a follow-up.
5. Develop and Iterate Prototype: Use the knowledge gained from the process to create and evaluate new solutions to address the identified needs. Design workflows and test them with a group of stakeholders. Gather feedback to assess effectiveness. Repeat x3.

Strong Customer Discovery Supports Early-Stage Fundraising

Customer discovery validates the market need for the technology. By engaging with end-users early on, start-ups can confirm whether their solution effectively addresses a significant problem. This validation is crucial for refining the product and making informed development decisions. It also helps instill confidence in fundraising groups by demonstrating the technology’s potential and the team’s focus on and commitment to identifying and addressing gaps.

Understanding the customer landscape can ultimately empower start-ups to demonstrate a clear and viable business model. Start-ups that grasp their target audience’s specific needs and preferences can craft more compelling value propositions, tailor their marketing strategies, and identify key differentiators. This strategic alignment can attract crucial investors and partners for advancing the product as well as appropriately building / scaling the business.

So remember, innovation at the end of the day is all about the customer!