While executives were happy with Gong, Fathom's interviews with individual contributors (ICs) revealed a critical flaw: the platform was too slow for their immediate post-meeting workflow. This overlooked pain point became Fathom's wedge to enter the market and build a product for the end-user, not just the buyer.
Related Insights
Customers describe an idealized version of their world in interviews. To understand their true problems and workflows, you must be physically present. This uncovers the crucial gap between their perception and day-to-day reality.
True product intuition isn't just from standard discovery calls. It's forged by directly engaging with customers' most urgent problems on escalation calls. This unfiltered feedback provides conviction and data-backed confidence for decision-making.
To find a competitor's real weaknesses, go beyond their marketing. Message their ex-employees on LinkedIn for operational insights and analyze their 1-star G2/Capterra reviews to identify the persistent product flaws that anger customers the most.
Instead of guessing your competitive advantage, ask potential customers which other solutions they've evaluated and why those products didn't work for them. They will explicitly tell you the market gaps and what you need to build to win.
Before an innovation workshop, focus interviews on employees and customers who interact with the product daily, not just executives. Their ground-level insights are essential for defining the strategic 'white spaces' that will guide the workshop and ensure it addresses real problems.
It's not enough for platform PMs to interview their direct users (developers). To build truly enabling platforms, you must also gain wider context by sitting in on the developers' own customer interviews. This provides deep empathy for the entire value chain, leading to better platform decisions.
The only reliable way to understand a customer is to "forward deploy"—work alongside them in their actual environment. This direct experience of their job closes the context gap that interviews can't bridge, revealing unspoken needs and frustrations.
To truly understand a B2B customer's pain, interviews are not enough. The best founders immerse themselves completely by 'going native'—taking a temporary job at a target company to experience their problems firsthand. This uncovers authentic needs that surface-level research misses.
To find product-market fit, Augment's team shadowed logistics operators for 60 days. This revealed a deeper problem than leaders described: massive email noise from listservs used as a workaround for 24/7 coverage. Building for the operator's messy reality, not the CEO's summary, is crucial for adoption.
Don't shy away from competitors. A powerful customer discovery tactic is to present competing solutions directly to prospects and ask them specifically what they dislike or what's missing. This method surfaces critical product gaps and unmet needs you can build your solution around.
