Customer Discovery
What discovery really is
Customer discovery is the structured effort to understand the business problem, the people affected, and the value at stake before anyone configures Salesforce. Candidates must know the core techniques: stakeholder interviews, job shadowing/observation, facilitated workshops, surveys, and document analysis (existing process maps, reports, org charts).
Concepts to name
- Stakeholder map: executive sponsor, process owner, end users, SMEs, Salesforce admin/architect, IT/security, compliance.
- Personas and journey maps: group users by behavior and goals, not by job title.
- Current-state (AS-IS) process mapping to expose handoffs, delays, and workarounds.
Traps
- Solutioning too early - accepting "build me a dashboard" as the requirement.
- Interviewing only the sponsor, then generalizing to every user.
- Leading or closed questions ("Wouldn't a Kanban view help?").
- Confusing a stated want with the underlying need, and missing the spreadsheet workaround people actually rely on.
- Assuming one region or department speaks for the whole organization.
Rule of thumb
Ask for the last concrete instance, not the general process: "Walk me through the last case you escalated." Then run 5 Whys to reach the root cause.
Worked example
A sales director asks for "a dashboard of open opportunities." Shadowing reveals reps lose time checking whether a discount needs VP approval. The real requirement becomes an approval-rule-driven field with alerts, not a dashboard. Discovery changed the solution - that is the point of it.