02 · Core service
Product Discovery
Your customers already ran the experiment. You just were not in the kitchen.
What we do
Find the problem worth solving before you fund the solution. We structure evidence, frame the job-to-be-done, and define an MVP that can actually be tested, small enough to learn, sharp enough to change a mind.
- Customer and field research
- Problem framing and opportunity sizing
- Ideation with constraints
- Validation plans and MVP definition
Case lesson · Intuit: Design for Delight / Follow Me Home
What if the most expensive meeting of the year is the one that never left the office?
Intuit’s field-research method is a staple of Harvard and HBR teaching on innovation. Publicly described by Intuit leadership; not a reproduction of any HBS case packet.
The room
Scott Cook’s teams at Intuit did not trust conference-room certainty about taxes, invoices, or small-business cash. They went to kitchens and shop floors. The method later called Follow Me Home was not a brand campaign. It was a refusal to outsource reality to a survey.
The tension
Product teams are rewarded for shipping. Watching someone struggle with a form for forty minutes feels unproductive. So companies collect research, file it, and build the thing they already wanted to build. The evidence never gets a vote.
The move
Intuit made field observation a product decision tool. Design for Delight asked teams to feel the customer’s pain, go broad on ideas, then narrow with experiments. The insight was rarely a feature request. It was the work as it actually happened, the workaround, the shoebox of receipts, the moment someone gave up.
What happened
Products such as SnapTax and later QuickBooks innovations came from watching the job, not workshopping the persona. The expensive error, solving a problem customers do not have, got cheaper, because it got caught earlier.
If research cannot change the roadmap, it is interior decoration.
The expensive error is solving a problem customers do not have. Discovery is a method, not a brainstorm.
How consulting helps
We put customer evidence in the room, frame the real problem, and design the smallest test that would change your mind. If the test cannot kill the idea, it is not a test.
- A problem statement tied to observed work, not opinions
- An MVP definition small enough to learn from
- A go / pivot / stop rule agreed before build starts
Case discussions summarize publicly known company history and widely taught Harvard Business School case titles. They are not reproductions of HBS case documents, and they are not client work of iBRAG.