Product & Delivery · Chapter 3 of 8
Discovery when your users are not consumers
The literature describes consumer discovery. Most postings in this atlas are B2B, platform or internal — where the method differs.
Across 331 parsed product job descriptions, roadmap and strategy appear in 99% and customer research in 20%. That is not because these teams do not care about users. It is because in B2B, platform and internal contexts, the discovery method is different and the consumer playbook transfers badly.
What changes
| Consumer | B2B / platform / internal | |
|---|---|---|
| Sample size | Thousands; statistics work | Five to fifteen; statistics do not |
| Who you talk to | The user | The buyer, the admin and the user — often three different people who disagree |
| Signal | Behaviour in the product | What they will pay for, or what they build themselves instead |
| Experimentation | A/B tests on real traffic | Rarely possible; too few accounts, too much variance |
| The strongest evidence | Retention curves | A customer doing the thing manually today, at cost |
| The trap | Vocal minority | The loudest account — usually your largest, rarely representative |
What to do instead of A/B tests
- Find who is already solving it manually. A customer paying three people to do something by hand is far stronger evidence than any stated preference. Ask what it costs them today — that is your value ceiling.
- Separate the buyer from the user, deliberately. The buyer's problem is usually risk, cost or compliance; the user's is friction. A product that solves only one loses either the deal or the renewal.
- Ask about the last time, not the general case. ‘Walk me through the last time this happened’ produces facts; ‘would you use a feature that…’ produces politeness.
- For internal platforms, watch rather than ask. Sit with a team for a morning. What they complain about and what actually costs them time are frequently different things.
- Discount the largest account by default. Its requirements are real and they are not the market, and building a roadmap from them is how a product becomes one customer's bespoke system.