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The biggest bottleneck in most discovery programs isn’t the research skills - it’s access. “We’d love to talk to customers more, but we can’t get them on the calendar” is the most common excuse for not doing continuous discovery. And it’s usually true 😅 A customer discovery program solves this. It’s a structured, ongoing system for recruiting and maintaining access to customers willing to participate in research - so that when you need to talk to someone, the answer isn’t “let me ask sales to introduce us” but “I have three slots available this week.”

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What it includes

A basic customer discovery program has three components: A panel - A standing list of customers who’ve opted in to participate in research. Segmented by persona, use case, company size, or whatever dimensions matter to your product. The goal is always having a pool to draw from without starting from scratch each time. A recruiting process - A lightweight, repeatable way to add people to the panel. In-product prompts, post-support emails, sales handoffs, end-of-interview referrals. Teresa Torres recommends the warm referral at the end of every session: “Do you know anyone else who’d be willing to chat?” One conversation compounds into many 📈 A scheduling system - Something simple that removes friction from booking. A shared Calendly link, a dedicated research calendar, a rotating slot in the product trio’s week. The easier it is to book, the more likely it happens.

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Who owns it

In larger companies this sits with research ops or a dedicated researcher. In most product teams, it’s the PM - with the trio sharing the interview load once the system is running. The key is that someone owns it. A discovery program that lives in everyone’s head is a discovery program that dies the moment things get busy.

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Segmenting your panel

Not all customers are equally useful for all research questions. A well-segmented panel lets you pull the right participants for the right question quickly. Useful dimensions to segment by:
  • Customer tier (enterprise, SMB, self-serve)
  • Use case or job to be done
  • Tenure (new users, long-term users, churned)
  • Engagement level (power users, occasional users)
Churned customers are particularly underused. They’ll tell you things your active customers won’t 👀

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The incentive question

Should you pay participants? It depends on your customer type. B2C users often expect a small incentive - a gift card, a discount. B2B users in professional roles usually don’t need one - being heard by the product team is often incentive enough. Whatever you decide, be consistent. And don’t let incentives attract the wrong people - you want engaged customers, not people optimising for Amazon vouchers. Lesson learned: teams that build a discovery panel early have a compounding advantage. After six months of continuous discovery, they know their customers better than any competitor who still relies on quarterly research sprints ever will 🏆