Discovery Aggregation

The problems customers have now, and the ones the market is about to give them

About this workflow

Identifying the problems customers face, evidenced and attributed, and separating them cleanly from the ones the market is about to create. The unit of analysis is the problem — not the customer, and not the solution.

The two horizons are held apart deliberately. Observed problems must trace to a named participant, ticket or session; anticipated problems are inference, and carry the driver chain that produced them plus the signal that would falsify them. Solution design and opportunity scoring sit downstream — this work supplies the evidence, it does not pick winners.

The recognizable task

Typical trigger

A new segment or market where the pain is unmapped
A strategy cycle needs a defensible problem set rather than assertions
Inbound signal has accumulated and nobody has interrogated it
A market shift has landed and its consequences for customers are unknown
A roadmap rests on problems no one can cite evidence for

What good looks like

Every observed problem traces to a named source
Problems are stated in the customer’s language, not translated into feature requests
Severity is separated from volume — a loud problem is not assumed to be a severe one
The current workaround and what it costs are captured, as the best proxy for how real the problem is
Observed and anticipated are never blurred, and every anticipated problem shows its driver chain