Think back to the last time you had to sign up for healthcare. Maybe it was through an online marketplace or an HR website while onboarding for a new job. Were you able to easily understand and compare the insurance plans?

American health insurance and HR websites make it hard to compare plans side by side, especially as you compare more than two or three plans. The plan’s explanations are filled with jargon and are difficult to understand for everyday people. Costs are hard to calculate, such as premiums vs. co-pays for specific procedures. These sites notoriously focus on business needs over the needs of everyday people like you and me. As a customer, I need to compare plans, see what I can afford, see what my options are with preexisting conditions… the list goes on and on. Yet I can barely understand what I’m buying. 

Introducing Lab Zero’s Customer Development playbook. 

When we build a product or service with our client partners at Lab Zero, we don’t want customers to have a bad experience. That’s why we talk to customers to learn about their needs. To conduct meaningful customer development, I wrote this Customer Development Playbook, where I share some of Lab Zero’s strategies for setting up hypotheses and learning goals, conducting interviews with customers, and making sense of insights. When we talk about customer development, we are talking about stepping away from our desks to test hypotheses with customers. It’s a subset of user research, and is our umbrella term for iteratively clarifying who our target customer segments are. At the end of the day, it’s about learning from our customers so that we make better informed, evidence-based decisions. 

The playbook is available on Github alongside our other process guides. It can be used during all stages of a project and is applicable to solo contributors and teams alike.

How do you validate ideas with your customers?

Get the Playbook