Yesterday I met with entrepreneurs on opposite ends of the spectrum but united by a shared question: What should I do next?

The first entrepreneur was firmly in the "have an idea/trying to make it good" stage, involving a pretty substantial physical consumer product plus intelligent sensing software. The second was in the "$10 million in revenue/need more paths for growth" phase, capturing big enterprise deals (good!) but failing to acquire new customers in less than a nine-month sales cycle (bad!).

Like the question that united them, the answer was the same: get in the trenches and discover what customers value through customer discovery work. Good discovery is straightforward: a lightweight way to test ideas that optimizes for learning and validates value using the customers' perspective.