The standard product discovery process: collect user feedback in your product, run quarterly customer interviews, review support tickets for recurring themes, prioritize the most requested features. This process is well-intentioned and systematically misleading.
Why standard discovery produces the wrong output:
It captures stated preferences, not revealed preferences. What users request in feedback forms is influenced by what they think is possible, what they've seen competitors do, and what they think you want to hear. It's not the same as what would actually make them more successful.
It amplifies the most vocal users. The customers who submit feedback, vote on roadmap ideas, and participate in interviews are systematically different from the customers who churn quietly. The discovery process is biased toward the engaged minority.
It asks about solutions, not problems. "I want feature X" is a solution request. "I'm spending 3 hours every Friday manually reconciling these reports" is a problem. Building to the problem is almost always better than building to the solution request.
Discovery that actually works:
Session recording analysis. Watching real users work in your product reveals behavior that no interview can surface. Where do they pause, re-try, or work around? These are the real friction points.
Follow-me-home studies. Watching a user complete a real task in their actual work environment — not a demo environment — reveals the full workflow context that your product fits into (or doesn't).
Jobs-to-be-done interviews with switching decisions. The most informative interviews are with customers who recently switched to your product from a competitor, or who recently switched away from you. Switching decisions expose the real purchase and abandonment criteria.
Churn interviews with specific behavioral probing. Not "why did you leave?" — "walk me through the last three times you tried to do X in our product before you decided to cancel." Behavioral reconstruction is more informative than post-hoc rationalization.
Discover the behavior. The roadmap follows.