Today’s episode is with Jane Davis, the Director of UX Research and UX Writing at Zoom. She previously led UX Research and Content Design at Zapier, and managed the growth research team at Dropbox.

Throughout the episode, Jane tackles the thorniest customer development questions and walks us through the end-to-end research process in incredible detail, covering everything from clarifying your goals and asking the right questions, to selecting participants and synthesizing insights.

We start by going through how she applies her playbook in the early-stage startup context — when you’re shipping the first version of your product and don’t yet have the resources to invest in a full research team. We also dig into challenges such as deeply understanding the problem you’re solving, taking on a competitive or a greenfield market, and figuring out willingness to pay.

We also get into best practices for prototyping and iterating, as well as some of the common roadblocks startups face later on, including how to build for multiple users and what to do when people aren’t excited about your product or using it frequently.

Whether you’re talking to potential customers before you start a company, or are looking to get better feedback from your current users, there’s tons of insights in here for founders, product-builders, and design folks alike.

Here’s the book Jane mentioned in the episode: Just Enough Research by Erica Hall.

We also recommend checking out Jane’s recent article: What’s the point of a UX research team?

You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.

Ep. 231 - Dr. Jen Esquer on Overcoming Infidelity + Reconnecting to Your Body + Intuition