Continuously Discovering Your Product's True Purpose
Last week, I spent a day listening to our support and success calls – something I try to do regularly to stay connected with our customers’ reality. These conversations continuously challenge how I think about our product.
These are not fancy customer advisory sessions or strategic planning meetings. These are everyday conversations between our team and customers who had discovered ways to adapt our product to their team’s scale and structure. It was a powerful reminder that a product’s purpose shifts dramatically based on the evolving market and the jobs customers have to do.
The Evolution of Purpose
Modern SaaS products are shape-shifters, constantly evolving as customers discover new ways to use them. What begins as a solution for one specific need often transforms as teams adapt it to their unique contexts. This evolution isn’t random – it’s driven by the real-world problems customers are trying to solve.
A small team might start using your product in its most basic form, focusing on core functionality. As they grow, their needs become more complex. What worked for a ten-person team needs to evolve for a hundred-person organization. Enterprise customers then push the boundaries further, requiring features that smaller teams might never need.
Listening to Reality
The most valuable product insights rarely come from formal feedback sessions. They emerge from support tickets, implementation calls, and casual check-ins. When you truly listen, patterns emerge that challenge your assumptions about your product’s purpose.
Recently, we discovered teams were using our deployment scheduling feature in ways we never anticipated. Some used it to manage their entire release process, others as a compliance tool, and still others as a team coordination platform. Each use case revealed a different facet of our product’s potential.
Understanding the Why
Behind every feature request and support ticket lies a deeper story. When a customer asks for a new capability, they’re really telling you about a problem they’re trying to solve. The key is understanding not just what they’re asking for, but why they need it.
This understanding comes from asking the right questions: What problem are you trying to solve? How are you handling this today? What would success look like? These conversations often reveal that the requested feature isn’t what they really need – it’s just the solution they’ve imagined.
Building for Evolution
Creating products that can evolve with your customers requires a different approach to development. Instead of building rigid solutions, focus on creating flexible foundations that can adapt to different needs. This means:
- Understanding core workflows and making them adaptable
- Creating features that can grow in complexity as needs evolve
- Building with configuration rather than hard-coding assumptions
- Maintaining simplicity while enabling sophistication
The Continuous Discovery Loop
Product discovery isn’t a phase – it’s a continuous process. Every customer interaction is an opportunity to learn something new about your product’s purpose. This continuous loop of discovery, validation, and adaptation keeps your product aligned with evolving customer needs.
Support calls become discovery sessions. Implementation meetings reveal new use cases. Customer success check-ins uncover emerging patterns. Each interaction adds to your understanding of what your product truly means to your customers.
Moving Beyond Features
Too often, we get caught up in feature lists and roadmap items. But your product’s true value lies not in what it does, but in what it enables customers to achieve. The same feature might serve completely different purposes for different teams, and understanding these variations is crucial.
This perspective shift changes how we think about product development. Instead of asking “What features should we build?” we ask “What do our customers need to achieve?” This subtle change leads to better decisions and more valuable solutions.
The Role of Product Teams
Product teams need to become expert listeners and pattern recognizers. This means:
- Regularly engaging with customers at all levels
- Looking beyond feature requests to understand underlying needs
- Identifying patterns across different customer segments
- Validating assumptions through continuous observation
- Being willing to challenge our own beliefs about our product
Looking Forward
Your product’s purpose isn’t static – it’s constantly evolving as markets change and customers discover new ways to use it. Success comes not from rigidly defining your product’s purpose, but from staying open to its evolution.
This continuous discovery requires humility. No matter how well you think you understand your product, your customers will find new ways to use it, new problems to solve with it, and new purposes to fulfill.
The question isn’t whether your product’s purpose will evolve, but whether you’ll be ready to evolve with it. Are you listening closely enough to hear what your customers are really telling you about your product’s true purpose?
Remember, every support call, every implementation meeting, and every customer interaction is an opportunity to discover something new about your product. Are you ready to keep discovering?