When I created this, Reforge had recently reduced the size of our company as part of a strategic shift to the business. At the same time, we codified new operating values to help shape and sharpen the company. Two of the values are "Delivering value to customers is all that matters" and "Small teams to bigger things." 

As a leader at the company, I was looking for ways to make it easier for teams to harness these values in their day-to-day. In order to consistently deliver customer value, I thought about how important it is to maintain an up-to-date, customer-informed view of the world through frequent customer discovery. I also thought about how smaller teams might feel overwhelmed by the time-intensiveness of customer discovery calls and how beneficial it would be to minimize the time and effort required to do them. To solve this tension, I developed a process that automates all the logistical aspects of customer discovery calls to save our teams time. The less time they spend on logistics, the more time they can spend talking to customers and actioning the insights gleaned.

Before I created this, I gathered information on how people across the company were currently doing customer discovery. I learned that many were doing calls but that they had various ways of sourcing customers, and hardly any were automating the process at all. That's how I knew this streamlined process would be beneficial.

When I finished this, I rolled it out through Slack to the group of people actively doing customer discovery. I included a 

 that walked through my motivation for creating this process and invited feedback as to how I could make it more helpful. I also shared it with my leadership team so that they could help create awareness about it in their teams. It was well received. All 4 product pods are now engaged in the new process, which I think demonstrates that the value is clearly understood.

While I knew that this streamlined process would help people already doing customer calls, I anticipated that those who haven't done them before might feel unsure about how to utilize these tool and process effectively. So I wanted to offer my time to help familiarize them with it and even help them design their first research project.

Short video tutorials are very helpful when offering training like this, especially when they are all located in one place and can be easily accessed.

To create this, I first asked people who had expertise in divergent sourcing methods to record a Loom video on how to do it. I didn't want my process to be overly prescriptive; in fact, it was important to me that I exposed people to new ways of doing customer discovery that they could add to their toolkit. Rather than it being "my way of doing it," I wanted to surface the ways people are currently operating at the company so they can learn from their peers.

Another interesting outcome of this project (which I had hoped would happen!) is that it inspired someone to contribute to making it even better. A designer on my team said that it inspired her to learn how to create a cohort in Amplitude so that she could automate customer discovery outreach for her pod. After she learned how to do this, she recorded a Loom video on how she did it and added it to my Figjam! This helped diversify the number of ways customer outreach can be done.

For anyone using this artifact or something similar to it I would suggest:

Positioning it as an act of service. You've done this to save them time! This will increase interest and adoption. I used language like, "take advantage of the time-saving process I've developed" and "Check out how you can make customer discovery calls a lot simpler 🪄"

When rolling it out up and across, be sure to highlight why this is needed, what it is/isn't, and what it solves/doesn't solve. Here is the message I shared with the leadership team to set the right context:

"Hi all, I wanted to share a project I've been working on that streamlines the process of customer discovery calls. I did this because I never want talking to our customers to feel like too much effort and I want to help those talking to customers be more efficient with their time. I've started to share this with the people that I know are actively doing customer discovery calls but I wanted to also let you all know so that you can help spread the word to those on your teams doing customer discovery calls as part of their work. I'd also love your feedback on how I can make this better for you and your team. Here is a loom overview as well as the Figjam that can be found in the Reforge All Team Figma Team. A few notes for context: This does automate all logistical aspects of customer discovery calls such as recruiting, scheduling, tracking, and compensation This does not automate aspects such as feedback gathering, synthesis, or share-outs (this is something to explore solving in the future). This is a way to make customer discovery calls more efficient, but customer calls are not the only way to gather customer feedback/insights."

I included this to give future users of this process an understanding of what they and the customer would experience once the automation had been set up.

Tess Peppers

Ali Riehle

Adam Green

Erin Mongan

At Reforge I developed a process that automates all the logistical aspects of customer discovery calls to save our teams time. The less time they spend on logistics, the more time they can spend talking to customers and actioning the insights gleaned.

Customer Discovery Call Process at Reforge

Calendly Event Setup

Participant Outreach

Automation Process Map

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