When I'm most useful
The work can start with a customer question, a product decision, or a service that isn’t holding together. I usually look across both sides of it: what customers are experiencing and what has to happen behind the scenes for that experience to work.
Usually there is already some evidence. The problem is that people are drawing different conclusions from it, or there is not enough direct evidence to make the next call without guessing.
- The team has three versions of who the customer is, and all three sound plausible.
- Research exists, but it has not changed a product, positioning, or roadmap decision.
- You are moving fast and need to know whether the customer hypothesis is still holding up.
- A product or service crosses teams, systems, and incentives, and what needs to change may be buried in a workflow, handoff, or operating detail.
The work goes wherever the decision requires: customer interviews and synthesis, service and journey mapping, product discovery, facilitation, positioning, or working through a workflow, prototype, or team practice that needs to change. It usually takes one of three forms:
- A Bullseye Customer Sprint brings the people making the decision into five live customer interviews over about four or eight weeks. The team leaves with a documented customer direction and a short list of next moves grounded in the same conversations.
- A Listening Cycle keeps the interviews going for three months while the team builds, using regular conversations and immediate debriefs to see whether the customer hypothesis is still holding up.
- Or fractional work, where I stay closer to the team for a defined period and carry what we learn into product strategy, positioning, roadmap and go-to-market decisions, and the specific product or operating changes that follow.
AI makes it dramatically easier to build, prototype, and generate plausible answers about customers. It also makes it easier to move very quickly in the wrong direction. Direct observation still matters.
I’m Skipper. I came into this work through design, and service design still shapes how I see it. The product is only part of the picture. I tend to look at what customers experience and the people, processes, systems, and decisions that make it possible. Sometimes the thing that needs to change is the interface. Sometimes it’s the workflow, customer definition, operating model, or the way the team is making the decision in the first place.
I host the How This Works show and write a newsletter, so interviewing people and understanding how they work is a constant for me. Before How This Works co, I worked across founding startup roles, product studios, enterprise consulting, and design leadership.
