9. Context adaptability

§The three pillars in this part are the things a startup's discovery rests on when every method has been cut to its minimum. The first is that there is no single right amount of discovery. There is only the right amount for your market.

§ 9.1Market context sets the dose#

§Steve Blank's oldest and least quoted idea is that startups are not one kind of thing. A company entering an existing market, one with customers who already buy and competitors they already buy from, faces a different problem from a company creating a new market, where the customers do not yet know they are customers. A third kind resegments an existing market by finding a niche or a cheaper way in.

§Each kind needs different discovery.

§In a nascent market, the deep work is on needs. People cannot name what they want because nothing like it exists; they can only show you what they do and what frustrates them. Discovery here is long on observation, generous with time, and suspicious of what people say they would buy. The risk is building something nobody understands.

§In a mature market, the deep work is on the incumbents. Everyone knows what the product category does; the question is what the existing options get wrong, for whom, and whether the gap is worth a company. Discovery here means using the competitors' products, reading their complaints, and finding the angle they have missed. The risk is building something nobody needs twice.

§In a resegmented market, it is both at once, narrowed to one group: what does this specific kind of customer need that the general solution does not give them?

§ 9.2The other dials#

§Market maturity is the largest dial but not the only one. The original guide named three more.

§Competition sets the bar for validation. In a crowded market, "people want this" is not a finding; "people want this from us rather than from the three others" is. Industry specifics shape the research: a founder selling to hospitals cannot run the same conversations as one selling to gamers, because access, language and the cost of a wrong answer all differ. Regulation defines what is possible before any customer is asked, and a discovery process that discovers a great product the law forbids has wasted its time.

§ 9.3Why teams get the dose wrong#

§They copy. A founder reads how a company in one context did discovery and applies it in another. Consumer social playbooks applied to enterprise software; enterprise sales discovery applied to a consumer app; a mature-market competitive analysis applied to a category that does not exist yet. The process is faithfully executed and answers the wrong question.

§ 9.4What this means in practice#

§Look at the market first. Decide what kind it is. Then decide how much of the first diamond it needs, and which of Product Sprint's instruments to lean on: observation and expert conversations for a nascent market, competitor use and switch conversations for a mature one. The method bends to the context. It is not the other way around.