Everybody wants to do strategic research.

The problem is that talking about doing strategic research is very different from having a system to do it.

So today, I am going to share the Customer Surveillance Blueprint—the best method to proactively uncover hidden revenue opportunities from your customers.

This blueprint has helped researchers at Twilio, Aflac, Discount Tire, and more to stop "working the product roadmap" and start finding “hidden” truths that others aren’t looking for.

Here is the Blueprint:

Video Walkthrough

How to use this blueprint:

1. Identify the right “informants” in your business. These are people that have knowledge about your customers and the problems they have. These people also have direct knowledge about how your business is solving their problems.
2. Have “investigators” in the business interview the informants to highlight the biggest challenges they are facing.
3. The investigators will then “interrogate” what they learned, and pressure test it against the things that matter most in the business. One way to do this is using the GVARS or AARRR frameworks.
4. The investigators will take their learnings and score them using the Strategic Impact Score. This will produce a rank-ordered list of priorities.
5. The investigators will investigate the highest priority stories using the SIMPLE Investigative framework. As they learn, they will attach a Level of Confidence to their facts, insights, and points-of-view.
6. The investigators will then use the Layer Cake Formula to strategically communicate what they learned.
7. If they have a strategic recommendation to make them use the POSTER Framework to draft that recommendation.
8. The investigators will share what they learned with stakeholders across the business and use that as an opportunity to gather feedback.