There’s a question I get nearly every time I give a talk on customer discovery. Someone in the audience, usually a first-time founder, raises their hand and says something like: “But didn’t Steve Jobs say you shouldn’t ask customers what they want?”

It is a fair challenge, and they are not wrong about the quote.

Jobs did say that customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them. But here is the thing: that is not what customer discovery is about. In fact, it is the opposite of what customer discovery is about. And conflating the two is one of the most common and costly mistakes I see early-stage founders make.

You are not asking what they want. You are learning what hurts.

Customer discovery is not a product feedback session. It is not a focus group. It is not a chance to pitch your idea and gauge the reaction. It is a structured process of learning about your customer’s world, their problems, and how they are currently trying to solve them.

When you walk into a customer discovery interview asking “would you use a product that does X?”, you have already lost. You are leading the witness. You are inviting them to react to your solution rather than reveal their reality. And people are polite. They will often say yes, even when they mean no, because they don’t want to hurt your feelings or seem dismissive of your hard work.

The result is a false positive that feels like validation but is actually just noise.

Your job is to understand the problem, not sell the solution

At the NYU Leslie Entrepreneurial Institute, we work with hundreds of founders each year across every sector and industry imaginable. One of the first things we tell them is this: if you are talking about your product in a customer discovery interview, you are doing it wrong.

Instead, we want founders to ask questions like: Tell me about the last time you experienced this problem. What did you do about it? How much time did that take? What did you try before that? Why didn’t that work for you?

These questions keep the conversation grounded in real, past behavior, not hypothetical future intent. That distinction matters enormously. When you ask someone what they would do, you get an idealized version of themselves. When you ask what they actually did, you get the truth. And that brings us back to Steve Jobs, because what he really meant has more in common with customer discovery than most people realize.

The real Steve Jobs lesson

Here is what I think Jobs was actually warning against: don’t outsource your vision to your customers. Don’t ask them to design the product for you. That is your job as the founder.

But there is another Jobs quote that gets far less attention: “New ideas come from watching something, talk(ing) to people, experimenting, asking questions and getting out of the office.”

That is customer discovery. Observation. Conversation. Curiosity. The insight that leads to a breakthrough product doesn’t come from a survey or a feature request. It comes from deeply understanding a problem that your customer has, often better than they can articulate it themselves.

You can’t do that from behind a desk. And you certainly can’t do it by pitching.

What you are actually listening for

The signal you are looking for in customer discovery is not “yes, I want that.” It is evidence that the problem is real, frequent, and worth solving. Look for customers who are already investing time or money trying to solve it on their own. Look for workarounds, hacks, and makeshift solutions. Those are the tells that you have found a hair-on-fire problem worth building around.

If someone says “oh, that would be nice to have,” that is not a signal. That is noise. If someone says “I spend three hours every week dealing with this and I’ve tried four different tools and none of them work,” that is a signal.

The goal is to collect enough of those signals, across enough conversations, that you can begin to see patterns. Not statistical significance, just patterns. Recurring themes. Shared frustrations. Common workarounds. That is the foundation on which a real product gets built.

Tell me more

If you want to go deeper on this, Talking to Humans is a free resource that covers the full customer discovery process from finding interview subjects to synthesizing insights. Our colleagues at UC Berkeley have also produced a series of short customer discovery videos that are a great practical complement, covering the do’s and don’ts of customer interviews in two to four minutes each. Both are worth your time, especially before your next conversation with a potential customer.