Glossary
Customer research, defined.
Plain-English definitions for the terms behind good customer research — the same concepts Intervool turns into a workflow, from the first interview to a roadmap you can defend.
- Customer discovery
- Customer discovery is the practice of interviewing real and prospective customers to learn their problems, goals, and context before committing to what to build or how to sell it. The aim is to replace assumptions with evidence — understanding the job customers are trying to do and where current solutions fall short.
- Customer interview
- A customer interview is a structured conversation with a current or prospective customer, run to surface their problems, workflows, and priorities in their own words. Good interviews are recorded or transcribed so the insights can be revisited, synthesized, and traced back to exactly what was said.
- Ideal customer profile (ICP)
- An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a precise description of the type of customer that gets the most value from your product and is the best fit to sell to — defined by traits like industry, company size, role, and the specific pain they feel. A sharp ICP focuses both product and go-to-market on the customers most likely to convert and stay.
- Persona
- A persona is a profile of a kind of user — their goals, pain points, and context — built from real customer conversations rather than guesses. Personas keep teams designing and selling to real people (for example, a hands-on founder or an ops-minded admin) instead of an abstract average user.
- Segment
- A segment is a group of customers who share a meaningful trait — industry, company size, behavior, or need. Segmenting shows how each group's needs differ (for example, seed-stage SaaS versus enterprise procurement), so a team can prioritize the right things for each instead of treating all customers the same.
- Thematic synthesis
- Thematic synthesis is the process of analyzing many customer conversations to identify recurring themes — shared pain points, requests, and opportunities — that no single interview reveals on its own. Done well, every theme stays linked to the source quotes behind it, so conclusions remain evidence-based.
- Affinity mapping
- Affinity mapping is a synthesis technique that groups individual research observations — quotes, notes, and pain points — into clusters of related ideas to surface themes. By organizing scattered feedback into natural groupings, a team moves from a pile of raw notes to a clear view of what customers repeatedly care about.
- Pain point
- A pain point is a specific, recurring problem or frustration a customer experiences in their work that a product could relieve. Pain points are the raw material of discovery: when the same one shows up across many interviews, it signals real demand worth building or selling against.
- Opportunity
- An opportunity is an unmet customer need or problem worth solving — surfaced from research — that could guide what a team builds next. Framing work as opportunities, rather than pre-decided features, keeps teams focused on the underlying problem and open to the best way to solve it.
- User feedback
- User feedback is the input customers share about a product — what works, what frustrates them, and what they wish it did — gathered from interviews, support tickets, surveys, reviews, and product usage. Treated as evidence rather than anecdote, it grounds product and roadmap decisions in real customer needs.
- Research repository
- A research repository is a central, searchable store of customer research — interviews, notes, recordings, transcripts, and tagged findings — so insight is easy to revisit and share across a team. Repositories are strong at organizing what you've learned; acting on it, like prioritization and roadmapping, often happens in separate tools.
- Product roadmap
- A product roadmap is a prioritized plan of what a team intends to build and why, usually organized by themes or time horizons. A strong roadmap ties each item back to the customer problem behind it — so stakeholders see not just what's coming but the reasoning — and stays adaptable as new evidence arrives.
- Prioritization
- Prioritization is the practice of deciding which problems, features, or ideas to work on next, weighing factors like customer impact, effort, and strategic fit. Done well, it keeps a team focused on the work that delivers the most value and turns a long backlog into a clear, defensible plan.
- Impact-vs-effort prioritization
- Impact-vs-effort prioritization is a method for deciding what to build next by scoring each idea on the value it delivers against the cost to ship it. Plotting ideas on those two axes separates quick wins and big bets from low-value or high-cost work, turning a backlog into a defensible roadmap.
Put these into practice.
Intervool turns customer interviews into personas, segments, and a prioritized roadmap. Free for 30 days.