Function 08

Discovery & Problem Definition

Builder · 10 years

The pivots and launches in this portfolio all hinge on reframing what problem the product solves. Analytics Center moved from access-control to definitional-accuracy because of how sales teams actually used it — not because of a roadmap.

Capabilities

Operator-user research.

Sales reps, couriers, regional GMs, ad-ops analysts — treat the operator as the customer. The interview discipline rides through every role.

Problem reframing.

The AC pivot was a discovery output: the tool was being used as an answer-finder, not an access-control surface. Reframe the problem, the strategy follows.

Ground-truth evals as discovery.

For AI products, the 100+ question eval set is the user research artifact — what users actually expect the agent to know.

Opportunity sizing.

Pipeline-driven sales forecasting, market sizing for new monetization surfaces, unit-economics modeling for new pricing policies.

Rapid validation.

Solo-product validation loops — ship a public version, watch behavior, iterate. Zentrading's paid-per-analysis model came from this loop.

Evidence

Analytics Center pivot.

Reframed the strategy from access-control compliance to definitional-accuracy AI partner by reading how sales teams were actually using the platform. The reframe is what unlocked majority adoption.

Text-to-SQL eval design.

Authored the 100+ question ground-truth eval set before iterating on prompts — the eval is the research artifact that captures what 'good' looks like for the operator.

TikTok NA monetization frame.

Built the use-case and value-proposition frameworks sales teams used with advertisers, derived from sales-team interviews during the NA ad-revenue expansion window.

Solo product validation.

Masterzen, Zentrading, Attune, ZenClipper — each shipped publicly, observed, iterated. Validation as a daily loop, not a stage.

Dalian launch discovery.

Only operator in market — every fleet-partner agreement and pricing policy started as an operator interview before it became a system.

At scale

Stack

operator interviews · ground-truth eval design · SQL behavior analysis · Lark Docs · pipeline forecasting · lightweight survey tooling

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