Building Customer Intuition Across the Product Lifecycle

“Customer intuition is the ability to understand and anticipate customer needs, pain points, and behaviours throughout the product lifecycle.”

When a new Chief Product Officer arrived at DocuSign, the research team got a request that sounded both important and slightly impossible: build stronger customer intuition across the organisation.

Marine Palamutyan and Morgan Davis were honest about the first reaction. They did not know what “customer intuition” meant either. How do you build intuition? How do you measure it? What would success even look like? The task had the perfect ingredients for analysis paralysis, especially for research teams that are trained to define problems precisely before acting.

Instead, they did the most useful thing you can do with an ambiguous mandate. They gave it a working definition and started building.

The Scale Problem That Makes Intuition Feel Unreal

Even with a definition, the scale at DocuSign makes “intuition” feel like a fantasy word. Marine and Morgan framed the numbers to make the audience sit up. Nearly 1.7 million customers. More than 1 billion users. Signers on every continent, including Antarctica. At the same time, the product itself has evolved. DocuSign is no longer “just” an e-signature company. It is shifting into intelligent agreement management, using AI to unlock data trapped inside PDFs and accelerate decision-making.

So the job was not simply to understand one type of user. It was to build customer intuition across industries, use cases, geographies, and a growing product surface area. The more the platform expands, the more intuition becomes less about individual empathy and more about organisational capability.

Start With a Strategy Document, Then Refuse to Let It Die

The first move was surprisingly traditional: they wrote a strategy document. Then they made it useful by naming it and using it as a living north star: a vision of building cross-functional intuition.

That “cross-functional” phrasing matters. Marine and Morgan did not position customer understanding as a research-owned asset. They framed it as a shared capability that needs to travel through product, engineering, marketing, sales, and leadership. The document helped them prioritise what to build first and turned a fuzzy ask into a set of components they could actually execute.

The Customer Intuition Pyramid That Gave Them Structure

Their approach became a pyramid with three layers, not as a neat consultancy graphic, but as a way to organise messy reality.

The first layer was foundation and intuition. This is the shared understanding of who customers are, what they need, what hurts, and how they behave. It is not “research outputs.” It is the base knowledge that the organisation should be able to return to again and again.

The second layer was built together. This is where intuition becomes active. Insights move into decisions, prioritisation, and real trade-offs inside teams, rather than living as static artefacts.

The third layer was cross-organisational partnerships. They called this the secret sauce because customer intuition does not scale by doing more research. It scales when other groups pull customer understanding into their own systems and processes.

What they liked about the model was its flexibility. Depending on maturity, size, and organisational readiness, you can strengthen one layer without pretending you have to “do it all” at once.

Customer Intuition Lives Across the Lifecycle, Not in a Deck

They also made an important point about time. Intuition is not built in a workshop and then stored. It has to live across the product lifecycle. Foundational understanding informs briefs. Briefs become plans. Plans become builds. Builds a ship into the world, where new customer feedback reshapes what happens next. Each stage needs a different form of customer signal, and each stage needs cross-functional collaboration to do anything meaningful with that signal.

Then they moved from framework to practice, showing three initiatives that made the pyramid real.

Foundation Layer: Customer Coffee Chats Made Listening a Habit

DocuSign already had foundational research tools like personas and jobs to be done. What they lacked was a human connection at scale. Teams did not just want to know about customers; they wanted to hear from them.

So Marine and Morgan launched Customer Coffee Chats, bi monthly 45 minute virtual fireside conversations with customers from different industries and backgrounds. The format is intentionally product-agnostic. No feature deep dive. No roadmap pitch. The customer drives what's top of mind. What is working, what is not, and what they wish existed.

The goal was habit formation. Listening should become normal, not rare. So they opened attendance to product, engineering, marketing, and sales. So far, more than 600 people have attended.

They also treated it like a product. They measured value with post-session surveys and tracked informal pull-through in Slack messages like “please keep doing these.” They noticed secondary benefits too. Sales teams, who often do not have time to uncover deeper customer context, found the conversations useful.

A key signal of success was spread. The coffee chats inspired other formats, including versions led by product managers and designers, not only researchers. That is what it looks like when intuition stops being owned by one function and starts becoming cultural.

Building Together: Insights to Action Replaced Passive Readouts

The second layer tackled a familiar research failure mode: the report that informs nobody.

Marine described the deliberate shift away from traditional readouts, where researchers present findings and everyone else is left to “go figure out what to do.” Stakeholders had told them those sessions felt passive, even academic.

Their alternative was Insights to Action, an interactive workshop where the researcher facilitates cross cross-functionaldecision making. Teams prioritise, ideate, and commit to next steps together. The change sounds small, but it alters ownership. Instead of research “delivering insights,” research helps the team turn insights into action while the right people are in the room.

They shared tangible impact. Insights have become Jira tickets. Workshops created space for productive debate across disciplines. And scepticism faded once teams experienced how quickly action could follow.

They were clear about how they made it work. Pilot with one team. Build a case study. Share it around to create momentum. Keep what works from the old model, add what the business needs, and do not overcrowd the room with non-decision makers who slow progress.

In the Q and A, Marine named the real blocker: culture change. People asked, “Where’s the deck?” and meant, “Please let me consume this the old way.” The turning point was finding early adopters, running a pilot that produced outcomes, and letting success convert the sceptics.

Cross Org Partnerships: Making Beta Readiness Measurable

The third layer showed what it means to scale intuition through organisational systems.

DocuSign’s beta operations team was trying to solve inconsistent go-to-market beta processes, unclear roles, and undefined entry and exit criteria. Separately, Marine and Morgan’s team was building a culture of measurement, including an experience scorecard measuring usefulness, usability, and satisfaction.

The partnership emerged because the needs matched. Together, they aligned on repeatable beta checkpoints so betas were not only about bugs and stability, but about whether a product was actually ready to ship. If an experience did not meet thresholds, teams paused and decided what business action to take.

This is where intuition becomes operational. They moved from gut checks to data-backed decisions, which matters when shipping to millions of customers and billions of users. They also saw knock-on benefits. Some products did not pass the criteria and were adjusted before general availability. They also increased research support for betas after realising the gap.

Their partnership advice was practical. Be ready with context and data when opportunities arise. Look for the larger system, not only your local project. Lead with how you can add value, not what you can extract. And stay flexible, because rigid agendas kill cross-organisational work.

“This Sounds Basic” Was the Point

One of the more provocative audience questions cut through the niceties: this all sounds basic. What is actually innovative here?

Marine and Morgan did not get defensive. They reframed innovation as execution at scale. Many organisations know they should understand customers. They still do not do it consistently because timelines, sprints, and delivery pressures crowd it out. The innovation was packaging these behaviours into repeatable, operationalised practices that can spread through the organisation.

In other words, it is not that customer listening is new. It is that making it habitual, measurable, and cross functional is rare.

Turning Intuition Into a Repeatable Advantage

What Marine and Morgan ultimately showed is that “customer intuition” is not a mystical talent. It is an organisational muscle you build through habits, workflows, and partnerships.

Define the concept so people can align. Create foundational exposure to real customer voices. Convert insights into decisions while the team is together. Embed customer readiness into broader operating systems like beta governance. Then measure not only satisfaction, but spread, adoption, and behavioural change.

The closing challenge they left the audience with was simple. Look at your own pyramid. Which layer is weakest for your team today: foundation, building together, or partnerships? Then choose one step you can take immediately to bring the customer closer and bring the organisation along with you.

Want to watch the full talk?

You can find it here on UXDX: https://uxdx.com/session/building-customer-intuition-across-the-product-lifecycle1/

Or explore all the insights in the UXDX USA 2025 Post Show Report: https://uxdx.com/post-show-report