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Before Amazon writes a line of code on a new feature, someone writes a press release announcing it. Before that press release, someone writes a FAQ. The whole thing is fictional - the product doesn’t exist yet - but the exercise forces the team to answer the hard questions upfront: who is this for, what problem does it solve, why does it matter? The customer letter is a variation of this idea. Instead of a press release, you write a letter from a future customer to your company, describing how your product changed their life 📬

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What it is

A customer letter is a framing technique used early in discovery. You write a fictional letter - in the customer’s voice - set in the future, after they’ve been using your product. They describe the problem they had, what they tried before, how they found your product, and what’s different now. It’s deliberately narrative and emotional. That’s the point. It forces you to think about the customer’s experience holistically, not just the features you plan to build.

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Why it works

Most product briefs describe what will be built. The customer letter describes how someone’s life will be better. That shift in perspective surfaces things a requirements doc never would:
  • Who specifically is the customer? (A vague letter reveals a vague customer definition)
  • What was their life like before? (Forces you to understand the problem, not just the solution)
  • What do they actually care about? (The emotional and social jobs, not just the functional ones)
  • Would a real customer ever write this? (A good smell test for whether your value proposition is credible)
If your team can’t agree on what the letter should say, that disagreement is valuable - it means you haven’t aligned on the basics yet. Better to find that out now than three sprints in 😅

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How to write one

Keep it short - one page maximum. Write it in first person, from the customer’s perspective. Set it six to twelve months in the future. A simple structure:
  1. Who they are and what they were struggling with
  2. What they’d tried before and why it didn’t work
  3. How they discovered your product
  4. What changed - specifically, concretely
  5. Who they’ve told about it and why
Then share it with the team. Does everyone picture the same customer? Does the “before” feel real? Does the “after” feel credible and specific?

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Pairing it with other framing tools

The customer letter works well alongside the Opportunity Assessment - the assessment gives you the structured framing, the letter gives you the human one. Together they cover both the analytical and the empathetic side of problem framing. Lesson learned: the teams that find the customer letter exercise most uncomfortable are usually the ones that need it most 👊 Discomfort means the assumptions haven’t been stress-tested yet.