What Problem for Which Customer?

Customer needs and discovery.

Articulated, Issue 23

Apologies for the delay in writing this. I have had family activities, travel, and the obligatory annual winter cold - which have contributed to my tardiness. Hope it will prove worth the wait for you!

In the last issue, I talked about how important it was to select the right problem to work on. I want to repeat it here. You need an important, unsolved problem that matters to your customer. It may not be in its final state - you may not even understand it completely - but you know there is something there.

How do you find such a thing? This past week at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) meeting in San Diego, I divided my time between the trade floor, where products were being described and considered, and the scientific/clinical sessions - where surgeons, administrators, nurses, and others talked about the problems that they still wrestled with in performing their jobs and creating quality healthcare for patients. Sessions on prosthetic joint infections in all of their complexity, new changes in reimbursement and the continuing inroads of bundled care, trends (has robotics peaked in orthopaedics?) and so on - can be mined for new product and company ideas. I added some thoughts to my notebook, based upon the trip. These will percolate for a while, until I match them with an approach that is worthy of evaluation. Possibly hours, or years from now.

Yet conferences are probably not the primary source of such discovered needs. Where else to look? Here are some passages from texts written by acknowledged experts that tell the story better than I can, followed by short comments from me:

What Is a Job? To summarize, the key features of our definition are: A job is the progress that an individual seeks in a given circumstance. Successful innovations enable a customer’s desired progress, resolve struggles, and fulfill unmet aspirations. They perform jobs that formerly had only inadequate or nonexistent solutions. Jobs are never simply about the functional—they have important social and emotional dimensions, which can be even more powerful than functional ones. Because jobs occur in the flow of daily life, the circumstance is central to their definition and becomes the essential unit of innovation work—not customer characteristics, product attributes, new technology, or trends. Jobs to Be Done are ongoing and recurring. They’re seldom discrete “events.” Competing Against Luck, Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan

• You are looking for places where the customer is seeking progress toward a goal that they value, and are encountering problems.

Before a customer hires any new product, you have to understand what he’ll need to fire in order to hire yours. Companies don’t think about this enough. Something always needs to get fired. Competing Against Luck, Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan

• Is the problem surrounded by an inadequate field of competitors solving it poorly? How hard will it be to best them?

...the jobs-to-be-done perspective starts with what customers want to accomplish, but can’t get done. And of course, customers are notorious for being unable to articulate a need until they are shown how it can be met. The End of Competitive Advantage, Rita Gunther McGrath and Alex Gourlay

• It may not be something that the customer can state verbally - but their actions will tell you the need. I cannot tell you how many times a surgeon has said to my team that they wanted products with high levels of clinical evidence. Yet when presented with a well tested, older product they will reject it for a newer, lower evidence alternative. The only explanation is that there are additional needs that haven't been stated....

....do not brainstorm a range of ideas and test them with customers to see which ones consumers like best. While the latter practice is common, it is often the cause of product failures. - What Customers Want, Anthony Ulwick

• These needs are not identified by a menu of alternatives ranked by the customer for desirability. I have seen this approach fail with my own eyes.

The moments of struggle, nagging tradeoffs, imperfect experiences, and frustrations in peoples’ lives—those are the what you’re looking for. You’re looking for recurring episodes in which consumers seek progress but are thwarted by the limitations of available solutions. You’re looking for surprises, unexpected behaviors, compensating habits, and unusual product uses. - Competing Against Luck, Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan

• Are frequently recognized when the customer "works around" the problem by adapting the inadequate solution they have at hand. An unexpected use of a product is always worth more attention and could result in new product lines, indication expansions, or new additions to an existing line.

Design thinkers observe how people behave, how the context of their experience affects their reaction to products and services. They take into account the emotional meaning of things as well as their functional performance. From this try to identify people’s unstated, or latent, needs and translate them into opportunities. The human-centered approach of the design thinker can inform new offerings and increase the likelihood of their acceptance by connecting them to existing behaviors. Asking the right kinds of questions often determines the success of a new product or service: Does it meet the needs of its target population? Does it create meaning as well as value? Does it inspire a new behavior that will be forever associated with it? - Change by Design, Tim Brown

• Is embedded in behavior, in a context - and is always human-centered. The concept of "latent needs" is a good one to file away....

A product that successfully fills a Product Opportunity Gap (POG) does so when it meets the conscious and unconscious expectations of customers and is perceived as useful, useable, and desirable. Creating Breakthrough Products, Jonathan M. Cagan and Craig M. Vogel

• Includes addressing unconscious expectations of customers.

We offer here five ways to uncover jobs that might be right in front of you if you know what you’re looking for: Seeing jobs in your own life, finding opportunity in nonconsumption, identifying workarounds, zoning in on things we don’t want to do, and spotting unusual uses of products. - Competing Against Luck, Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan

• Recognizing inadequacy: Looking for situations where existing solutions must be modified, where products are used in ways outside of the original design, and where all available products are inadequate, so the customer simply doesn't use anything.

As I have already said, this is about empathizing with the customer, understanding the struggles they are engaged in, and feeling both the source and magnitude of drive that they have to solve them. The effort is about recognizing needs that the customer understands well, as well as the deeper emotional and social needs that they may not yet be able to articulate. There are signs for those that can see.....

Working on a problem for your company? Need some help in business or product strategy, or in planning your commercial future? Let's talk.

(c) 2024, 2025 Todd M Boyce. Some images created by me with Adobe Photoshop 26.5 (beta), Adobe Illustrator (Beta) 25.5.35, DALL-E3.