Identifying Your Customers’ Burning Needs

How often do you talk about needs and benefits? I’m guessing frequently. But ask yourself and your team how certain you are that…

• You know what your customers’ needs really are?
• Everyone in your team knows what you think your customer’s needs are?
• Customer needs are really the basis for product features, content, landing pages and so on?

Whilst scaling my own startup and whilst helping other founders scale theirs, I’ve found mis-understood needs to be the root cause of several big problems.

Key learnings from this article:

• A need is the same as a benefit.
• A need is how your customer wants to achieve their outcome (their job to be done).
• A need is generally not the same as the outcome. If I take an Uber, my outcome is get form A to B and I have needs like without owning a car and without the hassle of cash payments or quickly.
• A burning need is just shorthand for the most important and urgent need(s) that a customer has.
• We identify needs by interviewing customers using a jobs to be done interview technique.
• We identify the customer’s job (outcome), pains (things stopping them getting their job done) and gains (qualitative and quantitative descriptions of the outcome, a job well done).
• Then we identify needs by putting verbs like increase, improve and speed up before the gain, and verbs like reduce, eliminate, and remove before the pains.
• Needs formatted this way are easy to survey by asking two sets of questions:
  • When you {do job}, {need} is important to me…
  • When you {do job}, finding/getting access to/having {need} is easy for me…
• We use a likert scale to measure responses
• The first question tells us whether a need is important, the second tells us how well met the need is by the market.
• Our goal is to find needs that are important to people, which are unmet by the market, so that we can sell products and services to customers that satisfy their needs.

Confused by the terminology?

• Download a needs cheatsheet

Burning needs for pre-product-market fit startups

If you’re pre-product-market fit, then you need to find the people (your ideal customer profile or ICP) with a burning need that your product delivers on.

The best way I’ve heard this described was like this at a YC event: imagine your hair was on fire. Your desired outcome is to put out the fire on your head. You need a fire extinguisher, a fire blanket or a fire hose. But if all I have is a stinking bucket of putrid water, you’ll happily pay me for it.

Think about how much most new products suck. They are stinking buckets of putrid water, but someone uses them.

If you’re pre-product-market fit, you need to focus on understanding what need your product delivers to your first few customers, then find more customers who have that need.

Some examples of great products that undoubdtely sucked when they were launched:

	Sucked because	Burning need
Twitter	It was down a lot	Share my ideas quickly
Figma	Lacked lots of features	Collaborate with other designers
Salesforce	Lacked lots of features	Avoid costly CRM software

Focusing on your needs will help…

1. Avoid wasting precious time and runway building features no one wants
2. Fix communication problems within your teams that reduce the impact of product features and growth experiments, leading to slow growth
3. Focus your time on the highest impact product strategies.

Avoid making these three mistakes

Validating need but not its importance

Failing to identify a burning need means you can only compete on execution and price, which requires very deep pockets

A product team I was meeting with recently showed me a survey they’d done. Their goal was to validate that a set of needs they’d identified through customer interviews were present in a larger population of their customer segment.

They ran a typical “how important is need” survey and had promising results - lots of customers were agreeing or strongly agreeing that the needs they’d identified were indeed needs. So far so good.

The problem came when we started to explore competitive solutions. Groceries in 20 minutes is a need, but for most urban Europeans, it’s very very well met by a plethora of very well funded startups.

Failing to recognise this could lead you to build another grocery delivery service (another mousetrap) that is poorly differentiated from the others. If you do this you can only compete on execution and price, which requires very deep pockets.

Identifying a need but not sharing it with the team

Learning is more important than revenue for a startup

Something I’ve seen in both small (10-20 person) and large (150-500 person) teams is failing to share an identified need with others in the company.

With a different company, just last week we discovered that the needs identified through 30 customer discovery interviews and validated via a needs survey, were not being used by the sales teams in their customer communication.

The startup was struggling to convert customer demos to sales, which was puzzling as our customer discovery process had been tightly executed, producing promising validation.

It turned out that the sales teams had not been briefed on the new positioning, driven by the newly discovered needs. Each of the 4 regional sales reps was making up their own sales pitch, responding to their customers’ needs with their own intuition.

This kind of lack of communication makes it impossible to learn - whether you succeed or fail in your sales, you learn nothing. And learning is more important than revenue for a startup.

Reverting to ideas and opinions for product features

You delight a customer by consistently helping them achieve their goals

With yet another startup, we were ready to create a set of product strategies (hypotheses for how we could delight our customers).

To me, you delight a customer by consistently helping them achieve their goals. Their needs are how they want to achieve their goal, what they need to achieve their goal.

Rather than build their hypotheses for how to delight customers based on what the customers needed to achieve their goals, the team I was working with, guided by a passionate but ultimately mistaken CEO, had brainstormed all of the features that customers had asked for.

Building features customers ask for is rarely going to work because customers aren’t experts in what’s possible with your product. They are experts in their own struggles and identifying their struggles - the combination of the desired outcome (aka job or goal) and pains (aka problems) - will let you identify the needs that your product delivers.

How features, needs, jobs and pains relate to each other.

	Description	Uber Rider Example
Features	How your product or service helps your user achieve their goals.	GPS tracking, arrival notificaitons, etc
Needs	How your user wants to achieve their goals	Prompt arrival of cabs
Goals (aka Jobs)	The outcome your user wants to achieve	Get from A-B
Pains (problems)	The things that annoy your customer or stop them from getting their job done	Late arrival of cabs

Needs are how the user wants to get their job done

Getting clear on your customers’ needs, then making sure your whole team - from engineering to sales, marketing, customer success, support and so on - are aligned behind a common view of needs is immensely important.

Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and inventor of Jobs to be Done, phrased it like this:

When we buy a product, we essentially ‘hire’ something to get a job done.

If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again.

And if the product does a crummy job, we ‘fire’ it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.

Needs are now your product does the job well.

How to discover needs by talking to customers

To discover needs, talk to your customers and ask them questions to identity their desired outcomes, the problems they have and how they measure success.

To learn how to interview customers, download my guide to customer interviews for product teams.

How to write needs to make them useful

Desired outcome - is the same as a job in JTBD. Its the goal your customer wants to achieve. Its always an outcome, never a task or activitiy. It is usually phrased as verb + noun. It should avoid compound and qualitative statements (e.g. get from A-B quickly). A good outcome pre-exists your product. So the desired outcome with Uber is not to get an Uber, its to get from A-B. We are not dealing with your UX or product strategy - we are purely dealing with the problem space.

Gains - gains are the qualitative descripor of a successful otucome. E.g. get from A-B quickly.

Pains - pains are the problems, the things that get in the way of completing the job.

Gains are not pains flipped over, they are different.

Needs - are how pains are resolved or gains are amplified to help your customer reach their desired outcome.

There are lots of pains and lots of gains for each outcome. I’ve chosen just one for each. Can you think of more?

	Desired Outcome	Gain	Pain	Need
Uber	Get from A-B	Early arrival at destination.	Late arrival of transport	Prompt arrival of cabs
Gorillas	Get groceries	Delicious meals	Time taken to go shopping	Fast home delivery of groceries
Calendly	Schedule meetings	Reducing costs	Complexity of back and forths	Fast meeting scheduling
Hubspot	Close deals	Close more deals	Loose track of next steps	Increasing number of deals closed
Monzo	Receive and spend money	Less worry	Hard to trasnfer money to friends	Feel good about finances

Try for yourself

For your product:

• Think of the customer segment you know best. This is the one you have the most data on, have the most interaction with.
• Identify their desired outcomes (Jobs to be Done)
• For each of their top 2-3 most important jobs, identify their pains - the things that stop them getting their job done.
• For each of their top 2-3 most important jobs, identify their gains - the qualitative measures of a good outcome.
• Generate a list of 10-20 needs, following the formula above.

How to validate needs using fast, cheap surveys

Once you have identified your product’s needs you’re in a good position to survey your users or a group of people who you believe share the same desired outcome as your users. These types of surveys are a fast, powerful indicator of needs.

You do not need to survey 1000s of people. Work incrementally like this:

• Survey 1 person: validate that they understand your survey
• Survey 10 people: validate that your survey is working, is usable, has no obvious errors
• Survey 50 people: validate that your survey is well designed. You should see differences if ranking between needs. If you don’t, you need to add some dummy or control needs (the needs in light blue on my diagram below). Having controls tells you whether your respondents are reading your survey or not.
• Survey 100 people: see if you have obvious winners. You are looking for needs that are important to people, that are also a big problem to them.

How to spot an opportunity in the market

With your needs survey done, you should be able to create a matrix like this:

A well-differentiated product is one that addresses unmet (aka burning) needs.

Try it for yourself

1. Interview your customers to discover their jobs, pains and gains.
2. Carry out enough interviews so that you are confident you fully understand a customer’s job.
3. Working from the main job that you believe your customer has, extract 10-20 needs.
4. Move those needs into a survey and survey both the importance of the need and how well it is met by the market.
5. Identify important, unmet needs. These are candidates for your burning need.
6. Talk to more customers, run more surveys or run other tests like landing pages, fake-sales and painted doors to zoom into the one burning need you will address.

Uncover your customers’ unmet needs

I run a course called Launch that takes startup leaders and/or their teams through the steps needed to discover, validate and launch a new product.

To find out how I can help you launch new products that your customers will love, get in touch.

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