Great Innovators Start with Customer Struggles (Not Customer Needs)
Teams create the most value for customers when they know the difference between customer needs and struggles
When I ask my friends what do you need, the typical response is:
“Ugghhhh, I need a vacation.”
But, what if I asked my friends a different question.
Instead of asking what do you need, suppose I asked what’s the #1 thing you’re struggling with in life right now? The answer to that question is often:
“I’m struggling with stress & burnout at work.”
Those are two very different answers, aren’t they?
Struggle vs Solution
If you were to build a product for my friends around their “vacation need”, you’d probably start developing ways to make that vacation happen. Your make-vacation-product could be fruitful, but you’d be missing out on innovation opportunities.
Why?
Because a need is almost always framed in the world that exists today.
Our brains naturally go to what we’ve wanted and used in the past. If in the past I’ve used a vacation to deal with stress and burnout, my brain will go with what it knows.
This is why it’s better to think in terms of struggles, instead of the customer need. Instead of I need a vacation, base your innovation efforts around the struggle that caused someone to choose a vacation — which in this case is I’m struggling with stress & burnout at work.
Unlock Your Opportunity Trees
An opportunity tree is a simple way to distinguish solutions from struggles. At the top you start with what your customer is struggling with today, and below that are opportunity nodes. Above, we can see how the vacation solution is one of many possible solutions for the I’m struggling with stress & burnout at work struggle.
This approach helps make sure you don’t miss on other innovative opportunities that are better at solving a problem.
What about impact on real product users, not just friends?
Let’s look at this with real data from research I did at Credit Sesame, where we help people overcome their financial struggles.
I started with two open ended questions:
1. What’s the #1 NEED you have in your financial life?
2. What’s the #1 STRUGGLE you have in your financial life?
The answers from over 250 responded proved very interesting…
It took ~30% more prompts to garner the same amount of responses for ‘struggle’ than it did ‘need’ . People are quicker to tell you what they need. It’s much harder for people to reach in and articulate what they’re struggling with than it is to give the vision for how they’ll solve it.
In fact, ~20% of those answering the ‘struggle’ question did not state a struggle, but shared a need. It’s hard for users not to talk from a solution.
But people shared their ‘struggle’ with 25% more words. Potentially a sign of both the complexity of articulating a struggle vs. a need and the richness it can provide.
While survey is by no means the best avenue to dive deep into either question, you can already see a different tendency above in how people think about the two questions.
It’s Not About Grammar; It’s About Mental Models
Yes…you COULD swap the verbs in contention here and the sentence would work in many cases.
A common swap we saw in our data was “I need to fix my credit score” or “I’m struggling with my credit score”.
But it’s not about the grammar.
It’s about creating a mental model that is close to how your users think of their problems (struggles). The closer a team’s mental model is to users struggles, the more innovative opportunities they will have available to them.
If we align our mental model to needs, we are missing opportunities to solve the underlying struggles in innovative ways.
Struggles Thinking is a Subtle Superpower
Starting from struggles is a customer development superpower with the subtleness that is easy to miss. Jason Fried’s example of marketing the better life users see themselves obtaining with your product is perfect.
Said similarly… “Here’s what I need” and “Here’s what I’m struggling with” sound similar, but they’re completely different discovery approaches.
A need is a faster horse. A struggle is suppressed freedom & mobility.
A need is a vacation. A struggle is increased stress & fatigue from burnout.
A need is a free credit score. A struggle is a lack of financial stability.
Don’t Handicap Your Process.
It’s easier to innovate from current perceived needs than from a foundation of struggles. However, when you think in terms of struggles — and use models like the Opportunity Tree — you unleash both your creative juices, and your growth opportunities.
Many thanks to Alan Klement for editing and advising this article.
