Into the Unknown: Revealing Customer Battles and Winning Them

Us humans, we are driven to build. From a young age, we explore different possibilities, building things out of curiosity. Through experimentation and experience, we discover what ignites our passion. This innate desire to build translates into every aspect of our lives, including our careers. As adults, we continue to build, but now our creations extend beyond ourselves, benefiting entire industries, customer, and communities.

Having honed your building skills, the next crucial question arises: what will you create? The world is already saturated with products and services. To avoid contributing to the noise, you need to build something truly purposeful for the customers. Otherwise, you risk wasting your valuable efforts on something people will simply discard. So, what exactly is it we should build? Where do we begin this journey?

In a recent BoS Hangout with innovation expert Bob Moesta, I learned a valuable lesson: the best starting point for building anything is to identify your customer’s hidden struggles. What are the customers battling with before having your products or services. These are the pain points they might not even realize they have. By solving these ‘unknown unknowns,’ you can anchor your project and ensure a positive outcome. True innovation lies not in fulfilling known desires, but in uncovering and addressing these hidden needs.

So how can find the unknown when even the customers does not even know them?

Bob is a generous guy to impart the five skills of an innovator. Five skills that can help you tackle sectors in building something that works, match with customer battles, and fight them.

1. Empathetic Perspective

See through varying viewpoints. Building with empathetic perspective means seeing the big picture. It’s about understanding situations from multiple perspectives to identify potential problems before they arise. This goes beyond just the customer. Imagine you’re developing a new ordering kiosk for a fast-food chain. From a customer’s viewpoint, it needs to be user-friendly. But marketing wants a glitzy design, while finance puts costs lower first. By considering everyone involved (internal stakeholders like marketing and finance, and external ones like investors), you can anticipate clashes (e.g., expensive features confusing users) and design a product that balances everyone’s needs.

2. Uncovering Demand

Surface hidden opportunities. Ditch the product pitch and peek into your customers’ world. What are their daily struggles? There’s always that they ultimately want. Know that instead of enforcing that to them. By understanding their journey (the who, what, when, where, and why), you can see how your product fits in. Forget bragging about features – focus on the value it brings to their lives. A great way to do that is to have a conversation with your happy customers and learn how your product helped them reached their goals and overcome the challenges

3. Causal Structures

Building something is like navigating through a map that shows you how everything is connected. They explain the “why” behind the “what” happening. Connect the dots. This lets product builders predict what will happen next and make informed choices upon having the insight behind the scenes.

Bob painted a picture of how things work: causal structures. Imagine a system at the center, like a machine. It needs fuel to run, and that fuel comes in various forms – resources, money, knowledge, data, even physical objects – these are your Inputs. The system then processes this fuel through your actions, churning out Outputs. But here’s the key: those Outputs need to perfectly match the desired Outcomes for your product’s users

4. Prototyping to Learn

Build-measure-learn. People often prototype to prove their ideas right, rather than learn what users actually need. Come in with a variety of concepts. Test them in the jobs you intend to put these concepts into. Because later on, the differences of the results from these concepts creates contrasts, and contrasts creates meaning that brings you closer to the solution for the particular job the product/service you are trying to design for. There are no failures here. Be glad to have tested several concepts and identified those are not the fit for the job as you can now eliminate them and focus on the most promising ones.

5. Making Trade-offs

Strike a balance. A trade-off is where a customer weighs the unique pros and cons of the available options. It is where one finds the product or service that best meets their needs. In simpler terms, it’s about narrowing down your options until you have one, best favorite.

Say, you are hungry at the moment with no food in the place you are in. You have options of cooking your own meal that you can perfectly match with your buds, but might take you much longer time and effort in buying the ingredients you need, or order online which will just make you wait and do something else, but might cost you more and less tasty. You start to weigh things, assess and eliminate whichever option best satisfies your current status. That’s where a customer makes a trade-off.

Do I have to master them all to win my customer?

It was a relief when Bob cleared that I do not have to be a master of all these five skills, but it pays to be aware of them, revisit them, and apply whichever project a particular skill is most helpful. Many other innovators from different parts of the world came to the BoS Hangout with Bob. Some were product builders as anticipated, but there were also team leaders, brand guardians, finance folks, it was a wide range of cast. Needless to say, customers go beyond being the product users. They can also be members of the company or a problem within budgeting.

There is a recording of the latest BoS Hangout here. If you missed it, you can watch it at your convenience.

Bob is also no stranger to the BoS Community. He’s been coming to BoS Conferences for a number of times in many years. We even stored a particular library dedicated to him. Take a look of the collection of his previous talks and see him from different angles.

Bob, and other brilliant personalities, is coming to BoS USA 2024. Get to hangout with him and the rest of amazing people from across the globe while learning from our industry leader speakers. They are just as welcoming. See you all there.