This article is part of Flip the Lens: the series that changes how you see the concepts you thought you’d already figured out.
What mindset has to shift if you want to be truly customer-centric?
People get the concepts of Jobs to be Done. They nod along. Then they go back to their teams. More of than not, they can’t always work out what has to change in their thinking.
Most innovation teams ask questions that can only ever return answers they already have.
Here’s the thing, it isn’t a research problem, it’s all rooted in which lens you’re using.
Your survey can only tell you what people already know
If your process is talk to some consumers, run a few focus groups, put out a survey, then build what’s on the survey – you aren’t doing Jobs. Sorry, but it’s true. That’s not customer-centric innovation.
Surveys don’t just fail to help you innovate. They restrict you. They can only tell you what people already know, rather than help you build what they don’t. Trust me, there is no survey I can run that gives me statistically significant information about what to build next, because they don’t know.
When I’m talking to customers, the moment I want people to arrive is when they don’t know what they want, and they can’t articulate it in solution terms. Yes, sometimes people answer in some idealised sense, absent of context. They’ll say yes to things they wouldn’t have considered, or couldn’t action, once the reality of their situation shows up.
Here’s the thing: people say one thing and do another. And your job is to get them talking about their life – not what you’re trying to sell to them.
Asking about your product is not asking about their life
Say I’ve been charged with developing a product, I have a feature I can build, and I go and interview customers.
Am I adopting customer-centric innovation at that point?
No.
Because I’m asking them what they think of my product, my prototype, my concept. I’m not asking about their lives, their struggles, or their context. I’m not trying to solve their problem. What I am doing here is I’m trying to solve my problem by convincing them to buy.
This is what’s known as supply-side bias. We start from what we have, decide it’s a good idea, and then go looking for proof that the consumer will value it. And it usually comes wrapped in manufactured context — “let me invent the situation you’re in, then ask what you think of this. Of course you love it”.
Flip it. Instead of looking at the world through the lens of what we do and what we have, look at it from the consumer’s side.
What are they struggling with? Why are they changing behaviour? What are they trying to do differently in life? Then work out how you fit into that.
You can’t convince people your solution is the right solution, and you shouldn’t really be trying. Not with a stronger brand, not with better language, not with one more feature.
Read more about why building what you love isn’t the same as building what sells.
Stop testing what you know
Most people run innovation on hypothesis testing.
You get in a room, form a hypothesis, generate a series of experiments, prove it yes or no. I grew up on the other side of the train tracks. I learned by doing and building, and I let empirical data drive what I did next.
One of the things I learned early in Japan was to build in a way that taught me what I didn’t know. Instead of one prototype, I’d build 8 or 16 very different ones and learn all the failure modes.
In 35 years in the innovation space, the pattern doesn’t change. Most people have to acknowledge that they don’t know, and then spend their time not proving what they know, but discovering what they don’t.
That includes admitting there isn’t one answer. There are always multiple ways to do something. If you’re hunting for the silver bullet, you’ll keep asking questions designed to find it.
Ask who’s buying but not using
Here’s a question almost nobody can answer. We’ve worked with Intercom for a long time, and out of that came a concept I call zombie revenue: how many people are paying for your product but not using it?
People confuse what causes somebody to buy with what causes them to use. Any sale is a good sale, they say.
But buying isn’t using.
When I ask teams for their zombie number, they don’t know it. That number tells you far more about the demand side than any survey will.
Unpack to the edge of articulation
For every 10,000 words somebody says, most people don’t understand 5% of what they mean.
So slow the conversation down. “I love this feature.” Why? What can you do with it that you couldn’t do before?
Matt, a principal here at Re-Wied, calls it getting from abstract to concrete. Easy, fast, convenient, refreshing – break those into their components until you have actions and metrics that are meaningful rto them. Sometimes people can’t articulate what they want but can articulate what they don’t want. I just want it simple so I can remember it. This other thing has 15 steps. Now you know where the threshold sits.
And assume you’re never done. Assume whatever answer you have is insufficiently unpacked.
The flip
Think about the most recent interviews you ran. Were you listening for how people measure progress?
Or were you listening for permission to build the thing you’d already decided to build?
Ask yourself, truthfully, are you really being customer-centric in your innovation?