Running Lean, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8. Understand Your Customers Better Than They Do

If you can describe your customers’ problems better than they can, there is an automatic transfer of expertise—your customers start believing that you must also have the right solution for them. Marketer Jay Abraham calls this phenomenon the “Strategy of Preeminence.”

You’ve probably experienced this at your doctor’s office: after receiving a diagnosis, you believed they had miraculously figured out your ailment and rushed to fill the prescription they’d ordered—even though the doctor was simply following a systematic process of elimination by unpacking your symptoms using educated guessing.

Understanding your customer’s problems grants you superpowers.

This chapter shows you how to use problem discovery sprints to deeply understand your customers (Figure 8-1).

Figure 8-1. The problem discovery sprint

The Problem with Problems

While the idea of uncovering problems through customer conversations is simple, doing this effectively can be quite challenging. You can’t simply ask customers to list their top problems, for reasons such as the following:

They may not know what they are

There’s a reason why people go to therapists. It often takes another person to go beyond surface problems and get to root causes.

They may not want to tell you

If admitting to a problem makes your customers feel vulnerable or uncomfortable, unless ...