Slow-twitch muscle
Unmet needs insight
Deep understanding of human motivations.
Surveys tell you what people say. Immersion tells you what they struggle with and dream about. This muscle turns customer insight from an individual skill into a shared language and pattern recognition the whole team carries, and it takes years to build.
How you train it.
Put teams, not just researchers, in front of real people in their real context, regularly. Build a shared vocabulary for what you see.
On your own: Ask what someone's day is like before you offer what you know.
Who does it well.
Made ethnography a team ritual; everyone who worked there still sees the world through the eyes of someone getting through their day.
Weeks of payment-integration pain compressed into seven lines of code, because they listened to developers, not the market.
Drills.
Watch people do the thing in their own setting, before you ask them anything. What they work around tells you more than what they complain about.
Contextual inquiry, Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt; the Doblin practice
Put the people who build the product inside the customer's building for weeks, working the customer's problem with the customer's data. Insight arrives faster than any brief can carry it.
Palantir's forward-deployed engineer model
Reconstruct the story of the last time someone switched to a solution: what pushed them, what pulled them, what held them back.
Clayton Christensen; Bob Moesta's switch interviews
Find the people who hit your market's future needs years early and have already built their own solutions. Learn from those.
Eric von Hippel, MIT
Rules for customer conversations that stop people being polite to you: ask about their past behavior, not your idea.
Rob Fitzpatrick
A checklist of the ten places innovation can happen, from profit model to customer engagement. Most companies only ever use two; the unmet need is often in the other eight.
Larry Keeley and colleagues at Doblin
Run hundreds of open-ended conversations in days rather than a dozen in a month, then read the patterns. Breadth that used to cost a research program, without giving up the open question.
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