Chapter 1:

Discovering Real Needs

Making an effort to listen—to hear, observe, and understand people—will make you a great discoverer. Proactive learners who are accepting, curious, and inquiring are good listeners. Who do you think listens well? Think about why—what listening behaviors can you adopt?

Discoverers want to understand where people are coming from: their backgrounds and environment, motivations and emotions. Discoverers back away from being in “I already know it” mode. They collaborate. They pursue dialogue, not interrogation. For those who are curious, discovery is fun.

Greg Burns, executive coach and Citi’s former chief learning officer, believes anyone can improve their listening and discovery abilities. He says, “It all starts with mindfulness, being in the moment, being able to turn your brain off and really focus on the other person.”2

This chapter investigates how to be a discoverer, and further, how and when to turn discovery into learning that will set you off to define value and growth concepts.

People buy painkillers, not vitamins

Change makers use proven methods to get insights about people and what innovations will address their needs.

Needs are rational: I need food because I am hungry; by the way, I prefer that it tastes good. And, it has to be affordable and sold where I shop. Product features meet rational aspects of needs. Needs are also emotional and influenced by values: I’m a mom, and after a long day, I want to put a healthy, tasty dinner on the table to promote good family habits.

Product features address functional needs, but are often limited to the basics. Truly innovative solutions go beyond rational needs, and connect with emotional needs and values. Emotional connection doesn’t mean soft-edged photography, or other communications clichés. Emotional needs may not be terribly profound. They are waiting to be solved within life’s day-to-day irritants and inconveniences.

A fellow innovator once said, “People buy pain killers, not vitamins.” Living as we do with so much complexity, relief from life’s hassles alone can earn attention and commitment to a brand. Take, for example, ketchup.

Do you buy ketchup? Does your ketchup bottle sit right side up or upside down? Heinz ketchup dates back to 1876. In 2002, Heinz’s business goal was to grow sales. Discovery led to a user problem: the hassle involved in getting the last bit of ketchup out of the bottle. Users reportedly jammed knives down the bottles, or shook bottles hard only to be squirted with a watery mess, or tried balancing the right-side-up bottle upside down (my favorite technique). Given the long narrow neck and wide bottom, that is a tough act.

Heinz responded by introducing the inverted ketchup bottle, applying a package design first invented for shampoo. Providing a better alternative to user workarounds revolutionized a 150-year-old product. Heinz grew at three times the market rate within a year of this new-to-category innovation.3

Takeaways:

How to be a better listener:

Are you simply solving your own problem?

What’s great about jumping into a problem that stems from one’s own experience is the deep understanding and passion to fix something that is bothering you.

The founder solving their own problem has to avoid building the perfect solution for their personal-use case, only to find they are not solving a problem of interest to many other people.

The corporate innovator may be on a team that does not include product users. They must account for their own personal detachment from what it is like to have a particular problem. They have the added responsibility of selling up the ladder, to executive team or board members removed from the daily realities of customers, and focused more on the internal demands of a grown-up company facing disruption.

Creating momentum to pursue innovation takes a lot of energy, commitment, and belief. Even if you need just a small amount of cash to get going, you may be depleting a department budget, negotiating with colleagues to depart with theirs, or using limited political capital to advocate for something that has not been done before. If you are a founder, you may be emptying your own savings or asking friends and family to trust you with theirs.

Users, buyers, and payers all matter

Back to household ketchup consumption, different family members each have an influence on which bottle of ketchup will be pulled off the supermarket shelf. Heads of household pay for the item, but family members all around the table are users. Perhaps a caregiver or relative handles grocery shopping. It’s important to understand the roles each member of the influence group plays, early on, to inform product priorities. Start to anticipate the complete experience.

Like tens of millions of other households, my family has a Netflix subscription. I am the payer: the subscription is a recurring charge to my credit card. My daughter is the user: after homework is done, she tunes in. Her friends send texts to each other about the latest content, and are all influencers of entertainment choices. Our childcare provider may be the buyer, monitoring the clock, the homework progress, and the weekly screen time tally. When my husband and I are not home, she gets to be gatekeeper, saying yes or no to my daughter’s pleading for relief from the never-ending boredom of digital-age, preadolescent, suburban life.

The user/buyer/payer/influencer model applies to business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) use cases. The constellation of players varies.

Say I’m the founder of a startup selling a bookkeeping solution to Main Street retailers. Unlike the Netflix example, where roles are each played by different people, in this example the buyer and payer are likely one and the same—the business owner. The user may also be the owner, or could be an on-site employee or remote contractor. The influencers could be diverse—including authoritative bloggers writing product reviews, or trusted neighborhood retailers.

At a global life insurance carrier, I led a team that proved out this model for the purchase of a big-ticket, complex product sold through intermediaries.

A couple has a child, triggering a conversation about life insurance. The parents influence each other, and decide to consult other influencers, including favorite online sources for personal financial information, or maybe college buddies. Wanting to understand products not (yet) available online, they call upon an adviser, who brings in yet another influencer, a broker. The couple ultimately decides. They are both buyer and payer. Who is the user? Well, the parents are receiving and paying for the emotional value of peace of mind, and may realize the rational value of tapping into a policy’s cash value. Other users are those named as beneficiaries.

Figuring out the roles of user, buyer, payer, and influencer for emerging use cases is a great way to organize insights to be productive. This model:

The user/buyer/payer/influencer model is one that’s both useful and easy to apply. Try it out as a mental model or in writing, completed on your own or with colleagues. Begin with users. Ultimately what matters is to map all members of the system and to understand how they affect each other’s decisions. A sample format is included later in this chapter, in the Three Cs section.

What people do trumps what they say

Customer journey mapping has become a mini-industry all its own. There is plenty of attention, including lip service, paid to the customer journey. Most brands circumscribe the definition around engagement with their own products or channels. From the perspective of users and buyers, though, the journey begins at the moment they realize they have a need, through researching, buying, and post-purchase usage, payment, and servicing.

The value of customer journey mapping is threefold. It can:

Create the best customer journey framework by focusing on phases:

See if you can identify different behavior patterns that spark ideas about segments.

The most effective way to figure out the customer journey is through a combination of observing and getting inside user and buyer thought processes, to see how choices are made and behaviors influenced at each step.

A helpful line of questioning starts with just a few questions:

  1. What did you do? And then what? And then what?
  2. What made you think to do that? What else? And what else?

Down the road, journey specifics can be fleshed out in more detail, refined, and applied to marketing, product, servicing, and other elements of execution.

Sometimes only a crisis can illuminate discovery

How can you invest efforts in discovery if you operate inside a culture that doesn’t like ambiguity and perceives the work of the change maker as too messy? A good discovery raises questions, not just provides answers.

Sometimes, change only comes when an urgent situation arises demanding something new happen, especially in a rooted culture, and especially one where the company has a legacy of achievement.

In a historically successful place, running around shouting that the sky is falling will backfire. And even providing indisputable evidence won’t guarantee buy-in. Sponsorship, credibility, influence, and relationships matter to win others over to change—the greater the change in direction, the tougher the shift.

Two pieces of advice, both assuming commitment to purpose:

  1. Focus others on the possibilities of what could be. Showing not just passion, but well thought-through execution, even at this early stage, helps win sponsorship and build a circle of supporters.
  2. Use your network to find a mentor from whom you can learn the tricks of remaining true to your vision and the steps necessary to deliver.

A crisis may have to happen to mobilize a team to listen and act.

Bill Unrue was CEO of Anonymizer, an Internet privacy and online identity management business, when all fundraising options dried up after the Internet bubble burst in 2000.

“We couldn’t get any VC money, so we had to earn our way out. We had to slow down and listen to the customer,” Bill said.4 He shared the team’s realization that paying attention to customer signals would define the company’s future. “Extinction has a way of focusing the mind. The only path for us was to listen to the customer to find what we could monetize.” The company ultimately achieved a good exit, fueled by customer insight that led management to reset priorities and rethink the highest potential sources of revenue aligned with their purpose.

Steal shamelessly

Never underestimate the ability to get great customer insights on a low (or no) budget. “Steal shamelessly,” a global CEO once said to me. Go for good-enough do-it-yourself ways to make progress. How to make high-quality discovery progress:

Insights don’t just come from research methods. Raja Rajamannar is Mastercard’s chief marketing and communications officer and president of its Healthcare business division. Raja is always on the lookout for new insight and ideas to drive value and growth. He credits three-quarters of the ideas his team pursues to sources outside the company. “I read every single email I get, because even if I have to go through ten thousand emails to find one great idea, the time invested is worthwhile.”5

Raja’s other tactics:

Don’t just bet on your own horse

Be sensitive to the risks of do-it-yourself. Discovery requires an open mind. The common trap is to seek customer feedback as validation. Entrepreneurs fall in love with their ideas, and then listen for the answers they preferred all along. So do corporate teams under pressure to generate revenue. Or, in this age of agile product development, the focus ends up on the offering itself, and not the broader context of the customer journey.

That is why, budget permitting, whether for entrepreneur or corporate innovator, there is value in having a third party with no stake in the outcome assisting in discovery. This is not to say throw discovery over the fence. It’s risky to say: “I’ll read the report when it comes back from the field.”

Think about discovery as co-development with users.

Discovery expert Matt Foley is an entrepreneur-in-residence at the High Tech Rochester (HTR) accelerator. Matt built and exited PluggedIn, which became a building block for the insights capability of global public relations and marketing consultancy Edelman.

Matt’s perspective applies to any change maker: “I’ve gone out and sat with entrepreneurs in conversations they are having with customers, and in the end we hear completely different things. I don’t have a horse in the race, so I hear things differently. Usually they just hear the positives. The challenge is when you don’t have money to hire an expert. What I advise: go into ‘mixed mode.’ Get together with customers. If your focus is B2B, go to their offices and see their environment. In any case, take a contextual approach.”6

He says, “People are often too nice to entrepreneurs. Sometimes I’ll have someone say to me, ‘I have a great idea, but I can’t find anyone to talk to me about it.’ Well, if you aren’t able to find a few people to talk to just to get feedback, you are going to have a helluva time selling it to lots of others down the road.”

Matt recommends setting up a customer advisory panel to generate ongoing insights and pay adequate attention to changes in the market. Getting potential customers engaged in discovery is by itself a step toward market validation. It is not difficult to assemble a group of people who will offer opinions and share their stories. To get the right people:

Erasmus said, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”7

Cofounder of the startup Kavyar, Sean Charles, uses discovery methods to connect artists with publishing opportunities in photography, fashion, beauty, modeling, and the arts.

His motivation to launch was to solve a problem in his own fashion business. “I was always frustrated with not being able to find photographers and other creative talent. I had the clients, I had the work, and I had the money to hire, but I was limited to the creative talent within my own network.”8

Sean says, “I got together with two other developers to build the software. We did what a lot of other startups did: we went into a cave for several months to design and build until we had something perfect. We had a false presumption of what a company like Apple might do: develop and release. Our thinking was, ‘We know what to do, we will build a better version of what is out there and it will take the world by storm.’”

That was not exactly what happened in Version 1.0. So the team sought guidance from a friend who recommended HTR’s Launchpad program. As a member of Launchpad, Kavyar had the good luck to work with Matt Foley. By then, Sean was ready to buy into Matt’s recommendations on how to get user insights, and the value of the time and effort to do so.

What value did the Kavyar team’s insights efforts deliver?

So the big problem turned out to be that, to be compensated as a creative, it was better to be good at the 80 percent, but to shrink that effort to as little time as possible. Kavyar refined its focus: to compress the 80 percent by automating and standardizing the tedious but essential tasks that took creative people away from their passion to create.

The team’s discovery learning:

This may all sound terribly obvious (as so much of life does, in hindsight). But so many innovation seekers under-invest in discovery. You can win by being the one-eyed person in the valley of the blind.

Measure progress: Take the 1 percent test

Productive discovery can be a reality check on preliminary solution and business model assumptions. A good set of observations or interviews, complemented by a bit of secondary research, can yield early hypotheses about market segments, including size and characteristics, wherewithal to pay, and customer journey.

To see whether this is so, take a back-of-the-envelope “1 percent test.”

  1. Use whatever rough data is on hand to estimate the total market size—whether that is number of people or units in the market, or the total value of purchases.
  2. Multiply by 1 percent.
  3. If the answer is big enough, that’s a good, albeit extremely crude, indicator that what you are pursuing could be worth pursuing based on the size of the opportunity.

One percent of the market may not mean “success.” This is a sanity check that lets you say, “Well, if we achieve one percent share, we have traction and can be viable,” so it’s worth putting in more effort. Just don’t play the “fun with spreadsheets” game and start to tell yourself the business will be huge at 1 percent, which is a big number to hit from a standing start. Bottoms-up analysis will be required, as will balancing of expectations.

The 1 percent test will be used later, too. It’s a handy tool when good enough is good enough.

The Three Cs for Discovering Real Problems That Matter

Capabilities

User/buyer/payer/influencer assessment

Use this matrix, or adapt it to be your own, as you gather insights about users, buyers, payers, and influencers.

The sample template is completed based on a hypothetical example, a B2B software purchase, to show how the method works for another type of use case. Don’t kid yourself. Personal emotional values frame B2B decisions along with professional motivations and the political considerations that exist in any organization.

Imagine, in this case, the buyer heads decision analytics as a member of a big-company marketing team, and is selecting software.9

table
table

Two active listening exercises

  1. Cultivate focus as a daily habit
    • Ask yourself: “How am I doing today?”
    • Get centered. This means calm your emotions, and slow your mind and breathing to a point where you can sense what is going on around and within. It’s a combined feeling of being very alert, and very relaxed at the same time.
    • Focus. Feeling cynical? Tell yourself to refocus.
    • Repeat daily: Refocus.
    • Create the habit. You’ll sense an improved ability to listen, and will come upon new, richer and otherwise overlooked insights.
  2. Get past fear to remove a listening impediment
    • Fear is the enemy of discovery. What does fear feel like? Paralyzing? Hard to focus, think, listen? The goal of this exercise is to experiment with how you can reframe fear, and convert the associated energy into a motivating personal challenge.
    • Get past fear by asking yourself, and then answering, two questions:
    • “What can I control?”
    • “What can I influence?”

You probably cannot control capital availability, but you can influence investors with a sharp pitch that demonstrates your passion and thoughtful customer insight, increasing your odds of getting resources.

Customer journey mapping template

Customer journey maps are most useful completed in conjunction with the user/buyer/payer/influencer assessment.

Connections

Connecting to insights: Ready-to-use discussion guide

The setup: Whether you work with an expert or pursue insight gathering on your own, have a discussion guide ready in advance. Guidelines:

The questions—and not trying to prove you are right:

  1. Tell me about yourself. (Name, where live, work, age, family, et cetera.)
  2. Tell me about a typical day in your life. (For B2B, tell me about how things went yesterday at work, what is on your calendar this week, et al.)
  3. Probe for insights:
    • “And then what?”
    • “And what happened next?”
    • “How did you react?”
    • “How did that feel?”
    • “What did you say?”
    • • “What did you do next?”
    • “Show me what you were doing?”
    • “Why did you do it that way?”
  4. What are the biggest frustrations you have throughout the day? Probe for times of day, and each example that comes up.
    • “What did you do?”
    • “How did you handle that?”
    • “What did the other person do or say?”
  5. Move to more specifics when your instinct is that you are in fertile territory.
  6. Another productive path starts with, “When was the last time you (fill in relevant activity)?” Continue by uncovering each step and the reason behind it, who else participated, how it felt, why each choice was made, what other options were considered. Keep in mind that an answer such as, “I never do that” or “I haven’t done that in years” is by itself an insight. There may not be much of a problem to solve, or the use case is so infrequent or inconsequential as to not represent the opportunity you imagined.
  7. Try asking questions that introduce a relevant use case. For example, go back to the earlier ketchup story. If you were gathering insights, you may have had a hunch that the bottle was problematic, and asked something like, “Show me how you make a sandwich with condiments?” “How do you store condiments?” “Why do you do it like that?” or “Tell me how you do it?” You may want to be in a setting that allows for a demonstration.

Culture

Cultural attributes for successful discovery include:

Chapter summary

Notes

1. National Geographic News, “Flash Facts About Lightning,” nationalgeographic.com, June 24, 2005.

2. Greg Burns, president, G. Burns and Associates, in discussion with author, July 15, 2016.

3. History of Heinz Ketchup Timeline, heinzketchup.com.

4. Bill Unrue, entrepreneur, Assurance CEO, in discussion with author, August 2016.

5. Raja Rajamannar, senior executive, Mastercard, in discussion with author, September 2017.

6. Matt Foley, founder, QualNow, in discussion with author, August 2016.

7. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, Adagia.

8. Sean Charles, cofounder, Kavyar, in discussion with author, August 2016.

9. Milton Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values, Free Press, New York, 1973.