3 Steps To Understand Customer Insights Before Launching A Product

Do you really know how your product is being used?

Case study time.

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Nitto-Denko is a Japanese brand that manufactures high-quality plastic tapes. Their tapes are meant for electrical insulation. Electricians & handymen often carry them for wiring jobs.

However, if you were to inspect the buyer demographic of Nitto tapes in Pakistan, you'd find an oddball segment in there:

=> Cricket-loving teenagers & young adults.

Since the 1980s, the Pakistani youth has been infatuated with the concept of "tape ball" cricket: street cricket played with a tennis ball neatly enveloped in pvc tape to give it weight & strength.

The manufacturers at Nitto never saw this coming.

After they caught onto this trend, you started seeing stores stock them specifically as "tape-ball tape".

Nitto eventually became an essential investment for all street cricket tournaments.

That's why it's so important to conduct customer research to uncover jobs-to-be-done.

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Why is your user "hiring" your product?

The data on your analytics dashboard may just show just that: numbers e.g. Nitto would have been seeing their sales rise.

However, it's only upon understanding how your consumer is actually using your product that you can:

1. Pivot the product to move into more lucrative, voluminous segments
2. Improve the product to create better product-market fit
3. Discover new personas that you weren't thinking of
4. Understand ways you can circumvent competition by playing on a different turf

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Here's another example:

Photoshop's goal was to deliver a powerful, sophisticated design tool that would allow users to virtually create any digital design that the human mind could conceive.

However, it was over-serving the market.

Because most working professionals:

• Aren't designers. Or at least they don't consider themselves as one
• Don't have the patience to learn the tool
• Don't need to create the next Mona Lisa

They're just looking to put up a nice social post, youtube thumbnail or presentation cover.

These people needed to "hire" a product that helped them produce professional designs in minutes that made them look good in front of others.

Enter Canva. It understood that job-to-be-done and filled that role perfectly.

Similarly:

Miro isn't hired as an online whiteboarding tool.

Miro is hired to help visual thinkers brainstorm together.

Slack isn't hired as an internal collaboration tool.

Slack is hired to help employees connect like their sitting in the same room.

Trello isn't hired as a Kanban board.

Trello is hired as a visual sticky board that depicts progress at a glance.

Therefore, you may have several preconceived notions as to why your audiences use your product.

Get clarity:

1. Shortlist users for interviews
2. Ask them what problem they are trying to solve
3. Use the 5 Why's method to get to the root motivation

You might be surprised with the results.