The four essential criteria to prioritize customer problems
Do you know the SINGLE thing successful companies have in common? A passion, sometimes an obsession, for the customer problems and the jobs this customer wants to get done. Successful product teams know how to get into their customer’s minds and address the most relevant issues.
Yet, how can you make sure you are addressing your customers’ most pressing issues? Easier said than done! Even when teams are fantastic at spotting the customer jobs-to-be-done (customer wants), too much data weakens the insights. Long lists of identified problems make it hard to properly prioritize the identified issues. As a result, they focus on non-essentials, and the products or services they build don’t meet expectations. Like them, I have struggled with too many products failing every single year.
There is hope, though, as some product teams consistently win. Product after product, portfolio after portfolio, they keep winning. These successful people share another thing in common: they know how to prioritize their customer problems and are very organized. They will not start any product development. They will not even write a single line of code before understanding how they can rank the most significant issues in their customers’ minds!
While the tactics differ, successful product teams tend to pay specific attention to four critical criteria when understanding their customer’s journey. We’ll call them the “PUMP4” criteria:
– Painful: how much PAIN are your customers in?
– Urgent: how urgent is it to solve this issue?
– Money: how much money are they willing to pay for resolution?
– Pervasive: how widespread is the problem at hand?
Here’s a quick guide on how to approach the PUMP4:
P: How much PAIN are your customers in?
It has to be the kind of pain that gets in the way of getting things done or could have significant consequences. We all face problems getting things done, but we often create our own “ersatz” solutions by creating shortcuts or ways to avoid these. In other words, we tend to “live” with these problems and the bearable pain that comes with them.
The customer problems worth solving need to belong to a different class. They need to be unbearable! For example, in the category of communication systems that I’m a bit familiar with, not knowing if you are on “mute” or on camera when on a business call used to be a significant source of anxiety. It got better with technology. But needless to say that it destroyed some reputations. People fired because they didn’t know if the camera was on or the microphone was muted or not. It is an example of a rather painful problem. If you don’t solve this problem, the consequences can be dire.
U: How urgent is it to solve this issue?
The more pressing and urging the want for resolution is, the better! It must be the kind of pain that needs to resolve promptly. This dimension often goes with pain intensity. It also stands on its own when you add a particular time constraint (e.g., imperative to pay your taxes by April 15th).
This dimension is probably the only one that you can influence by your marketing and sales efforts down the line. In other words, if the sense of urgency is not evident through your customer interviews, you can nurture it with how you position and present your offering. You see it all the time when marketers show you soon-to-be-gone offers or less advantageous ones if you wait. One word of caution, there’s a lot of abuse. Still, you can use it authentically and as a way to build a loyal following, like creating unique conditions for your early adopters and turning them into fans for life.
M: How much money are they willing to pay for resolution?
The next essential dimension is whether anyone is willing to PAY to solve the customer problem at hand. It is critical no to miss it. A problem cannot be only painful and pervasive to matter. If the current solutions are relatively “commoditized,” there’s not much of a business case unless the problem is associated with other issues that could command a premium. I’ve seen this issue quite often in high-tech. Solutions tend to become “commoditized” as tech giants integrate them into their platforms (like Apple on their operating systems).
A good example is the alarm clock on your iPhone. It does address a real painful, pervasive, and urgent problem. Still, the existing solution is relatively commoditized. It comes with your phone. So imagine you are an app developer and think of developing an alarm clock application. You will need to identify adjacent unsolved problems if you want anyone to pay. Your customer has to be willing to pay real money for the resolution of their issues. Competition and where the bar has been set for a commodity will help you determine that willingness to pay.
P: How pervasive is the problem at hand?
There’s no need to be a statistician to understand that the challenges you identify with your customers need to be pervasive enough. If only two out of a hundred people claim they have a specific problem, it is not enough for it to qualify as a problem worth solving. It needs to reach critical mass and have enough customers in intense pain.
For you to assess such pervasiveness, you generally need a mix of qualitative and quantitative research. The sequence can work both ways. I have personally seen the most success when starting with qualitative (like doing a dozen interviews to qualify the most significant issues). Then we’d confirm with quantitative research(like an online survey to hundreds). But you can also have quantitative analysis unveiling some trends and correlations that require qualitative validation on a smaller set to understand the root causes, to understand the WHY. The most important is to appropriately combine both qualitative and quantitative.
Ready to take action?
Prioritizing the customer problems you are uniquely positioned to solve is not necessarily easy, but WELL worth it! Once you meet the PUMP4 method’s conditions on a specific problem, you know you can serenely design the right solution. Understanding your customers (or future customers) takes methodical effort, active listening, resilience, and time. But for those of us who want to optimize product success chances, it helps us ask the right questions, get the sequence right, and build sustainable product success.
If you want to master customer empathy and build long-lasting product success, check out our latest “Customer Insights Matter” Sprint Course. It will teach you key strategies and techniques to truly capture what’s on your customers’ minds. You can go at your own pace and micro-learn if need be, but you should be ready to act on your learnings in typically less than half-a-day.
If you need a more tailored approach and customize it to your specific situation, let’s talk (drop us a note, or schedule a free exploratory call).