What Customers Want

**Author:** Anthony W. Ulwick

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:** How to transform innovation from guesswork into a predictable, measurable process by understanding the jobs customers are trying to accomplish and the outcomes they use to define success.

**Who This Book Is For:** Product managers, entrepreneurs, executives, marketers, and anyone responsible for creating products or services that people actually want to buy.

Every year, companies around the world spend billions of dollars trying to innovate. They conduct focus groups, run surveys, interview customers, and hire creative agencies. They generate thousands of ideas, build prototypes, and launch products with high hopes. And every year, the vast majority of those products fail. The failure rate for new products is staggering. Depending on the industry, anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of new offerings never achieve commercial success. This is not because companies lack talent, resources, or ambition. It is because they are using a fundamentally flawed approach to understanding what customers actually want. The problem begins with a simple question that nearly every company asks: "What do you want?" When companies ask customers this question, they receive answers that are almost always misleading. Customers describe features they have seen elsewhere. They request specific solutions that may not address their real needs. They offer opinions that reflect their limited understanding of what is technically possible. And companies, eager to please, build exactly what customers asked for, only to discover that nobody buys it. This is the innovation paradox. The more directly you ask customers what they want, the less likely you are to create something they will actually value. Anthony Ulwick spent decades wrestling with this paradox. As a product development consultant working with companies across dozens of industries, he watched the same pattern repeat itself endlessly. Smart people, working hard, using the best available methods, and still failing to predict what would succeed in the market. The breakthrough came when Ulwick realized that the problem was not with the questions companies were asking, but with the fundamental assumptions behind those questions. Companies assumed that customers could articulate their needs. They assumed that customers knew what solutions would work best. They assumed that gathering more opinions would lead to better decisions. None of these assumptions are true. Customers are not designers. They are not engineers. They are not market researchers. What customers are, however, is remarkably consistent in one crucial way: they all have jobs they are trying to get done. They have tasks to complete, problems to solve, and goals to achieve. And they have clear, measurable ways of determining whether they have succeeded. A farmer does not want a tractor. The farmer wants to prepare soil for planting, and…