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We would get those insights a lot of the time by visiting customers, which is the best. Because we want to see their of office, who sits next to them, if they’re in a cubicle, what’s in their cubicle, what do they have printed out that’s hung on the wall, what does their browser look like, what are their favorites, what’s on their desktop? You just really want to understand, as a researcher, what are they doing? What does their day look like? And the reason why I care so much about that is because rarely do you get that information when you ask someone a pointed question about features or functions or things that they need. A lot of the times we found that the information we were getting when we asked customers directly was kind of aspirational: It was things that they thought that they wanted or that they dreamed of, but when we looked at what they actually did each day, in most cases it had zero overlap. So we learned way more by having those interviews and watching what they were doing, and seeing their daily practice, and seeing how they had to go through ve different apps to do something, or download something into Excel. Excel was gold for us. It’s always been for me, building the kind software that I do. As soon as I see a customer or prospect use Excel, I know we’re onto something. That’s where they’re doing something that we can help them do more efficiently. But it’s something that almost no customer is going to tell you about. Because it’s so boring to tell someone that: “I download this, I export this, I put it in Excel, and I sort it this way, and I do that, then I put it here, then I do this, then I re-upload it here, then I put it in PowerPoint ...
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David Cancel (HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands)