Customers & Research

Customers say they want feature X, but is that the job or just a solution they've imagined?

A starting point

Almost always it's a solution they've imagined, and building it verbatim is how founders ship features nobody uses. The job hides one layer beneath the request: ask what they'd do if that feature existed, and what they're doing today without it. Your job is to trade their proposed solution for the underlying struggle it was meant to solve, then decide the real fix yourself.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked

Read

📖 Book
✓ Link checked Paid Beginner

Why we picked it The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past behaviour, not your idea, so you can't be lied to. If a founder reads one thing before talking to a single customer, it's this.

The Mom Test

From momtestbook.com by Rob Fitzpatrick ~130 pages

  • Talk about their life, not your idea.
  • Ask about specifics in the past, not opinions about the future.
  • 'That's so cool, I'd totally buy it' is a compliment, not data, dig for commitment and evidence.
Open momtestbook.com →
✍️ Essay
✓ Link checked Freemium Beginner

Why we picked it The faster horse line gets quoted to justify ignoring customers entirely, and that reading is wrong. Vlaskovits, a customer development author, unpacks why a customer asking for a faster horse is still handing you the real job (get me there quicker), even though they named a solution they could imagine. It reframes a feature request as a signal about intent, which is exactly the muscle this question is about. Read it as a way to think, not a rule.

Henry Ford, Innovation, and That Faster Horse Quote

From Harvard Business Review by Patrick Vlaskovits Short read, about 800 words

  • People describe their needs in terms of the solutions they already know. The named feature is a proxy for a deeper job to be done.
  • Ignoring customers is not the lesson. Reading past their literal words to the underlying want is.
  • Your job is to separate the stated solution (faster horse) from the actual outcome they are chasing (get somewhere faster).
Open hbr.org →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it When a customer hands you feature X, the Five Whys is the simplest technique for drilling from that request down to the real job underneath. This piece lays out the method in plain product terms, developed at Toyota and now a staple of product discovery, so you can run it on your next request in ten minutes. It is a concrete tool to pair with the mindset from the other two picks. Use it as a first pass, not a rigid procedure.

What Are the Five Whys (5 Whys)

From Productboard by Productboard Short read, about 5 minutes

  • Ask why five times (roughly) to move from a stated feature to the root problem the customer is trying to solve.
  • Anchor each answer in evidence, not guesses, so you drill toward a real cause and not a story you prefer.
  • The root you reach often points to a different, better solution than the feature that was originally requested.
Open productboard.com →

People also ask

What does 'jobs to be done' actually mean? People don't buy products, they 'hire' them to make progress in a specific situation, the famous milkshake was hired to make a boring commute beara... Beginner 2 resources → How is JTBD different from features, personas, or user needs? Personas describe who; JTBD describes the progress they're trying to make and the struggle that pushes them to switch. Features are your answer; th... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I actually uncover the job my customers are hiring my product for? Interview people who recently switched to or bought something in your space and reconstruct the timeline: what triggered the search, what they used... Intermediate 3 resources → Who are my real competitors once I think in jobs to be done? Anything the customer currently 'hires' to get the same job done, including a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, a competitor, or doing nothing at all.... Intermediate 3 resources → How do I turn a job to be done into product and messaging decisions? Write the job as a struggling-moment statement ('when I ___, I want to ___, so I can ___') and use it as the filter for what to build and how to pi... Advanced 2 resources → How many customer interviews do I need before I trust the job I've found is real? There's no magic number, but the honest signal is repetition: when your last three interviews stop surprising you and start confirming the same str... Intermediate 3 resources →