How to Prioritize Customer Problems Effectively

Wasting time on the wrong products

Insight from Opinion X

Are you working on a product that has no traction?

Trust me, we've all been there. No shame in that.

I bet you got to this point when a product manager:

• Came up with a product idea and asked customers if this solved their problem

• Customers said, "Yes this does," so then the PM got buy-in from the executive team

• Product flops. Growth teams get blamed for not doing their job to drive traction

The executive team keeps pushing because "customers say we have the right product”. However, customer wallets are saying the opposite.

What is happening here?

The product solved a problem. But not THE problem.

When you talk about a specific problem, customers will not focus on their other issues. They will hyper-focus on the problem you are bringing up.

To combat this, try Customer Problems Stack Rank (CPSR). This can work for customer facing products, internal tools or processes you are building out.

CPSR will tell you how important your idea is compared to the other problems your target customers experience.

Try this:

1. Write a broad question about the activity or task you are improving.

2. Turn your idea into a problem statement.

3. Create other problem statements that fall under the same activity you are optimizing

4. Send your stacked ranked problem statements to target customers (Use this to find participants)

You’ll notice that your target audience will stack rank your statements. This way, you can figure out where to target your efforts.