How to gain insights into users' real needs?

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Editor's note: The more you try to be objective, the less likely you are to find the answers you want. This article is from a compilation, hoping to inspire you.

Over the past 10 - 15 years, one piece of advice that entrepreneurs often hear is: "Build a product that people want." This statement resonates because it effectively condenses the core responsibility of founders into a single maxim. Unfortunately, it lacks operability. It's a bit like telling an investor: "Beat the market."

In both cases, the obvious question is: "How do you do it?"

The main framework for considering this question is to think about the needs of customers. From this perspective, people only buy products they need. In other words, they "hire" products to perform specific tasks.

If you adopt this framework, you often implicitly assume that people have a set of objective, discoverable problems that need to be solved. If you observe carefully enough, you can identify these problems, relate them to needs, and thus recognize the products that need to be developed.

This is the scientific method of building a product. What was once mysterious becomes an empirical activity: you go out to discover needs and then create ways to meet them. This means talking to customers, whether on the street, on the Internet, in a bar, etc., whenever and wherever you can find them.

A naive approach is to grab a potential customer by the collar and directly ask them: "What do you want?" Any experienced founder will tell you that this method doesn't work. You'll only get a shrug or be told "I want a raise!"

People don't have a ready - made list of needs.

For experienced founders, their goal is to develop a detailed understanding of their target customers: what they do when they wake up in the morning, how they handle their inboxes, and how they react when they see their boss reply with a simple "no" to their long, late - night email. The key is to stay objective. You ask questions to collect neutral data that can tell you the truth about the world. You shouldn't deceive yourself with leading questions in an attempt to confirm your preconceptions.

But any experienced founder knows that this process is fractal. The more deeply you inquire about a person's daily experiences, the more details you can observe. However, the real needs or tasks, those urgent or unmet needs, often get lost in the process of detailed communication.

What really works? Abandon objectivity. Instead, start with a specific view or bias. Once you present your view of the world or your perspective on what you're building to customers, everything changes. Suddenly, the vague chaos in their minds becomes clearly visible. It's like a non - Newtonian fluid under external force: under the pressure of your perspective, it changes from a liquid to a solid.

You may have had similar experiences in other areas of life. Think about questions like: "What do you want for dinner?" Or, "Which movie do you want to watch?" Or, "What type of article do you want to read?"

If you ask me, my mind goes blank.

But if you ask me how about having Japanese cuisine, or what I think of "Inside Out 2", I can launch into an extremely long - winded description, explaining in detail why Japanese cuisine is delicious and how "Inside Out 2" is a boon for psychotherapy enthusiasts.

Why is there such a big difference in my responses to different topics?

Needs arise in specific contexts; they are not context - independent facts

When you look for needs or tasks in the way I mentioned earlier, the underlying theory is that there is a set of objective hidden desires. You're looking for the essence, adopting a rationalist view that these inherent attributes not only exist but can also be discovered and formally listed.

However, we've found that these needs or tasks actually arise through a series of correct action sequences. The emergence of a need or a "task" is due to the right prompt. This prompt or stimulus is a creative act, a process of learning how to generate a series of words and actions that can elicit a reaction from potential customers. Trying to be objective actually reduces the likelihood of you observing the desired results.

Take my writing of this article as an example. It would be foolish of me to ask you in advance what type of article you'd like me to write. You're reading this article because it appeared on your screen, not because you had a latent need that you could express.

This need emerged because I performed a series of actions, and this sequence of actions elicited a reaction from you. This reaction seems like a need you've always had, but it only emerged when the environment created the conditions for it.

Now the question becomes: "How do you learn to generate the right sequence?"

Be the person who can find the answers

If you're thinking, "Figure out which sequences will generate a good reaction," then you're still looking for the essence. You're looking for a list of words that will excite others. Don't do that. The process of creating what people want is a learning process. Through experimentation and error, become the kind of person who can generate needs, desires, and actions in others.

This kind of person notices that there's a long queue in front of a newly opened restaurant in their community. Instead of just walking by, they go into the restaurant.

They stop to observe the soft earthy tones of the restaurant's interior decoration, which evoke the image of villages along the Mediterranean coast. They notice the unexpected ingredients subtly incorporated into the menu, such as za'atar, cinnamon, and chili peppers, which are subtle tributes to other cultures and traditions. They notice the feelings this sequence of experiences stirs up in them, that sense of familiar yet pleasant surprise. They know that if they immerse themselves in these feelings, they'll be able to evoke them later.

A good analogy for how to become this kind of person is to think about how a language model learns to respond to prompts. They repeatedly try to generate sequences, learn the implicit patterns, and then apply these patterns in specific contexts. A language model doesn't have a dictionary of all possible sequences. Once it's trained, appropriate responses naturally emerge from the prompts. It's the same for you; as long as you keep training, new responses will keep emerging.

Creating what people want is a way of seeing and responding to the world.

The way you learn to understand user needs is very similar to the way you learn to walk. You clumsily take one step at a time, fall, get up, and fall again. You keep repeating this process until your body learns the thousands of tiny dynamic adjustments needed to maintain balance in any situation, so that you can take the next step without thinking.

Then, you're free to run.

Translator: Teresa