Matthias SpeicherIn short
Customers describe symptoms and propose solutions they already know. Both are valuable, and both mislead if you take them literally. The real target sits underneath: the job the customer wants done, along with the hurdles before it and the outcomes behind it. Understand these jobs, functional, emotional and social, and you build the right thing before the market demands it. The tool for it is old and underrated: the Value Proposition Canvas.
There’s a sentence that comes up in almost every product meeting and sounds so reasonable no one questions it. We have to hear what the customers want. The sentence is right and it’s dangerous, because it usually gets misunderstood. Hearing customers doesn’t mean taking their wishes literally. It means looking behind the wish.
Why the literal answer misleads
Customers do two things when you ask them. They describe a symptom, and they propose a solution. The symptom is real. The solution is almost always the one they already know.
Take an example from the charging market. Many users demand being able to pay by card at the charger. The wish is understandable. It comes from refuelling, where the card has worked for decades, and it’s a reaction to app chaos and opaque tariffs. Take the wish literally and you bolt a card terminal onto every charger. And you make worse the very problem the customer actually meant. Because the card means more steps, more interaction, more friction.
There’s more than convenience in that wish, there’s price. With the card the customer associates a binding, legible price. Refuelling, card and clear price are a single thing to them, all projected onto the card. The pain they want solved is loss of control. Many apps, many tariffs, different prices at the same charger at the same time. The card is an attempt to win back control.
So what the customer really wants isn’t the card. It’s to charge without thinking and with a clear price. The card is just the familiar form they dress that need in. A card terminal at every charger doesn’t solve that, it serves the symptom. An integrated approach goes to the root cause. The driver plugs in, the price is clear up front, and the rest runs on its own, no app, no card, no step. The right answer to the wish for the card isn’t the card. It’s a system that hands control back to the customer without forcing a payment on them.
Customers often say what they want, but not always what they need. The task is to tell the two apart.
The job a product gets done
The tool that helps here is the look at the job to be done. The question isn’t which feature a customer demands, but which task they want done. You hire a product the way you hire a tradesperson. Not because you like the tradesperson, but because a result is needed.
These jobs have three levels, and most product teams see only the first.
The functional job is the task itself. Getting from A to B. Charging the battery. Finishing a document. That’s the level most spec sheets argue on.
The emotional job is how it should feel. Safe, in control, free of worry. A driver doesn’t just want to arrive, they want not to fret on the way about whether the charger works. This level shows up in no spec and still decides satisfaction.
The social job is how the customer looks to others while doing it. What they can tell, what they’re admired or envied for. Someone who owns a modern, well-kept product likes to say so. The social job explains why a product that objectively works still disappoints when it feels dated while others move on.
Serve only the functional job and you build a product that does what it should and binds no one. It’s the emotional and social jobs that create loyalty, because they hit the need behind the need.
How Apple masters the jobs
No one demonstrates this better than Apple, most clearly with the iPhone, and it’s worth looking closely, because it isn’t deception, it’s craft.
The Pro in the iPhone name sells the social job. It’s the promise of belonging to the capable ones. Few buyers of a Pro model ever work with the camera professionally, many take the same holiday snapshots they’d take with the standard model. What’s bought isn’t the camera, it’s the feeling of needing it. A feeling that grows from your own ideas of what would be possible with it, and that clever marketing feeds on purpose. It’s the same mechanism as with the car. You buy for the exception you imagine, and use in the everyday.
Cleverer still is the bundling, and here it’s worth separating two effects. The better camera is the exception bait. Hardly anyone needs it, but it sells the image of capability. The longer battery life, by contrast, is something else, it can be a genuine everyday benefit for you. And that’s exactly what the second, subtler mechanism works with.
The surcharge for just three more hours of runtime looks too high. Rationally it’s hard to justify. But it is ten percent more, and what if I need it? That lands right in the job to be done, in the fear of being empty by evening. You reach for the Pro. And to justify the surcharge to yourself, you pull in the better camera, which you know you don’t need, but what if. So you retroactively justify a purchase with a feature that would never have carried the purchase in the first place (post-purchase rationalisation, paired with loss aversion). Out of the paltry three extra hours, which would never have justified the high surcharge, comes a rounded purchase you explain to yourself.
The runtime figures are cleverly chosen for this. The steps between models are small, but the base figure of the standard model is set just so it feels tight for daily use. Whether that’s intentional is beside the point. Anyone who resists notices afterwards that the standard model is entirely enough and they miss nothing.
And the social job is even built into the casing. Two cameras or three, you see it from the outside at a glance. You instantly recognise who has the Pro, even through the case, even when the Pro-only colours are hidden. The device carries its rank visibly outward. The social job isn’t claimed, it’s built into the product.
This is no put-down, quite the opposite. It’s a deep understanding of the emotional and social jobs, translated perfectly into product and price. But it also shows the flip side of the tool. Whoever masters the jobs can serve them or exploit them, and where the line runs, they have to decide for themselves.
The tool: pains, gains and the right offer
To get from the jobs to a concrete offer, I use the Value Proposition Canvas. It isn’t a new tool, it’s proven, and it rarely gets used rigorously.
On one side sits the customer. Their jobs, what they want done. Their pains, everything that stands in the way, annoyances, risks, obstacles. And their gains, the outcomes and benefits they want, including the ones they’d never ask for.
On the other side sits the offer. The pain relievers that remove exactly those hurdles. The gain creators that deliver exactly those desired outcomes. An offer fits when these two sides meet, when the product solves the real pains and creates the real gains, not the assumed ones.
The value of this tool isn’t in the template. It’s in the discipline of asking the right questions and not mistaking the answers for your own assumptions. Work out the pains and gains cleanly and you find the features that prevent erosion, before the market demands them or a competitor solves them first.
The proof from my own practice
For me this isn’t theory, I’ve applied it and measured it. For my project Speicher elektrisiert I defined two user profiles cleanly. The Technical Analysts, who want to understand systems, and the Joyful Explorers, who want orientation in everyday life. For each I built a separate Value Proposition Canvas, with their respective jobs, pains and gains.
The result wasn’t a hunch, it was measurable. Content that serves both perspectives at once, technical depth and pragmatic everyday explanation, had the greatest impact. A single, fairly dry technical post reached around 25’000 views in just over a day, at a reach multiplier of more than seven relative to the size of the network. That was no accident. It was the result of knowing the jobs of the two audiences precisely and tailoring the offer to them.
What holds here for content holds for any product. Understand your users’ jobs and you hit more precisely with less effort. Guess at them and you produce a lot and hit little.
Why this is the real work
At the start stood the sentence, we have to hear what the customers want. At the end stands its correction. We have to understand what the customers want to achieve, and clear the path there of friction.
That’s less comfortable than working through a wish list. It demands looking behind the symptom, questioning the familiar solution, and taking seriously the emotional and social jobs that appear in no ticket. But that’s exactly where the difference arises between a product that delivers what was demanded and one that hits what’s needed.
Customers say what they want. Good products deliver what they need. The art is knowing the difference.