Customers know where they hurt. They don't often have the solution, but that's where you come in. Yates notes that successful innovators marry customer pain with"the art of the possible in terms of the technology and trends available to solve that pain. For example, Uber doesn't get created if we don't have mobile phones, GPS, and real-time payments."
Uncovering customer pain is a potential advantage that big companies have over their startup competitors. Large organizations have no shortage of customers that can be leveraged for interviews and discovery calls, focused solely on understanding customers. Any company on the Forbes Global 2000 list could conduct hundreds of interviews in a matter of weeks, while a startup may struggle to line up even a tenth of those calls.
Of course, where a bigger company may struggle is actually listening to the feedback—even if it’s not what interviewers want to hear—and not letting customer interviews turn into sales pitches. Listening, absorbing candid feedback, and reacting without defensiveness are not skills that come easily to a lot of companies.on feedback, it was discovered that only 6% of people say that at their organization, good suggestions or valid complaints from employees always lead to important changes.
To take full advantage of Yates' method for unleashing your unicorn within, your organization must surface, hear and assess customer pain. Projecting onto customers a pain that doesn't exist, misinterpreting what customers actually said, or not admitting that a solvable pain doesn't exist, all spell doom for your innovation.
A Silicon Valley veteran, Yates knows all too well the dangers of putative innovators who never understood their customers' pain . As she told me,"There have been thousands of startups in Silicon Valley that never went anywhere because the super-smart engineers who founded the company had products first and then went searching for pain as opposed to finding pain and then building the solution. Too many thought they had all the answers and never bothered to actually interview a customer.