The first goal of the Market Requirements tool is to help you capture and organize the solution independent needs or Jobs to be Done (JTBD) of your target customers, and potentially other key stakeholders in your value network. These needs or JTBDs should come directly from your target customers from open-ended Discovery Interviews or Surveys. When a customer buys a product, they are ‘hiring’ it to perform some job for them, whether that’s a subconscious process that happens when choosing a new outfit, or a conscious and explicit set of criteria documented in a Request for Proposal.
The second goal of the Market Requirements tool is to help you translate the customer needs into specific and measurable Market Requirements for solutions to those needs that can be used as a basis for comparison between competing alternatives and your Solution Hypothesis.
The most important aspect of focusing on needs and Jobs to be Done is taking the perspective of the customer, NOT the preconception of the solution. This perspective serves two important purposes for the potential solution provider:
Defining specific, measurable Requirements and prioritizing them based on customers’ views of their relative importance and their satisfaction with existing alternatives is critical in two ways:
