How Should Customer “Needs” Be Defined?

Companies receive countless inputs from customers every day through various sources, yet they still fail to fully understand their customers' needs. This causes significant issues for marketing, development, R&D, and sales teams who rely on these insights to create valuable products and services. The jobs-to-be-done framework defines a market as a group of people and the job they are trying to get done. Customer needs are then defined as statements that express how customers measure value while trying to get a job done. This enables organizations to create products and services that provide the value customers need in a controlled and measured way, which is beneficial for long-term planning. This framework also allows organizations to prioritize customer needs and to determine which ones are most important and unmet. In doing so, they can create systematic and predictable customer value.