[AI-Driven New Business Creation] The Qualiteg Way: Defining Customer Problems Based on Hypothesis-Exploration Interviews

Hello, and welcome to the Qualiteg blog. I'm Michele. In my work on AI-driven new business development and marketing, there are certain questions I hear from clients again and again. Through this blog, I would like to share my own answers to the challenges that people exploring AI-based business initiatives commonly face.

In my consulting work on new business development, I notice that many people are eager to jump straight into brainstorming ideas.

Before generating ideas, however, you need to think through, based on facts, what problems your customers actually have.

Today I would like to talk about how to think about and select customer problems, and how to formulate hypotheses about the problems your initiative should focus on and solve.

Start by confirming the question

The first item to consider is confirming the question. Before generating ideas, revisit the problems and needs you uncovered through research and other activities.

Here I will explain how to extract customer insights.

Let's use an electric bicycle rental service as an example.

Suppose we have the following fact:

I wanted to rent an electric bicycle and did so, but the battery had very little charge left.

That is our starting point.

From this fact, imagine and write down the customer's insights, that is, the inner voice expressing what they wish were the case, or what worries them.

In this case, it might sound like:

If only there were more charge, I could reach my destination on a single rental.

If the battery dies partway, won't the bicycle become heavy and impossible to ride?

You should be able to hear the user's inner voice like this. Recognize these as the user's "questions."

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Next, let's diverge on the question

Here we use How Might We, a design thinking framework for defining questions.

Translated literally into Japanese, "How Might We" becomes 「どのようにして私たちは〜できるか」. A literal translation, however, does not paint a very clear picture, so at Qualiteg we use it in the following form:

How might we solve or improve this problem by achieving "what" for "whom"?

Let's try applying this framework to "diverge on the question."

"How might we enable users who regularly use our service to ride our rental electric bicycles to more distant destinations?"

"How might we relieve customers who want to try our service for the first time of the worry that if the battery dies partway, the bicycle will become heavy and impossible to ride?"

In this way, you can derive customer problems from facts such as the results of customer interviews.

Here is the key point: in this phase, there is no need to judge whether a problem is good or bad. The goal is to extract as many problems as possible. In the next phase, we will consider which of those problems to select and turn into your company's solution.

Thank you very much for reading this column to the end. At Qualiteg, we provide training and consulting on AI technology and on methods for planning new businesses. If this has caught your interest, or if you have specific requirements, please feel free to reach out throughour contact form.

We also run popular workshops for those who want to master the steps of new business creation. The training focuses on helping each participant think about the business from an executive's perspective, and the content is designed not only for planners but also for their counterparts in engineering, design, and marketing.

We look forward to hearing from you. Please stay tuned for the next column.