Use caseExplore an unmet need
Trace unmet needs through the spreadsheets, manual checks and copied steps people build to get a task done, including among people who buy nothing for that task today.
People seldom request something they have never imagined. They do describe, readily and in detail, the effort a task costs them, and that effort is where the study looks.
Participants describe how they get a job done today, step by step and in their own setting, with no product idea raised, so the conversation stays on the work and its friction.
Recruitment reaches people who handle the task with no product at all, using paper, email or memory, recruited to the brief's profile and screened for fraud, because their workarounds are often the rawest evidence of the need.
Each participant recalls one recent occasion when the task failed or took far longer than it should, what they did next and what it cost them, which anchors the need in an event and keeps it concrete.
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GrowwA workaround is a need someone has already paid for in time or effort, which makes it stronger evidence than a stated wish.
Struggles are grouped by the task participants were attempting and the step where it broke, each group carrying its quotes, so recurring struggles stand out across people and settings.
Participants show how they cope, from a spreadsheet kept beside the official system to a colleague everyone asks, and each workaround is recorded with the time it costs, a rough measure of how much the need hurts.
The strongest needs, those with costly workarounds reported by several kinds of participant, go forward to a survey that measures how widespread they are before anyone commits to building a solution.
Unmet needs are found through generative research, done before a team decides what to build. Ethnographic and contextual research observes work directly and catches steps people skip when they describe it, and diary studies capture struggles as they happen. The strongest signal is a workaround: when people keep a spreadsheet beside the official system, chain several tools together or accept long delays to get something done, the need is real enough to cost them effort. People who use no product for the task matter as much as customers, since their workaround is the whole of their current solution. Analysis groups struggles and workarounds into opportunity areas, which a survey can then size and a team can rank against strategy. A common mistake is asking people what they want, since most describe a feature they have seen elsewhere rather than the struggle behind it. Jobs-to-be-done interviews give this work its structure, reconstructing a recent occasion in detail to find the progress the person was trying to make and the alternatives they used, including doing nothing.
Discovery can find something interesting in any set of interviews. Writing into the brief, before fieldwork, what would count as a need worth taking to the opportunity review keeps the team from promoting whatever the interviews happened to turn up.
An unmet need can hide in an adjacent role or a task nobody listed. AI moderation makes a wider qualitative sample practical, so discovery can include the neighboring roles and settings where a workaround might sit, without adding moderators.
Interpreting workarounds is the hard part: deciding which spreadsheet signals a need and which is habit. With the moderator carrying the sessions, the team's most experienced researcher spends the week on that judgment.