Establishing Scope For Uncovering Customer Needs

The Needs Aperture is a methodology for identifying, prioritizing, and applying customer needs to achieve innovation and go-to-market success. As part of this process, product managers and marketers need to determine the scope within which they will look to uncover customer needs. The broader the scope, the more potential needs can be uncovered, although too wide of a scope leads to an unwieldy and ineffective needs discovery process. Forrester recommends four parameters to consider when establishing the scope for this research effort. In this report, we describe parameters to consider and guidelines to apply when setting the scope for uncovering customer needs.