Product Sense Help: My pain points aren’t unique!

You’ve done an impeccable job at choosing a customer segment and now you’re on to defining pain points. You have three in mind but suddenly you’re stuck: you realize that your pain points aren’t specific to the customer group you chose. What do you do?

Here’s an argument for why it’s okay if your pain points aren’t unique to your chosen segment.

Your job in the customer segmentation section is to find a customer segment that will be highly likely to engage with your product. It’s the first part of getting to product market fit. It’s only by targeting the best customers (the best market) that you can find the best product (which stems from a significant pain point) and achieve the ideal fit.

When you define and choose from a variety of pain points, you’re doing so from the perspective of the segment that you chose without reference to all of the other potential customers that you didn’t choose. If the pain point you choose is in fact the problem that matters most to the selected group, it doesn’t matter that it is also important to the groups you didn’t choose. It is still the pain point you need to focus on.

The reason choosing the best customer group is important is not because it will be the only group to be motivated by a particular pain point, but because it will be the most motivated.

So the ideal workflow of a product sense response isn’t find a customer group and find problems that are unique to it, but rather find a customer group that will be unusually interested in a solution to problems they experience.

You can tell this is the right strategy because choosing pain points that are unique to the group may result in niche products that may not scale to other users. Choosing more generally applicable pain points can still be successful with your pilot audience and potentially scale to a broader audience in the future. Again, selection of the ideal user group makes the “land” part of land and expand possible.