Customer Problem Stack Ranking: How Stripe Validate New Product Ideas.
80% of products and features are rarely or never used. Why? Because they're building solutions for problems customers don't care enough about.
I spent over a year on 100+ customer discovery interviews only to follow the wrong user need. I've also spent 5+ years as a Techstars Community Leader and Global Facilitator helping hundreds of early-stage entrepreneurs from around the world to validate their ideas and build first-concept products. If there is one thing I've learned, it's that validation is hard.
At the end of March 2021, I came across a Twitter thread by Stripe product manager Shreyas Doshi describing a validation method called Customer Problem Stack Ranking.
At the time, we were struggling to get website visitors to convert and people just didn’t understand why they would use our product. We decided right away to give CPSR a try on our startup. The value proposition that we spent 7 months of discovery research crafting came dead last with both of our top two target customer segments.
Dead. Fucking. Last.
We learned more in 2 hours using this stack ranking approach than we did in 100+ customer discovery interviews.
So, I've taken this experience and built a tool for Customer Problem Stack Ranking to help you validate your ideas, find product-market fit, and build solutions that customers *really* love.
To explain how Customer Problem Stack Ranking works, I'm going to take a startup idea that I've heard at countless hackathons; an app that makes it easier for a group of people to split the payments for their upcoming holiday. We can call this hypothetical app Splitzies. Ok, let’s jump in.
What is Customer Problem Stack Ranking?
Customer Problem Stack Ranking (CPSR) tells you how important your idea is compared to the other problems your target customers experience. It's a simple data-driven approach to understand whether your idea solves a burning pain point 🔥 or just a mild inconvenience 🙄
Step 1: Write Your Question
Customer Problem Stack Ranking is like a type of survey, so it needs a question. CPSR questions usually go along the lines of "What is frustrating about ____ ?". Your CPSR question should be broad enough that it allows your participants to explore all the problems associated with an activity rather than just the specific problem that your idea will solve.
For our imaginary app Splitzies, our 'activity of focus' is booking a group holiday so our question is: What is frustrating about booking a group holiday?
Step 2: Turn Your Idea Into A Problem Statement
Asking target customers to tell you if they like your idea is a very bad approach. As Rob Fitzpatrick's book The Mom Test explains, if you ask people about your idea they will just tell you it's great so that they don't hurt your feelings. Instead, we need to turn our idea into a problem statement so that we can compare it to the other problems that customers face during the 'activity of focus'.
For Splitzies, our problem statement could be: "Dividing the cost of a hotel booking is frustrating and complicated when planning a group holiday." You can create multiple problem statements to explore the different pain points your idea might solve and the different words your target customers might use to talk about the 'activity of focus'.
If you're not convinced about the need to use problem statements, here's a short video from a serial entrepreneur. If you're struggling to write your own, here's a quick how-to video on problem statements.
Step 3: Create Peripheral Problem Statements
Brainstorm other problem statements that fall under the same 'activity of focus' but aren't related to your idea. These can be informed by asking open-ended questions during a handful of interviews or by reading some ‘pain point’-related blog posts/forums. Don't worry if you feel like you've missed some peripheral problems; using OpinionX to run your stack ranking means that your participants can submit new problem statements to cover areas you missed at the start.
Let’s have a go at writing some peripheral problem statements for Splitzies:
It's difficult to plan activities when I haven't organized a transport method like car rental or public transport.
It's hard to find out how expensive a destination is for general things like food and transport.
Agreeing on dates that suit everyone is a pain!
Some destinations are very different depending on the time of year but good information on seasonality is hard to come across.
Keeping a list of potential Airbnbs and hotels turns into a giant messy spreadsheet.
Step 4: Send Your Stack Rank To Target Customers
Send your stack rank survey link to target customers. Pick one specific segment rather than a generic demographic to avoid noisy data. For example, if I send my Splitzies CPSR to both young parents planning a family holiday and student backpackers, they're going to have very different priority problems and our data will get all messed up.
If you haven't got a pre-release waitlist, hit people's DMs on online communities, forums, and social media. When we used CPSR on ourselves, we joined a few Slack communities for Product Managers and got a +25% response rate on a couple hundred messages (this outreach only took a couple of hours one evening). Here’s a bunch of free tactics that you could use to find participants.
Step 5: Iterate!
One of the most important things to do when running a CPSR is to grow your problems list as you discover new pain points that you missed at the start. 81% of stack rankings run on OpinionX finish with new opinions added by participants in the top 3.
That’s why we recommend that you don’t use a normal survey for CPSR — tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and Google Forms lock you in with all your blind spots when you write your multiple-choice list at the start. It’s SUPER important that you can grow your problems list as you go, which is easy to do with a stack ranking tool like OpinionX.
Step 6: The Results
Once you’ve got enough participants, sort all the problems by highest importance to stack rank your statements. In one click, you'll know how important your value proposition and idea are compared to the other problems your target customers face.
As I said, the results of our stack ranking showed us that the value proposition we had spent 7 months building came dead last with our target customers. What was surprising though, was that our stack ranking showed that the big picture problem we were solving was actually very important to our target customers, but the words we were using couldn't have been resonating less.
Aka, having the right problem but the wrong words to describe it is pretty much the same thing as chasing the *wrong* problem.
After our CPSR, we took 5 of the top 6 most important problems from our stack rank results and rewrote our entire landing page and onboarding experience. By the end of that week, conversion, onboarding success, and referrals had all multiplied.
Step 7: Go.
The best time to do Customer Problem Stack Ranking was yesterday. Whether you're validating a killer startup idea, working to improve your messaging, or trying to pick the next big problem to tackle for your product, Customer Problem Stack Ranking is a versatile and flexible solution that's ready to help you out.
OpinionX is the only tool built for Customer Problem Stack Rank. Creating your stack ranking on OpinionX is completely free and you can be ready to share it with participants in as quick as 4 minutes. Get started now.
Daniel Kyne is the Co-Founder and CEO of OpinionX, a free online tool for Customer Problem Stack Ranking that helps product builders to validate their ideas and find product-market fit. Daniel is a Techstars Global Facilitator, a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum, and a former Digital & Innovation Lead at Unilever UK.
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