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Skills from A Smart Bear

The Needs Stack: What your customer actually wants

Climb inside your customer's head — map the ladder of needs your product serves, level by level, revealing your real alternatives, the outcome you may honestly promise, and your higher purpose. Adapted from Chapter 4 of Hidden Multipliers: A Rose by Any Other Name.

Input
Who your customer is — ideally your ideal-customer definition and interview findings; a sharp sketch works too.
Output
A NEEDS-STACK.md: the ladder of customer needs with your level marked, real occupants named at each level, and each level's positioning role — what you do, promise, obviate, or aspire to.

What this is about

Nobody's life ambition is to buy your product. The customer creating an AWS account doesn't want infrastructure — they want the WordPress website it enables. They don't really want the website either — they want a personal platform for content and self-promotion, which they want because they're chasing a book deal, which they want because… there's always another level. That ladder is your customer's Needs Stack, and the book's strategic insight is that a product satisfying one level makes every product below it obsolete for that customer: whoever delivers the website without the infrastructure wins the customer, and the infrastructure vendor never even sees them.

Mapping your stack answers questions your competitor list can't: who your real alternatives are (the vendors a level above you, quietly removing customers from your market), what outcome you may honestly promise (the level just above yours — features are what you do, the next level up is what you promise), which steps you should brag about making obsolete, which metric tells you whether customers actually succeed, and where your company's higher purpose lives.

This skill builds the map interrogatively: it anchors the level your product satisfies — phrased as your customer's goal in your customer's words, not your product category — then walks down through what you obviate and up through what they really want, one level per exchange. Every level must pass a crystallization gate before the walk moves on: specific wording, a true means-to-an-end link, real named occupants. No sketching the whole ladder in one breath, and no stopping at your own level — that's the trap the chapter warns about.

Example invocation

You can invoke the skill like this:

/asb-needs-stack We sell managed Postgres hosting for small SaaS teams.
Here's our CAROL.md from the ideal-customer exercise — what does our
customer actually want, and who are our real alternatives?

The skill anchors your level in your customer's words, then walks the stack down and up with you, recording each crystallized level — with its occupants and its positioning role — in NEEDS-STACK.md.

One practical note: say where you're working. Name a directory (or point at your existing files) when you invoke, and the skill keeps the method's files together there — if you don't, it asks before creating anything.

From the source

Two sources form the foundation of this skill:

  • As in Chapter 4 of Hidden Multipliers: A Rose by Any Other Name (section "The Needs Stack") — hiddenmultipliers.com — the stack itself: the obviation rule, the shortest-path-vs-flexibility trade-off, the level-role framework this skill records (features at your level, promises one up, aspirations above, advancements below), and the purpose levels at the top.
  • Using the Needs Stack for competitive strategy — the published deep treatment: alternatives vs. competitors, Google searches as a proxy for the level your customer is thinking at, measuring the next level up, and why climbing your own stack is usually a different business.

Supporting articles each supply a piece of the mechanism: