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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

No one wants to buy your product for its own sake. The customer who creates an AWS account does not want infrastructure. They want the WordPress website it enables. They do not really want the website either. They want a personal platform for content and self-promotion. They want that platform because they are chasing a book deal. They want the book deal because of a goal above it. There is always another level. This ladder is your customer's Needs Stack. The book's key insight is this: a product that satisfies one level makes every product below it obsolete for that customer. Whoever delivers the website without the infrastructure wins the customer. The infrastructure vendor never even sees them.

Mapping your stack answers questions that your competitor list cannot answer. It shows who your real alternatives are: vendors one level above you who quietly take customers out of your market. It shows what outcome you can honestly promise. That outcome is the level just above yours — your features are what you do, and the next level up is what you promise. It shows which steps you should brag about making obsolete. It shows which metric tells you whether customers actually succeed. And it shows where your company's higher purpose lives.

This skill builds the map by asking you questions, one level per exchange. First it anchors the level your product satisfies. State this level as your customer's goal, in your customer's own words, not your product category. Then the skill walks down through the steps you make unnecessary. It also walks up through what the customer really wants. Every level must pass a check before the walk moves to the next level: exact wording, a true means-to-an-end link, and real named occupants. Do not sketch the whole ladder in one step. Do not stop at your own level — the chapter warns that this is a common mistake.

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 it walks the stack down and up with you. It records each finished level in NEEDS-STACK.md, with its occupants and its positioning role.

One practical note: tell the skill where you are working. Name a directory, or point to your existing files, when you invoke the skill. The skill then keeps the method's files together in that location. If you do not name a location, the skill asks before it creates 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. This section explains the stack itself. It covers the rule that a level makes the levels below it unnecessary. It covers the trade-off between the shortest path and flexibility. It covers the level-role framework this skill records: features at your level, promises one level up, aspirations above, and advancements below. It also covers the purpose levels at the top.
  • Using the Needs Stack for competitive strategy — this article gives a deep, published treatment of the topic. It covers alternatives versus competitors. It covers Google searches as a proxy for the level your customer is thinking at. It covers how to measure the next level up. It also covers why climbing your own stack is usually a different business.

Supporting articles each supply a piece of the mechanism: