Unmet Needs
What are unmet needs?
Unmet needs are customer needs, pain points, and desires that are not currently being satisfied. These gaps represent opportunities that product teams discover through customer interviews and use to guide their product decisions.
In continuous discovery, unmet needs are what teams aim to uncover through their research. When discovering solutions, the goal is to match each solution to a specific unmet need, pain point, or desire—ensuring that what you build addresses real gaps in the customer experience.
How do unmet needs relate to opportunities and outcomes?
Unmet needs are a type of opportunity on an opportunity solution tree. Teams group and align these unmet needs as opportunities under their desired product outcome, creating a clear connection between what customers need and what the business wants to achieve.
This link between unmet needs and outcomes is powerful for alignment. When executives recognize that business outcomes depend on changing customer behavior—and that behavior change requires addressing unmet needs—it becomes easier to align leadership with what customers actually want and need.
By focusing on unmet needs rather than jumping straight to solutions, teams ensure their work is grounded in real customer problems rather than assumptions about what customers might want.
How do teams uncover unmet needs through interviews?
Discovering unmet needs requires specific interview techniques that go beyond general or speculative questions:
Ground questions in specific past behavior rather than asking customers what they think in general. Instead of "What do you think about Netflix?" ask about a specific time they used the service.
Focus on stories of actual experiences where customers encountered problems, struggled to accomplish something, or felt frustrated. These stories reveal unmet needs more reliably than hypothetical scenarios.
Listen for goals, context, and needs within customer stories. When someone describes trying to accomplish something and struggling, that struggle points to an unmet need.
Avoid speculative questions like "Would you use this feature?" or "What do you want?" These questions invite customers to guess or rationalize rather than share real experiences that reveal genuine unmet needs.
The quality of unmet needs you discover depends on asking the right questions—ones that help customers tell stories about their actual behavior and experiences.
Learn more:
- Customer Interviews: How to Recruit, What to Ask, and How to Synthesize What You Learn
- Story-Based Customer Interviews Uncover Much-Needed Context
Related terms:
- Opportunity
- Customer Needs
- Pain Points
- Customer Interview
Last Updated: October 25, 2025