Understanding Customer Demand: a Series

Skill at understanding customer demand is the skill that underpins the domain of marketing, sales, and product.

This is a series about ‘speedrunning’ the skill — the notion of learning the minimum needed for an effective foundation of uncovering demand. It is based on consulting work and business experimentation done in the years between 2018 to 2021, as the author, Cedric Chin, sought to get good at the skill of demand.

The Essays

1. Speedrunning the Skill of Demand — What is the skill of demand, and how do you get better, faster at it? We introduce the concept of a separate skill that underpins sales, marketing, and product, talk about what makes this skill difficult, and then introduce a technique — Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman’s Sales Safari — that is a proven, rapid way to gain proficiency at the skill of demand.
2. The Jobs to be Done Framework as a Method to Understand Demand (members only) — Sales Safari helps you understand who and why people buy your product. The JTBD framework lets you understand how people buy — and therefore gives you more levers with which to influence the buying decision.
3. Vanguard as a Demand Side Mystery — In the previous two parts, we looked at two theories of demand that assume that demand comes from pain. While these theories work for a variety of scenarios, we’re left with a huge hole in our understanding of demand: we cannot understand forms of demand that do not emerge from pain. Vanguard is a near-perfect example of this: it is a massive business today, but none of the theories of demand over the past 40 years can explain the phenomenon that is Vanguard, especially in its earliest years. This is what a demand-side mystery looks like.
4. The Heart of Innovation: Why Most Startups Fail — This is a summary of the 2023 book The Heart of Innovation, and gives us the answer to the mystery we set up in the previous instalment. The ideas in this piece covers a lot of ground: it explains Vanguard’s success, gives us a new definition of ‘product market fit’, and represents the first new contribution to what we know about demand since the Jobs to be Done framework in 2003. The demand framework explicated in this essay is also the first framework I’ve seen that doesn’t rely on ‘pain’, ‘desire’, or ‘progress’ to explain customer behaviour. It therefore gives us interesting new levers for finding and creating demand.
5. Cases from the Heart of Innovation (members only) — We look at three cases that demonstrate the ideas of Deliberate Innovation, the demand framework introduced in the previous essay. Then, we explore certain elements of authentic demand from each case. The goal? To calibrate your understanding of these ideas in action.
6. Coming soon.

Originally published 16 April 2025, last updated 23 May 2025.