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. Coming soon.

Originally published 16 April 2025, last updated 05 May 2025.