Customer Needs and Problem Analysis
Focuses on a structured process for uncovering and diagnosing a customer's needs, goals, and problems before acting on them. Core elements include identifying the customer's business objectives and success metrics, mapping stakeholders and their roles, priorities, and decision criteria, understanding the customer's current environment, workflow, and constraints, uncovering pain points and inefficiencies through targeted questioning and observation, scoping requirements including relevant constraints such as performance, security, or compliance where applicable, verifying assumptions about timeline, resources, and available budget or capacity, performing root cause analysis to separate symptoms from underlying issues, and producing a prioritized set of customer needs with recommended next steps.
