The Needs Stack: What Your Customer Actually Wants

Nobody's life ambition is to buy your product. Whatever your product does, it is a means to an end — and that end is a means to a higher end, and so on, up a ladder this method calls the Needs Stack. Mapping the stack tells you who your real alternatives are (not just your competitors), what outcome you may honestly promise, which steps you should brag about making obsolete, and where your company's higher purpose lives. This skill builds that map with the user: anchor the level the product satisfies, walk down, then walk up — one level per exchange, each level crystallized before the next.

The mental model

A worked stack