Shaking, slapping, banging, performing ritual dances…

We used to try all kinds of things to get ketchup out of a glass bottle.

For over 100 years, we westerners just accepted this as normal. We’d stick table knives in, tap the “57” on the bottle’s neck, and share folk wisdom about the perfect angle to hold it.

Until 2002, when Heinz finally did something breathtakingly obvious: they turned the bottle upside down. 😲

Such a simple solution that took a century to implement. The need was literally staring us in the face at every barbecue and diner counter in North America.

I see this pattern constantly in my product strategy work. We can get so caught up in sophisticated solutions that we miss the simple problems screaming for attention.

Take ChatGPT. Everyone’s racing to make it write better fiction or code more efficiently. Meanwhile, my developer clients say what they really need is a way to explain their own code back to them six months later when they can’t remember why they wrote it that way.

In I Need That, I talk about how the dog brain (our emotional, instinctive side) often spots these obvious needs first. It’s why little kids naturally squeeze juice boxes, shooting liquid out the straw, even though the tank brain growls, “don’t do that.” And why we puzzle over which side of an inverted ketchup bottle goes up.

The same principle shows up in business products. Companies invest millions in complex project management tools while teams secretly use basic checklists to get things done. We love to overcomplicate solutions when simple ones are staring us in the face.

Look at what’s happening with fitness trackers right now. While manufacturers compete to add more obscure metrics, Garmin discovered athletes mainly want better battery life. They’re crushing competitors by solving that one obvious need really well.

Here’s what I love about this: The problems worth solving are usually hiding in plain sight. They’re in the small frustrations people have learned to live with – the ones they don’t even bother mentioning anymore because they assume that’s just how things are.

Action for today: Watch your customers actually using your product. Not how you think they use it – how they really do. What small annoyances do they work around? What “hacks” have they created?

Those workarounds often point to obvious needs we’ve all been too clever to see.

What everyday frustrations might your product be overlooking?

Laurier

P.S. Speaking of obvious needs — ever wonder why car cup holders took so long to become standard? People were balancing coffee cups on seats for decades before automakers realized this was actually a solvable problem. Vehicles today have many of them. Sometimes the best innovations are the ones that make us say “finally!”