A powerful heuristic for innovation is to use your own irritation as a guide. Jerry Seinfeld, annoyed by the formulaic nature of talk shows, created "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" as its direct opposite. By identifying friction points in existing products, you can find fertile ground for creating something better.

Asking users for solutions yields incremental ideas like "faster horses." Instead, ask them to tell detailed stories about their workflow. This narrative approach uncovers the true context, pain points, and decision journeys that direct questions miss, leading to breakthrough insights about the actual problem to be solved.

Instead of inventing new features, Prepared identified its most lucrative expansion opportunity by seeing users' painful workarounds. They noticed 911 dispatchers manually copy-pasting foreign language texts into Google Translate—a clear signal of a high-value problem they could solve directly.

Users aren't product designers; they can only identify problems and create workarounds with the tools they have. Their feature requests represent these workarounds, not the optimal solution. A researcher's job is to uncover the deeper, underlying problem.

Intentionally create open-ended, flexible products. Observe how power users "abuse" them for unintended purposes. This "latent demand" reveals valuable, pre-validated opportunities for new features or products, as seen with Facebook's Marketplace and Dating features.

Some of the largest markets address needs customers have completely given up on because no viable solution existed. This powerful latent demand is invisible if you only observe current activities. You must uncover the high-priority goals on their mental "to-do list" that they have quit trying to achieve.

Don't design solely for the user. The best product opportunities lie at the nexus of what users truly need (not what they say they want), the company's established product principles, and its core business objectives.

Standard questions like 'What's your biggest pain point?' often yield poor results. Reframing the question to what work a customer would offload to a new hire bypasses their pride or inability to articulate problems, revealing the tedious, high-value tasks ripe for automation.

Truly innovative ideas begin with a tangible, personal problem, not a new technology. By focusing on solving a real-world annoyance (like not hearing a doorbell), you anchor your invention in genuine user need. Technology should be a tool to solve the problem, not the starting point.