The Spreadsheet Is a Cry for Help

Almost every product delivers part of an outcome and leaves the customer to finish the rest. A mortgage lender sells a mortgage, but the customer's real job is moving house. An accounting package produces the numbers, but the job is deciding what to do about them. A holiday company sells flights and a hotel, but the job is a week away that the whole family enjoys. In each case there's a gap between what the product does and what the customer was actually trying to achieve, and I call that gap “the unfinished job”.

Customers rarely complain about the unfinished job. They just get on and finish it themselves, unpaid, with whatever is to hand. In offices that usually means a spreadsheet, which is why it's in the title, but it takes many forms. The house move gets managed through a folder of emails, a notes app and a lot of phone calls to solicitors. The accounts get reworked in Excel before anyone takes them to the board. The holiday gets organised in a WhatsApp group because the booking only covers the travel. Each of these is a customer quietly doing work your product left undone, and each is a cry for help.

That unpaid work is one of the most valuable growth signals a business has, for three reasons.

1. 01The demand is already proven, because customers are spending their own time and money on it, so there's no need to guess whether it matters.
2. 02The customer is already yours, so there's no acquisition cost, and you already have their trust, their data and a place in their routine.
3. 03Every part of the job you take on is something they'd have to rebuild if they left, so finishing more of the job makes you harder to replace.

Put together, that's a better risk profile than almost any new market can offer: proven demand, low acquisition cost and an incumbent's advantage.

It matters most in B2B and enterprise, where the unfinished job is usually a workflow rather than a single task. A professional uses your product to get a piece of work done, inside a process, alongside other tools, towards a decision someone else is waiting on. The more of that work you take on, the more your product becomes part of how the organisation operates, and switching stops being about a contract and starts being about changing how people work.

So why do so many businesses miss it? I think the answer is measurement. Businesses measure their product, while customers measure their outcome. Usage, satisfaction scores and churn all describe the moment a customer spends with you, and none of them tell you whether the job actually got done. Low churn only means customers didn't leave, not that you finished anything for them. The metrics that reassure a board are often the ones that hide the gap, which is exactly what makes this kind of growth unobvious. From inside the product, everything looks fine. The unfinished job only becomes visible from the customer's side of the boundary.

The way I find it is through what I call “the day in the life”. Rather than asking customers what they think of your product, follow them through the day it's meant to serve, from before they reach for it to well after they've put it down. Look for the handoffs, the information carried from one place to another by hand, the time spent checking and waiting, and above all the workarounds. Each of these marks the point where your product stops and the customer's day carries on without you, in a place you can't see, can't improve and can't charge for.

A few years ago I worked with a financial data and ratings business that seemed, on paper, to have very little left to grow into. Almost every professional in its market knew the brand, churn was low, and its ratings had become a fixture of the industry, so the board's instinct was to look for growth in adjacent markets. When we followed its customers through their day, a different picture emerged. They described the business as essential, but they used it for a few minutes at a time, downloading the data into spreadsheets, combining it with other sources and doing the real analysis somewhere else. The business was trusted and rarely left, but it finished only a sliver of the job its customers were trying to do. The best growth available wasn't in a new market. It was in the rest of that job.

There's a second, less obvious prize in finishing more of the job. A product that covers more of the customer's work learns more about how they operate, what they compare, what they choose and where they get stuck. That knowledge rarely appears in the management accounts, but it compounds. The more the product is used, the better it gets at anticipating what customers need, which in turn brings more use. A business whose customers finish the job somewhere else never gets that flywheel started, because the most valuable insight stays in the spreadsheet.