How Your Customers Use Spreadsheets Reveals Their Unmet Needs
People use spreadsheets to plug feature gaps and stitch broken processes together. They're silent pleas for a better solution.
It wasn’t long after starting at my first job out of college that I taped a print-out of Excel keyboard shortcuts to my monitor. I genuinely did want to be more productive with a tool I used every day, but who am I kidding…when I saw Wall Streeters hammering in a bajillion keyboard commands and never touching the mouse, it looked cool to me and I wanted to look like a Serious Corporate Person, or something.
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Thanks to the rise of Google Sheets, Excel isn’t quite the 800-lb gorilla in the spreadsheet market that it was back in 2006. Google doesn’t break out user numbers by application for Workspace (née G Suite), but estimates like this put it at around a billion monthly users, or roughly on par with Excel’s monthly users today — a low-key amazing success story of taking on an entrenched incumbent product. (That Google accomplished this not by besting Excel on core capabilities but instead by delivering a web-first, mobile-friendly experience that was far superior for collaboration may merit a post of its own at some point.)
I maintain that Excel’s unsexiness causes product people to under-appreciate it. It’s been thirty-five years since the first version rolled out, and close to 15% the human species still uses it on a monthly basis. Or if numbers bore you, let’s look at the passion among the user community. Yes, you read that right.
If you don’t think passion and spreadsheets belong in the same sentence, you’ve obviously never heard of the competitive Excel eSports circuit. Puzzle-solving competitions in Excel is very much a thing, with purses in the tens of thousands of dollars for the big tournaments. The Microsoft Excel World Championships (which should not to be confused with the also Excel-based Financial Modeling World Cup) aired on ESPN just a few weeks ago.
What else would you call this product community besides passionate?
And while you may counter that this represents a small fringe group, keep in mind that only a small fringe group of weirdos who waited in line for hours to get the new iPhone. The rest of us just got a new phone when we broke one or our Verizon contract was up.
Spoiler alert: Diarmuid Early, a financial analyst whom Investor’s Business Daily called the LeBron James of Excel, didn’t take home the title this year.
But as strange and compelling as I find this competitive Excel subculture, that’s not why I’m writing about spreadsheets today. Because there’s another reason why spreadsheets should occupy a little more headspace than it does in most product managers’ minds: observing how your target customers use them is a great way to discover unmet user needs. The instances in which users regularly rely on spreadsheets are potential opportunities to insert your product.
Spreadsheets Hold Broken Processes Together
The flexibility and familiarity of spreadsheets is what makes them a safety net product for people trying to get things done, which is why its so important to dig in whenever your target users open one. If your users consistently rely on spreadsheets to accomplish some part of a larger process, it’s often a band-aid on a badly integrated product experience or a stand-in for .
Take me, for example. Here are just a few of the tasks for which I still rely on spreadsheets that have nothing to do with data analysis:
Address Management - My wife and I periodically update our master list of family and friends’ home addresses in a Google sheet - very handy thing to have each year when we missed the window for sending a Christmas card yet again
Personal CRM - I keep a centralized running log of inbound business-related inquiries and recruiter conversations in a Google sheet so I don’t lose track of follow-ups or next steps on my end.
Schedule management - A Google sheet shared between six other families is how we coordinate kids’ summer camps, soccer practices and other logistics
Password storage. I’ve been adding to the same spreadsheet for this since 2006. I know there are tools for this, but I keep product keys and other bits of info I need in there too, and I’m not motivated to find yet another app for this.
Evernote supplement - I like Evernote, but its table widget stinks. Embedding Google or Excel tables requires paying more. No thanks.
In some cases, the value of a more efficient or secure solution than a spreadsheet isn’t sufficient to make me want to buy it. But in other cases, I’m unaware of better options that I might be willing to pay for. And then there’s plain old inertia - if the rock’s been in your shoe long enough, you start to forget it’s there.
This is also why when you’re doing user discovery for either B2B or B2C products, you need to capture every little micro-step your users take for whatever process of theirs you’re trying to understand. How long does that take you? Who else looks at this? Do you email this to them with a link or attachment? What format do they see it in? What happens when there’s a problem with xyz? And on and on until you really bottom out on it.
The Spreadsheet Test for Product Ideas
If I could only ask one question to a potential customer in a discovery interview, I’d ask what their #1 challenge is at that moment. And if I had one more, I’d ask them to show me all the spreadsheets they create as part of doing their job.
Any part of a process your target user manages with spreadsheets, especially but not only in B2B contexts, is a potential opportunity to insert your product or a new feature for two reasons:
Before a company or a person buys a dedicated tool for something, spreadsheets often are that tool
Once the complexity or required for a process exceeds a certain threshold, managing it with spreadsheets becomes error-prone and annoying
Most business processes can be handled via spreadsheets in a pinch, even if it’s painful. Think of all the things they manage with spreadsheets before it’s worth moving a process to other tools:
Any job that can be done with spreadsheets will be by some of the market. So when you stumble across a process being managed with them, you need to evalaute if: (a) they’re using spreadsheets as a stop-gap before they graduate to more sophisticated tools, (b) existing solutions aren’t economical for them at their scale, or (c) no good tool exists for what they’re trying to do — and then start figuring out whether you can give them something better that they’ll be excited to try.