(2025-03-19) Chin Speedrunning The Skill Of Demand

Cedric Chin: Speedrunning the Skill of Demand. This week's essay is freely available and kicks us off on a new series on getting good at demand — the skill that underpins sales and marketing and product. (2025-03-20-ChinSpeedrunningTheSkillOfDemand)

This week's piece is the start of a new series, a short one, that will run concurrently to the Asian Conglomerate series. I've hinted at this at the end of my 2024 Commoncog Recap, where I wrote "[In 2025] We’re going to talk about the nature of Demand, with the help of some friends."

When people talk about getting good at sales, or marketing, or product, they tend to talk about getting good at sales, or marketing, or product. But it's been my experience that there is a separate skill that underpins all these three skills, that all the best folks in all three skill domains have. This skill is something that I will call, loosely, 'demand'.

I am not the first person to notice this. In his 2022 book Learning to Build, entrepreneur and JTBD framework creator Bob Moesta argues that great product builders are really good at five different skills, which he’s observed again and again across the many hundreds of companies and clients he’s worked with. One of those skills he calls ‘uncovering demand’:

Uncovering Demand: people with this skill can detach from their product or service and look at the demand-side of the equation — seeing struggles, context, and outcomes.

This seems trite but it really isn't: as I detail in the essay, it takes a bit of effort before you learn to stop thinking of your own product or company and take the perspective of a customer's pain, solution be damned

I spent the years between 2018 and 2021 getting good at marketing, and I eventually learnt this 'demand thing'. In 2019 I discovered a technique that I used to accelerate my understanding of demand

In this series, I will speedrun everything I know about demand. The real goal here is to get to a summary of The Heart of Innovation, a 2023 book that I believe is the first new contribution to our understanding of customer demand since the early 2000s.

The name of that technique is 'Sales Safari', and was originally created by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman.