Do you involve Lead Users in your processes? You and your team decide on building a new product (which haven’t existed before in such a form), but you need to back up your future decisions with real market data. The usual scenario is that the team would identify the users of such a product and what their possible needs are, craft surveys,
and run rounds of interviews, compare available market data from competitors, etc. Some would run focus groups to gather more insights and ideas.
All that data is valuable, there is no doubt. However, is it the right direction? Would the product work as expected?
…and so the team would spend time and money on building an MVP and later on, some more money for marketing to get additional data about the performance of their solution.
In this whole process, there lies a missed opportunity, a gap full of valuable insights, information, and in many cases true solutions, tested and used on a regular basis.
Companies skip that step, either because of overconfidence in their processes, lack of knowledge, time, or countless other reasons.
That gap, if investigated well, could strike gold. Get ready to meet with your Lead Users.
What Lead Users Are
There is often the misconception mixing lead users and leads in some contexts. Here are the definitions of each:
Leads: People or potential buyers a company has identified as possible customers: someone who showed interest in a product or service.
Example: You sign up on a website to be one of the first to get a certain product or a service, and the company now has your contact as a lead. To them, you are someone who could potentially buy their solution.
Lead users: People who already have advanced or extreme needs and often build or modify solutions themselves before the rest of the market needs them.
Example: A professional chef customizing kitchen tools because standard ones don’t meet their needs yet.
Those are people who have had such an urgent need or pain for having a solution that does not have a commercial solution yet. In their desperation, those people would go on and solve that pain themselves: whether be it with DIY tools or, if they have some technical background or the know-how in a certain domain, they would be able to solve the problem with materials and tools they have at their disposal.
Such solutions might not be fully complete and mass-market ready, rather “hacky” or even solve only part of the problem. In other occasions, such a solution might be driven by their interests. For example, a gamer that wants to play a certain type of a game that does not exist yet on the market might go on to make their own mod or a version of such a game. Same could be for those who do sports or in niches where the masses do not even think about.
It is interesting to note that those users are not necessarily with an entrepreneurial mindset, not searching for fame or attempting to form startups around their invention. Their true motivation is to make their lives easier, so that they can either have more time, be more efficient in their work, etc. There are, of course, occasions where those people, seeing a broader potential, would spread the word out and develop a commercial product.
Platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and many others already provide great opportunities for individuals to get funding and get more people to know about their solutions. Trends show that companies also scout for such innovations and enter into partnerships or agreements to help deliver those products.
In addition, with the rise of AI, there are even more bots and crawlers which search the web for such products and solutions with the word being spread out. Those systems would categorize, look for clues and other users’ sentiment (excitement, virality, etc.) in order for their product teams to stay on the edge of innovation in their domains.
Lead users are also important for your product research as well, since those will be your very first early adopters and your advocates. They will point out flaws or improvements in your product, since they best know the use cases and their exact needs, and they could tell you so directly. They could help spread the word and make your product better along the line.
In the trends aspect, more users are innovating and their numbers are growing because:
Design kit costs are low and more accessible.
Information on how to do things is everywhere (YouTube, articles, materials, etc.).
Communication and finding answers is faster: through communities and the speed of connecting with others on the other side of the world.
AI: finding answers much quicker than before, having the ability to learn, be well-informed, and processing tasks much faster.Process
How does the process of finding lead users look? How can you get the most out of that for your team or business idea?
Going back to your team: you have already spotted an unmet need on the market. You are at the stage where you are ready to prepare for building your surveys and interview questions, or perhaps you are ready to jump directly into an MVP.
This is the point where you could stop and instead try to find your lead users. This is not an easy task; it is not guaranteed that the data you need is even there. Also, the insights that a team could draw from this are not on a mass scale, mainly because the lead users are small in number.
This and possibly other reasons are why not every product team goes this route. It is so much easier to throw marketing money and slap a landing page together to see what sticks and what people say, than to actually go outside, meet with others who are in the same domain, talk to them, and understand what their needs are.
Finding the Lead Users
Pyramiding: It is a known fact that any person can be reached or identified by just asking 3-4 other people. For example, let's say your team is working on a solution for restaurant kitchens that can speed up communication between the waiter, the customer at the table, and the chefs in the kitchen, so that the customer receives the exact meal they asked for.The question your product team needs to ask is: “Has this been solved in some way already, and who might be the ones that solved it?”
In a search for a lead user for table-kitchen communication, we would identify that restaurants and chefs might be the right spot to look. Even if your team is outside this industry or lacks expertise, you can start by asking if anyone knows a hobbyist or self-taught chef. This is your first contact. Then, you ask them if they know a true professional in hospitality that is contact number two. You then ask contact number two if they know anyone who has already put a custom digital communication system in place.
By talking to these experts, you unlock knowledge you didn’t have before. At each step, you ask if they know someone working on a solution or using a “hack” in their daily work. This eventually leads you to contact number three: the Lead User. You should be in “discovery mode” during these talks, rather than just checking off a list of questions.
This process is not guaranteed, mainly because lead users might be in a different geographical region, not active on the internet, or living in a rural area. To increase your chances, start with different chains:
Chain A: Hobbyists → Professionals.
Chain B: Academic field (e.g., someone in culinary research).
Chain C: Industry experts (e.g., people building digital solutions for chefs).Using AI and web filtering is another viable approach. You can also aim for someone “good enough” or close to the top of the pyramid if the absolute ideal lead user is unreachable.
Once you contact lead users and the people in the chain before them, you will have identified insights that mass surveys of ordinary people rarely produce. This is because you are identifying how others have already attempted to solve the problem. Ordinary users might not have encountered the problem at this level yet; some might even think their current workflows are perfectly fine. Relying only on ordinary users can provide biased information that takes your product in the wrong direction.
Utilizing Lead Users
The next step is utilizing lead users as your consultants and early adopters. Your team can involve them in co-creation: having them provide deep technical insights, test early prototypes, and suggest specific improvements. Because they have already lived with the problem, their feedback acts as a shortcut to a refined product. Furthermore, as natural advocates, they can help build credibility within their niche and provide authentic, open feedback that helps you scale toward the mass market.
Identification Techniques
- Lead Users for Existing Products (Internal & External)
Look for internal power users who bypass your UI with custom scripts or “abuse” features to solve complex tasks. To find external lead users, look at “analogous” industries with higher stakes. For instance, if you are designing office chairs, study Formula 1 drivers or fighter pilots who deal with extreme ergonomic stress; their specialized solutions often reveal what will eventually become a mass-market need.
- Identifying New Unmet Needs
Finding solutions for products that don’t exist yet requires pyramiding: asking hobbyists who the most “extreme” expert in their field is until you reach the top. These users are often already “stitching together” multiple existing tools to create a functional “Frankenstein” prototype that reveals the core architecture of a brand-new market category.
- Consumer (Regular Joe) vs. Professional (Expert) Solutions
The “Regular Joe” lead user typically innovates for convenience or passion, like a mountain biker welding a custom camera mount. These individuals provide insights into user experience and emerging trends. Conversely, professional lead users (like surgeons or engineers) innovate out of high-stakes necessity, offering technical breakthroughs in safety and performance that define industry standards.
Case Study
A prime example of the lead user method in action is the evolution of LEGO Mindstorms. The company bridged the gap between a basic toy and a high-end robotics platform by observing “hackers” who had already modified the product’s firmware to create custom operating systems like LNP and BrickOS.
These lead users, whose advanced technical needs for complex coding and precision sensors far outpaced the average child, essentially performed years of free R&D. They built their own DIY prototypes and magnetic sensors to solve limitations in the original 1998 release. Recognizing that these users had already struck “gold,” LEGO invited them to co-design the next generation: Mindstorms NXT.
This resulted in a commercially superior product that featured 12 advanced sensors and a 32-bit processor directly inspired by those early user-built hacks.
Benefits and Limitations
While the lead user method unearths high-value, “frontier” innovations that traditional surveys miss, it relies on a small, non-representative sample. These users may prioritize extreme technical performance over the user-friendliness required for the mass market. Consequently, this can lead to development bias, where a team risks over-engineering a product for a handful of experts while neglecting the price sensitivity and simplicity sought by the “average” consumer.
The Trap: Lead users often ignore unit economics. They will build a solution that costs $1,000 to save them 10 minutes. Your job as a PM is to take their $1,000 “Frankenstein” and turn it into a $10 mass-market feature.
Also, these user innovators are among the first, so the scale is small. That is why a lot of companies or producers are not interested in such innovations: they simply do not see it at scale, nor is there proof for such scale yet. On the other hand, the value these innovations bring can be tremendous. Once made into a mainstream product, it can become a very profitable business.
Conclusion
The lead user finding approach is not a replacement for existing product design and development practices, but rather a complementary aspect to strengthen your product case and decision making.
Ultimately, the lead user method is not just a research technique but a strategic shortcut that allows companies to bridge the gap between abstract market data and proven, real-world solutions. By identifying and collaborating with the rare individuals who have already “built the future” out of necessity, businesses can transform expensive, speculative R&D into a focused process of refining existing high-performance prototypes for the mass market.
References
Thank you for reading. Have you ever found a ‘power user’ who was using your product in a way you never intended? Please share your thoughts.
References
Hienerth, C., von Hippel, E., & Jensen, M. B. (2014). Synergies among Producer Firms, Lead Users, and User Communities: The Case of the LEGO Producer–User Ecosystem. Journal of Product Innovation Management.
Urban, G. L., & von Hippel, E. (1988). Lead User Analyses for the Development of New Industrial Products. Management Science.