How Jack Truong Improves Companies by Uncovering Hidden Consumer Demands

What distinguishes truly effective business leaders from their peers? For Jack Truong, whose career spans groundbreaking engineering achievements to corporate turnarounds at 3M, Electrolux, and James Hardie, the secret lies in a deceptively simple question: What do consumers need that they’re not currently getting?

Starting with Consumer Pain Points Instead of Product Features

The traditional product development approach often begins with existing technologies or company capabilities. Truong flips this script entirely.

“I was exposed to various divisions in my first two years at 3M, and I really had to learn and understand what the unmet needs were in those industries, and come up with inventions that deliver innovative solutions for those particular sectors,” Truong explained in a Construction Today interview.

This consumer-first approach  yielded substantial results. During his early career at 3M, Truong developed 11 patents, including innovations that would become household staples. His work with the Post-it Note franchise demonstrates this methodology perfectly. While many viewed paper notes as increasingly obsolete in a digital world, Truong recognized that people still needed visual reminders—just in more versatile applications than traditional products offered.

By creating adhesives that would work on vertical surfaces and adapting the product for new use cases, Truong revitalized what could have been a declining product line. The solution emerged not from technological capabilities but from careful observation of how consumers actually used the product and what limitations they faced.

Challenging Conventional Wisdom About Market Saturation

When Truong became president and CEO of Electrolux North America in 2011, he encountered a common corporate fallacy—the belief that a “mature market” offered limited growth potential.

“Back in 2011, when I joined, [Electrolux] was about a $4.2 billion business,” he told CEO Magazine. “The company saw North America as a mature market and didn’t expect any growth. In fact, when I took over, the company wasn’t growing and profit was declining.”

Rather than accepting this perspective, Truong delivered a wake-up call to the global leadership team: “There’s no such thing as a mature market, there’s only mature business managers.”

His subsequent strategy demonstrated the truth behind this assertion. While competitors focused on technological features, Truong’s market research revealed significant consumer segments that valued design aesthetics, simplicity, and reliability over cutting-edge functionality.

“We put more focus on the design to make our products eye-catching, beautiful, and easy to use,” he explained. This shift in emphasis allowed Electrolux to target underserved market segments, ultimately moving the brand from third to second place in North America and doubling its value.

Distinguishing Between Technological Capability and Consumer Value

Throughout his career, Truong has maintained a critical distinction between what technology can do and what consumers actually need. He points to Google Glass as the perfect example of this disconnect.

“Google failed to understand the true unmet needs of its consumers when the company first launched its ‘moonshot’ Google Glass in 2014,” Truong observed. “Despite the ‘smart’ glasses’ cutting-edge technology, the product was discontinued after just one year. Despite its live map imaging and hands-free web navigation, Google botched its assessment of the product’s marketability — opting for a ‘clunky’ shape, overcomplicated features, and an overwrought price tag ($1,500).”

This analysis cuts to the heart of a common business pitfall: assuming technological sophistication automatically translates to consumer value. Google Glass represented remarkable engineering achievement, but it created new problems (price barriers, awkward aesthetics, privacy concerns) that outweighed its benefits for most potential users.

Observing Consumer Behavior Rather Than Just Asking Questions

A particularly powerful aspect of Truong’s methodology involves looking beyond what consumers say to study what they actually do. This approach often reveals opportunities that traditional market research might miss.

“Creativity costs money and innovation drives value,” Truong notes. “Listen carefully to what consumers don’t say, and observe closely what they do. Only then do your innovations have the potential to change consumer behavior and create true value and demand.”

This insight acknowledges a fundamental reality of consumer psychology—people often struggle to articulate needs they don’t realize can be addressed, or they’ve simply accepted certain limitations as inevitable. By watching how people interact with products in real-world settings, businesses can identify workarounds, hesitations, and frustrations that point toward untapped market opportunities.

Anticipating Market Evolution Before Competitors

In rapidly changing markets, yesterday’s winning formula can quickly become obsolete. Truong warns against organizational complacency even during periods of apparent success.

“As technology advances and consumer demand evolves, companies and products quickly can be left behind,” he cautions. “Too many organizations are focused on developing, launching, and loading new technologies and features to existing products while ignoring the possibility of new solutions that actually make life easy for consumers.”

This forward-looking perspective has enabled Truong to anticipate market shifts before competitors, positioning his companies to capitalize on emerging consumer needs rather than reacting to changes after they’ve occurred.

Implementing the Hidden Demands Methodology

For business leaders seeking to apply Truong’s approach in their own organizations, several key principles emerge from his successes. Rather than asking what your company could make, Truong suggests focusing on limitations rather than just possibilities—identifying what current products fail to do for consumers. This shifts the innovation mindset from feature-driven to solution-driven development.

A critical component involves studying behavioral patterns by observing how people actually use products in their daily lives. Paying particular attention to workarounds consumers develop for existing limitations often reveals the most valuable innovation opportunities. These adaptations signal unmet needs that consumers have learned to accommodate but would gladly eliminate if given the chance.

Truong also encourages leaders to question market saturation narratives. When conventional wisdom suggests a market has limited growth potential, his experience shows the value of looking for underserved segments whose needs differ from the majority. These pockets of unfulfilled demand frequently offer substantial growth opportunities that competitors have overlooked.

For any proposed product enhancement, Truong’s methodology requires evaluating innovations through a consumer lens, rigorously assessing whether it solves genuine consumer problems without creating new ones. This balanced approach prevents the common pitfall of adding features that look impressive on paper but create complexity, cost increases, or usability issues in practice.

Perhaps most importantly, Truong advocates maintaining vigilance even during successful periods. Regularly reviewing market positioning helps identify emerging needs or shifts in consumer preferences before they become obvious to competitors—positioning the company to adapt proactively rather than reactively.

The business landscape is littered with companies that failed to adapt to changing consumer demands. By systematically uncovering and addressing hidden consumer needs, Truong’s approach offers a powerful framework for sustained growth even in seemingly mature markets.