Twitter’s strategy is in a flutter. Its user growth rate has slowed and its revenue from ads dropped below Wall Street targets last quarter, resulting in a 30 percent drop in its stock price since April.

After eight years, the company is still struggling to explain its business to Wall Street and its story to the world.

More than a billion people have signed up for Twitter and then left, never to return. The CEO of five years, Dick Costolo, resigned because Wall Street lost confidence in him and the company’s growth strategy. Management seems unclear about where to focus and what to do to drive growth.

What can we learn from Twitter? I want to address one thing: sequencing. That is, companies should first gain an understanding about what target customers want and only then turn to figuring out how to deliver it. This could have saved Twitter eight years of floundering.

Defining customer needs

The problem is that most companies don’t know what type of customer inputs to capture to drive innovation and growth or how to obtain them. The key inputs to obtain from customers are:

• What customers are trying to accomplish with your offering
• How they measure success
• Where they currently struggle

But because most companies don’t know how to do this, they resort to “informed” guessing about what customers want, which leads to high failure rates, a lot of frustration, and wasted time and resources. Even with Twitter’s significant success (market value of $22 billion), it appears that the company has been on a multi-year cycle of this guessing game.

People buy products and services to get functional and emotional tasks done. These tasks can be readily discovered if we keep them separate and distinct from solutions.

Customers can tell us what they want when we focus on what they want to accomplish rather than product or service specifications. People can tell us, for example, that they use Twitter to stay abreast of current events, learn something new or announce a new product.

These tasks (needs) are independent from solutions and readily accessible from customers.

Twitter’s strategy

Twitter’s website currently focuses on helping users get one task done above all others: See what is happening right now. But with 302 million monthly active users, there are undoubtedly dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other important tasks that users are trying to accomplish with Twitter, both personal and professional.

Before attempting to develop new features and improvements, the key question that management should answer by talking with a broad range of customers, is “What tasks are people trying to accomplish with Twitter?”

A comprehensive list of these tasks can be readily obtained and then each task can be rated for importance and satisfaction by surveying a representative sample of target customers. The results would identify the tasks that are important and yet unsatisfied by Twitter and other competitive options. These are opportunities for innovation and growth.

The more important and less satisfied a task is, the greater the opportunity for innovation and growth. This data would also reveal promising segments in the market that are defined by the different tasks that users want to accomplish. This information would give management the focus it needs to guide new feature development, messaging and positioning, and nail their value proposition for multiple segments rather than continue dissatisfying everyone with a one-size-fits-all offering.

It’s human nature to jump to conclusions before the problem has been defined. Twitter management must distinguish between what it really knows based on valid customer input versus what they think they know or want to believe.

Discover needs, create value, drive growth. Getting this sequencing right will increase the likelihood of success for any enterprise.

(This article first appeared in The Business Journals, June 25, 2015)