I recently read an article about a company called Cue Ball who have discovered another effective way to get consumer insight.  They ask customers what they are doing three minutes immediately before and three minutes after they use their product or service.

One of their products provided investment analysts with financial earnings data.  When they applied the three-minute rule — they discovered that immediately after getting their data, their customers were painstakingly importing it into Excel and reformatting it. This observation led them to prioritize developing a more seamless Excel plug-in feature with enhanced formatting capability over other product development initiatives. The result was an almost immediate and very significant uplift in sales.

The three-minute rule also helps highlight unique cross-selling opportunities such as finding out that disposable cameras are often bought straight after the purchase of new born nappies.

The three minute rule is useful to overcome product myopia, produce cross selling opportunities and design better (and more lucrative) selling experiences. Customers seek solutions, but you might only be providing part of one.  The three-minute rule is a forcing mechanism to see the bigger picture and adjacent opportunities.