When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become great at making products people will buy

Think of your business as delivering a combination of products that work together to forward the system of progress.

Discover the customers’ JTBD by focusing on what doesn’t change. Before you make anything, have a clear picture in your mind of what customers will stop doing.

First, study the push and pull. Dig into inertia and anxiety after identifying push and pull.

Ask yourself, “From which budget will my product take away money?” Create better marketing material by speaking to your customers’ JTBD. Focus on delivering emotional progress (getting a Job Done). Don’t focus solely on functionality.

Customers can tell you of their struggles, how they expect life to be better, and how they interact with the products they use. But they cannot tell you what to do about it.

Innovators must understand what the customer does and doesn’t know. We must abandon the idea that customers have a laundry list of “needs.” Instead, we should see customers as having only one need: to make progress within the systems they belong to. Any

When you study customers’ stated preferences—wants, needs, or desired outcomes—you are studying the interactions between customers and the system only at that moment. All those wants, needs, and desired outcomes will change when the systems that customers belong to change. Yesterday,

Grow your business by unlocking new aspirations and offering products for them. Justin

Figure 20. When customers make progress (get a job done), new aspirations are often revealed.