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

Instead of attaching value to what products are, value should attach to what products do for customers.

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

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.

In these examples, the outside world wasn’t forcing customers to change. Rather, they experienced a combination of circumstances that made them think, I don’t like how things are; I want to make a change.

Reduce anxiety-in-choice with trials, refunds, and discounts. “Buy one, get one free!” “Lifetime guarantee!” “Free shipping!” “Thirty-day refund!” These are probably the most obvious and widely practiced techniques of managing cost/value expectation. We’re all familiar with them and have heard enough about discounts in Anthony’s case study on theat

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.

Customer Jobs doesn’t tell me what kind of innovation I should make or how to build it. Instead, its restricts itself to (1) what customers are struggling with, (2) how they imagine their life being better when they have the right solution, and (3) what they do and don’t value in a solution.

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

“No business plan survives first contact with customers.” Why is this so? Because life is full of unknown and unknowable variation. Just because a product or business strategy worked once doesn’t mean it work will again.