Coding is solved by agents.
Judgement is solved by Next Move Theory.
Next Move Theory is a methodology with a step-by-step algorithm for every product decision. It lays out every tactical and strategic move open to you and helps you choose the best, with the odds on your side. The foundations are open and free. AI skills run it on your product.
14,000+
PM students learned Next Move Theory from 2018 to 2026
+22%
average revenue growth attributed to implementing Next Move Theory in a study of 90 companies
People from these companies have studied at Next Move Academy:
…and hundreds of other companies
Runs in Claude Code and Codex. Free and open-source.
Ivan Zamesin, the author
Author of Advanced Jobs To Be Done and Next Move Theory.
Ivan developed every methodology behind Next Move Theory from scratch — including reinventing Advanced Jobs To Be Done on a neuroscience foundation — and has taught them to 14,000+ students.
14,000+ students
Founders and product managers trained through the most popular product course in his home market, running since 2018.
#1 product expert
Ranked first in his home market by three independent industry studies. Advises the largest tech companies on product strategy.
Took 25% from Google
Led image search at his country's largest tech company (30M MAU); his team grew market share from 55% to 72% against Google Images.
Built and sold a startup
A therapist-matching service. Built it, grew it, and exited to a larger marketplace.
The method, measured in revenue
How teams applied Next Move Theory to move real business metrics — each case names the decision that changed and the metric that moved.
A real-estate agency grew ROMI 1.5× and sales conversion by 40%
A mid-sized agency in a crowded metro market dropped age-and-income targeting for two jobs-based segments — and moved every number that mattered.
A fleet-management SaaS grew revenue 75% by betting on one safety segment
A B2B SaaS couldn't rank its roadmap. Advanced JTBD surfaced a high-willingness-to-pay, low-competition segment — and the company reorganized around it.
A luxury real-estate firm closed $500K in deals at 2,000%+ ROMI
An international luxury property firm kept selling "investment returns" — until jobs-based segmentation revealed most buyers wanted something else entirely.
AI-scored sales calls lifted agent conversion 20% in a shrinking market
A residential agency couldn't analyze 150 calls a day by hand, so it taught an AI pipeline to do the jobs-based scoring in three minutes per call.
A media agency tripled its average deal by firing its wrong-fit segment
A personal-brand agency was spread thin across low-margin clients until jobs-based research pointed to one segment willing to pay three times as much.
A dental clinic grew revenue 37% by owning the "fix it in one day" segment
A dental clinic was copying competitors without knowing why — until jobs-based research surfaced its highest-value patient and a focus worth building around.
Recognize yourself?
Founder, pre-PMF
You've shipped the thing nobody cared about and spent months on features no one asked for. Building is comforting, but validating is scary. The next bet is another three months, and it feels like a coin flip.
Indie hacker / vibe-coder
You can ship anything now, but the last few got zero buyers. You don't want to get one more product nobody pays for.
Product manager
The last three things you shipped moved no metric. You've become a backlog manager, not a PM, shipping features without knowing why.
Product leader, VP/CPO
Every team decides a different way, none of it built on strong foundations — so you can't be sure any call is the right one, and you're moving blind.
Product marketer
You're launching into a crowded category where everything sounds like “yet another X,” and your channel tactics just aren't working.
You can't see all the moves in front of you, so you're betting on a guess. Here's the methodology that fixes that.
The essence of Next Move Theory
The operating system for product decisions
Next Move Theory is the algorithm behind every product call: how to find product-market fit, scale, position, grow conversion rates, improve retention. It works at every level, from this sprint's tactics to the company's strategy. Eight years of work, taught to 14,000+ founders and product leaders. The core of it is free in the open canon. The rest of the methodology lives in the courses and products here.
It lays out every move open to you
Most decisions feel like a coin flip because you only see the one option you'd already fixed on. Next Move Theory lays out every tactical and strategic move actually open to you, and most importantly the ones you'd have missed.
It helps you choose the best
Scores give you comfort, not confidence that these are the right moves. Next Move Theory weighs each strategy by how much it moves your goal and points you to the best, with strong logic behind it.
With the odds on your side
The whole point: more of your bets land. Hundreds of companies run on Next Move Theory, and across dozens of documented cases the metrics moved significantly: conversion, retention, revenue, market share.
See the casesBuilt for the makers
Same algorithm. Here's the win it lands for each segment
Decide what to build with the odds on your side
See every tactical and strategic move open to you, find the Job customers will actually pay for, and pick the strategy that wins before you bet the next three months on a hunch.
Pick a niche that actually pays
Writing code was never your problem. Choosing what to ship is. So let a methodology pick the Job people pay for and make the next build the first one with real buyers.
A roadmap that moves the metric — not theater
Run the logic from the foundations up, find where the metric actually breaks, ship the few moves most likely to shift it, and dramatically raise the odds of growth.
The operating system your product org runs on.
When every team reasons the same strong foundations, tactic to strategy, you can stand behind every call, and more of your bets pay off.
Positioning that isn't “yet another X.”
Find the angle in the customer's real Job, not channel hacks, and the odds it converts climb before you spend a dollar.
Why Next Move Theory skills beat other skills
Ask ChatGPT or Claude to run product research or apply a methodology and you get confident, generic output. Models barely know real methodologies, so without detailed methodology prompting the thinking stays shallow. The Next Move Theory skills carry the methodology foundations: thousands of theses and the exact algorithm, so the model reasons with it instead of guessing.
9/10 approved
alpha testers said the Next Move Theory skills produced better work than the other skills they'd tried.
Built on Advanced Jobs To Be Done
Eight years ago I discovered Jobs To Be Done, saw enormous potential in it, and made an unreasonable decision: rebuild it from scratch so it would finally yield an algorithm. It came together only when I found the science that explains what value actually is to a brain managing an energy budget, and how a person changes behavior. On that foundation I rebuilt JTBD into thousands of theses — Advanced Jobs To Be Done.
AJTBD alone still wasn't enough. To get a real algorithm, a few more disciplines turned out to be fundamental. Together they became Next Move Theory:
Advanced Jobs To Be Done
What value actually is and how to create it. How to segment customers and make strategic moves. How to communicate value. JTBD rebuilt from scratch into thousands of theses.
Riskiest Assumption Test
Every idea is a stack of assumptions, any of which can kill it. Buy the cheapest evidence against the deadliest one, before you build.
Unit Economics
Compete only for the Jobs of segments where the margin lets you grow and fund the next bet. And find the highest leverage metric from your current unit economics.
ABCDX Segmentation
Split the paying base by margin × satisfaction: double down on A/B, fire C/D, read X as the signal of where to grow next.
Theory of Constraints
Find the single bottleneck that actually limits growth of your product and fix that, instead of improving everything at once.
Today hundreds of companies run on this work, and dozens of cases are documented in the Cases section. The canon states the methodology as theses. The book tells the story of how it was discovered. The skills turn the algorithm into tools: feed in a product idea and get back a decision, not a description.
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