Next Move Theory is the integrative meta-framework that joins five core methodologies into one system. The four pillars are Advanced Jobs To Be Done, Unit Economics, Riskiest Assumption Test, and ABCDX Segmentation. Theory of Constraints is the fifth core methodology. Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is the supporting goal-setting methodology. AJTBD is the substrate (see AJTBD key theses); this file is the integrative root.
The leading principle is that the product is a single organism. Marketing can't be changed in isolation from the product and the segment. The product itself doesn't care about the borders between functions — product, marketing, engineering, sales, support, R&D, finance. Every function performs Jobs for the same target segment, in the same shared language.
The methodology is being built to provide an algorithm for solving any business task. It is in active development. Significant parts already exist: The Algorithm for v1.0 of the cycle, and about 80 strategies catalogued in the Mechanics Catalog. Open frontiers include cross-function goal-setting alignment and the universal decision-tree tool. The goal is the vector, not the current state.
1. The unit of analysis is the Company Strategy — a sequence of cross-function actions toward an expected outcome
A Company Strategy is a sequence of actions of the company's functions that leads the company toward an expected outcome. The functions are Discovery, Delivery, Marketing, Sales, Support, R&D, and Finance. The outcome can be profit, revenue, market share, valuation, a position in a market, an acquisition exit, or any other named result. The sequence covers everything: which research is run, which experts are interviewed, what is learned from them, and which quantitative validation is done. It also covers how the team aligns internally, how the segment-and-Job anchor is chosen, how that choice becomes department-level and individual Company goals (OKR), who is hired, and how the work is executed quarter by quarter.
Multiple Company Strategies are always available to a company at any moment. These are alternative sequences of cross-function actions. They could lead to the same outcome through different paths, or to different outcomes entirely.
Next Move Theory's job is to make those alternatives visible, comparable, and choosable, so the company can pick the most economically valuable one — the Chosen Company Strategy. The set of alternatives is the analytical space. The Chosen Company Strategy is the one sequence the company is actually executing, tracked through quarterly cadence.
Every product decision silently encodes a Company Strategy. The choice is not whether to embed one. The choice is whether the team picks one deliberately, with the alternatives visible and compared, or one by accident.
The Chosen Company Strategy is anchored on AJTBD: the choice of Jobs of segments. It answers "which Jobs of which people will we compete for, why these and not others, and why will we win?" Without that anchor, a Company Strategy is just an action list. With it, every downstream decision — Unit Economics, RAT, ABCDX, hiring, Company goals (OKR) — inherits the segment-and-Job foundation.
2. The methodologies on which Next Move Theory rests
Six methodologies form the system. The four pillars plus Theory of Constraints carry the core integration. OKR is the supporting goal-setting methodology.
Core pillars:
- Advanced Jobs To Be Done (AJTBD) — the unit of customer analysis (Job, Job Graph of the segment, Map of Segments). See AJTBD key theses. AJTBD gives the language and the customer-side unit of analysis. The other pillars close the gap between "we found valuable Jobs" and "we extract target profit from a sustainable business."
- Unit Economics — the financial filter. If the per-unit math doesn't add up, the product doesn't exist, regardless of how good the Jobs are.
- Riskiest Assumption Test (RAT) — the discipline of removing the riskiest assumptions cheaply and in the right order before building. It is the integrative function, because RAT pulls every component of the product into one validation system. See Riskiest Assumption Test.
- ABCDX Segmentation — the discipline of allocating company resources to profitable, satisfied customers (A/B) and firing the unprofitable, unsatisfied ones (C/D/X). See ABCDX Segmentation.
Core methodology — constraint management:
- Theory of Constraints (Goldratt) — the system view that throughput is governed by the slowest link, that the bottleneck moves as the system changes, and that the Critical Chain is where breaks and cycles cluster. AJTBD's Critical Chain of Jobs is borrowed and adapted from Goldratt's Critical Chain. The Critical Chain of Jobs is the sequence of Jobs that must complete in order for a higher-level Job to land. The chain-repair mechanics in Critical Chain of Jobs operationalise the principle.
Supporting methodology:
- Objectives and Key Results (OKR) — the goal-setting framework that translates the Chosen Company Strategy into measurable cross-function commitments. Company goals (OKR) are Jobs of business entities (see AJTBD key theses §2). OKR provides the protocol that propagates the Chosen Company Strategy into the Company goals of Discovery, Delivery, Marketing, Sales, Support, R&D, and Finance without drift.
3. Why Next Move Theory exists — the alignment problem and the methodology gap
The author could not find any step-by-step methodology for forming Company Strategies that both rests on value creation for the customer and solves the cross-functional alignment problem inside a company. Existing frameworks each cover a slice: JTBD for the customer, Lean Startup for validation, OKR for goal-setting, ToC for operational throughput. None integrates the slices into one operational system. Next Move Theory was built to fill that gap.
In a typical product company, every function speaks a different language and pulls in a different direction:
- Researchers run studies that the product team shelves.
- Product ships features that Marketing doesn't know how to sell.
- Marketing brings in leads that don't fit what the product actually serves well.
- Sales closes deals on customers who churn or never see value.
- Support is overloaded with C/D customers who consume 80% of energy for 0% of profit.
Three different segmentations live in the same company. Product segments by Jobs, Marketing by demographics, Sales by industry. Three strategies — product, brand, marketing — are written separately and rarely reconcile. The result is misalignment, wasted resources, and an organization that works hard at every node and still can't compound.
Next Move Theory's job is to align every function around one Chosen Company Strategy and one target segment, in one shared language: the language of Jobs.
4. The cause-and-effect chain to profit — sequential up to value, then three parallel conditions
Business value is the output of one causal chain. The chain is sequential up to value creation. Then it branches into three conditions that must hold at the same time. Then it converges into conversion-retention and profit.
The chain below is deliberately simplified. A vast number of detailings and variations sit beneath each step. Different business models route through different sub-chains, different channels load at different rates, and different segments scale on different cost curves. We work at this abstraction level because it is the level at which the key strategic errors become visible and effort can be deliberately allocated.
Market with money
→ Segment + Job (one analytical entity, not two steps)
→ Added Value
→ ┌─ Business Model and Unit Economics — positive per-unit math at the chosen model
├─ Ability to create demand and acquire customers — at target CAC and target lead quality
└─ Ability to scale, including scaling customer service — without quality decay
→ Unit Economics keeps closing at scale — by getting conversions + retention + repeat purchases at target levels
→ Profit
- Market with money — the sum customer segments currently spend to perform Core Jobs. A market is defined in Job terms. Not "the EdTech market" but "the sum spent by people who want to learn a skill in order to switch careers."
- Segment + Job is one analytical entity, not two steps. A segment is defined by its Job Graph, by the set of Core Jobs and success criteria its members share. Two groups performing similar Core Jobs with similar criteria are one segment. Two groups performing different Core Jobs with different criteria are two segments, regardless of how identical their demographics look. See Segmentation §1 and AJTBD key theses §12.
- Added Value — performing those Jobs above the customer's expectations, against the segment's success criteria. See Value Creation §2–§5 for the prediction-and-compare mechanism that makes the brain register value.
- Three parallel conditions after Value. Each must hold; failure of any one stops the chain.
- Business Model and Unit Economics positive — the chosen business model (one-off, subscription, marketplace, freemium, B2B, and so on) supports per-unit math that closes: LTV > CAC, payback under 12 months, target margin per unit.
- Ability to create demand and acquire customers — channels and demand-creation mechanics that deliver leads at the target customer acquisition cost and the target lead quality, in volume.
- Ability to scale, including scaling customer service — operations, support, R&D, and hiring keep pace with customer flow without quality decay. The org can grow throughput without breaking the chain.
- Conversion + retention + return — at customer-flow scale, the UE keeps closing; people pay, use, and return.
- Profit — the residue once every prior step holds.
The three conditions are tested in parallel, not sequentially. This is why the RAT discipline treats its baseline risks as simultaneous tests, not stages.
5. Two consequences of the chain — and the diagnostic discipline
Consequence 1: when a downstream metric breaks, investigate the upstream chain first.
The root cause sits upstream in the majority of cases. Low conversion is most often a Job, segment, value, or communication problem upstream wearing a funnel mask, and only sometimes a funnel mechanic problem. High CAC is most often a segment-and-Job mismatch, and only sometimes a channel-tactic problem. High churn is most often a value problem (the customer is now seeing the value gap clearly) or a segment problem (the wrong people were acquired in the first place), and only sometimes a retention-mechanic problem. The local fix at the broken metric may also work in some cases. But the rate of upstream causation is high enough that the upstream investigation should happen first. In the parallel section of the chain (§4), the diagnostic asks which of the three parallel conditions is failing, treating them as co-equal candidates.
Consequence 2: the largest single leverage is choosing the most economically valuable Job in a segment with the budget to sustain the unit economics.
Every step inherits the quality of the step above it. The choice at the head of the chain compounds through every step downstream: the most economically valuable Job, the segment whose budget supports target margin, the segment large enough to scale. The choice combines four dimensions:
- The Job's value gap against current Solutions — how much room is there to create Added Value?
- The segment's budget for the Job — does the customer have money to pay enough to close UE?
- The segment's size and reachability — is there enough volume to scale into?
- The segment's accessibility through known channels — can we reach them at target CAC?
Picking on one dimension and ignoring the others is the most expensive and most frequent strategic error.
6. Subtraction — the meta-operator running across all four pillars
The four pillars look like separate disciplines with separate vocabularies, but underneath all four run one operation: subtraction. Subtraction is removing something from the system that, at first glance, looked like it had to stay.
| Pillar | What gets subtracted |
|---|---|
| AJTBD | Jobs from the target segment's Job Graph; non-target segments from the strategic landscape |
| Unit Economics | Negative-margin units, channels, transactions, SKUs |
| RAT | Risky assumptions before they get built into the product |
| ABCDX | C/D customers from the paying base; their support load |
Subtraction asymmetrically beats addition for four structural reasons (see Subtraction §2):
- The brain rewards "less spent." Every interaction with a product is an investment of attention, time, and energy. Subtraction hands back what the customer was already spending, immediately, before any learning curve. AirPods didn't "add wireless audio" — they killed untangling headphones. ChatGPT didn't "add AI writing" — it killed find a template, format headings, draft from blank.
- Risk compounds multiplicatively. Seven 60%-confidence assumptions give a joint survival probability of 3%. Removing one assumption multiplies the chance by 1.67×. Adding one, even at 80% confidence, multiplies by 0.8. The cheapest way to raise a product's chance of working is to remove a risky assumption.
- Focus doesn't sum. Every addition steals from every prior commitment. Subtraction runs in reverse: removing a segment, Job, feature, or channel hands time and attention back to everything that remains.
- Loss aversion runs at about 2×. The customer's brain registers the removal of a friction, anxiety, or chain-break at roughly twice the strength of an equivalent feature addition. Square's tip screen removed the awkwardness of choosing while the barista watches. TurboTax removed the anxiety of "am I doing this wrong." Each registers as about 2× the value of an additive competitor at the same build cost.
Skill transfer across pillars is real. A founder who has internalized Kill a Job in AJTBD has already done most of the cognitive work for RAT's drop-it exercise and ABCDX's fire-the-C/D move. The vocabularies differ; the operation does not. Detailed canon in Subtraction.
A diagnostic question travels across pillars: "in each pillar, what has this team explicitly subtracted in the last quarter, and why?" A team that answers in all four is running the meta-operation. A team silent in one or more has a pillar-specific gap.
7. Value is the substrate on which everything stands
Value is energy efficiency for the brain in performing a Job — outcome over cost. Outcome is measured against the customer's success criteria. Cost covers time, money, effort, cognitive load, negative emotion, and Tax Jobs. The success criteria are where outcome lives operationally; they specify, for each Job element, what "well enough" looks like. The brain judges every interaction as an investor judges a return: the predicted outcome must justify the predicted cost. The delta between delivered value and the customer's prior prediction is a separate construct. That delta is what drives behaviour change: adoption, switching, retention, and learning. Beat the prediction and the brain registers a Positive Prediction Error, the dopamine signal customers experience as the Aha Moment. Meet the prediction and there is no signal. Fall below it and the brain registers a Negative Prediction Error, a Problem.
Two consequences fall out of this:
- Behaviour change is always relative to expectations; value itself is not. Yesterday's wow is today's baseline. The brain's prediction bar rises continuously because the customer compares the product to every other product they touch. A product that holds the same absolute value-delivery over time still delivers value. But it produces a falling perceived-value-gain curve and fading behaviour change. Value creation is continuous work, not a one-time delivery. See Value Creation §6 for the Red Queen mechanic.
- A feature is not value. A feature is the truck that delivers value, the format in which energy-efficiency arrives in the customer's day. Customers don't need features; they need a change of state (a prediction error). Founders who fall in love with features and read criticism as identity attack are operating on the wrong unit.
Value is the substrate on which every other operation in the methodology stands. The Chosen Company Strategy, segmentation, communication, Unit Economics, focus, subtraction, RAT, ABCDX, retention, and acquisition are operational layers on top of value. If value is not created, the methodology has nothing to talk about. If value does not reach the customer, alignment and focus have no result to align around.
Value lives across the canon in different operational forms: full theory and 20 base mechanics in Value Creation; the canon's key hypothesis of value (energy efficiency in performing a Job — outcome over cost) in Scientific Foundations §2; allostasis and prediction-error substrate in Scientific Foundations §1, §11; communication as conveyance of value already delivered in Communication; criteria differences across segments in Segmentation; the chain-walk where value actually delivers (or fails) in Critical Chain of Jobs; the Consideration Activators that load the awareness of value in Consideration Activators; subtraction as the asymmetric value-creator in Subtraction; the validation of value before scaling in Riskiest Assumption Test; the customers worth keeping in ABCDX Segmentation.
Examples: ChatGPT delivered a massive Positive Prediction Error on "generate a usable first draft in seconds"; Apple Pay killed "reach for the wallet"; Stripe killed "a two-week PayPal integration"; Wealthfront took "manage my retirement turnkey" off the customer entirely.
8. Focus is a core operation of Next Move Theory
Focus, attention management, and subtraction are one operation in three names. Focus is the chosen target: target segment, Core Jobs, and criteria. Attention management is the continuous routing of constrained team-and-customer attention at that target. Subtraction is the mechanism: direct(X) = subtract(claims-on-non-X). The team doesn't add attention to the focus. It stops spending attention on non-focus, and the released attention lands on the focus.
The same operation runs at five nested scopes (see Focus & Attention Management §3):
- (a) Directing the customer's attention through the chain-walk.
- (b) Company-level focus on segments and Core Jobs.
- (c) Department-level focus per function — Discovery, Delivery, Marketing, Sales, Support, R&D, Finance.
- (d) Product-portfolio focus across products and acquisitions.
- (e) Individual employee focus across the day.
9. Local vs. global optimum — two parallel investment tracks, not opposites
- Local optimum means improving the current product, segment, or business model. Low risk, low ceiling. Add a Job at a lower level, fix problems, raise conversion, lower CAC. Delegated to junior roles. ABCDX and conversion optimization live here.
- Global optimum means changing the segment, business model, market, or Core Job. High risk, multiplier-scale upside. The job of founders and C-level. Segment switches, moves up the Job Graph to a Big Job, B2C → B2B switches, and business-model changes live here.
- The Innovator's Dilemma is the failure to fund the global-optimum track because the local one still works. The exit runs through the Job Graph: moving to Previous and Next Jobs, climbing to higher-level Big Jobs, finding segments that grow on a trend. See Local vs Global Optimum.
Hold focus on the local optimum and fund a second, parallel investment track aimed at the global-optimum move. Both tracks run at the same time. A team that holds the focus track but funds no second track drifts into the Innovator's Dilemma in 3–5 years. A team that funds the second track but doesn't enforce the focus track never wins the target segment in the first place. The two tracks are not in opposition. They are independent investment streams pulling on different attention pools, with the founder's authority deciding the split. See Focus & Attention Management §7.
Examples: Amazon held retail focus while running a second investment track on AWS from about 2002; Netflix held DVD-by-mail focus while running a second track on streaming 2000–2007; Stripe refused enterprise sales while funding Atlas and Treasury exploration as a separate track; Notion refused Enterprise IT requirements until the individual-knowledge-worker segment was saturated, while reserving a discovery track for the enterprise expansion.
10. Next Move Theory as alignment in practice
Every function works on the same target segment, with the same Jobs, with the same success criteria, in the same language:
- Discovery runs research to learn the real Job Graph and the real success criteria of the target segment.
- Delivery builds value over those Jobs and criteria, using the value-creation mechanics, ranked by RICE, with the riskiest assumptions tested first via RAT.
- Marketing acquires people in motion toward those Jobs, using proxy signals derived from AJTBD interviews: subscriptions, communities, life events, search queries, role titles.
- Sales closes by hitting the same Jobs and the same criteria. In B2B, it hits both the Business Job and the Personal Job of the decision-maker.
- Support is sized for A/B customers. C/D/X are filtered upstream by lead qualification, not absorbed downstream by an over-staffed support team.
- R&D invests in capabilities that perform the target segment's Core Jobs at higher prediction errors over time.
- Finance and Unit Economics validate that the chosen segment, Job, and budget mix supports the target margin, that LTV > CAC stays positive at customer-flow scale, and that the per-unit math closes before the company invests in scaling. Finance is the gate that confirms the largest segment, Job, and budget combination the Chosen Company Strategy committed to in §1 actually delivers profit at scale.
The shared language — Jobs, success criteria, segments — is what makes alignment cheap. Without it, alignment requires standing meetings. With it, alignment is automatic. The OKR protocol (§2) propagates the Chosen Company Strategy into each function's measurable commitments.
11. Next Move Theory as a diagnostic
Next Move Theory produces a set of validation criteria for any product or company. Following the cause-and-effect chain top-down:
- Is there an economic Map of Segments? Do you know the size, budget, frequency, and reachability of each?
- Have you picked one target segment using the four-factor screen (added value, target margin, scale, reachable demand), landing on the most economically valuable Job × the segment with the budget to support target margin?
- Do you know the Job Graph of the target segment — Core, Big, Small, and Micro Jobs?
- Do you know the success criteria for the Core Job and the Big Job?
- Have you surfaced the Aha Moment, and have you moved it as far left in the chain as possible?
- Do you have a value proposition in the formula
[segment] + [Job] + [how much more effectively] + [features]? - Do you have proof of value (people pay; people use; people return)?
- Do all three parallel conditions hold? (a) Unit economics closes at the segment level, not on average. (b) Acquisition channels modeled, tested, scaling. (c) Service, operations, and R&D scalable without quality decay.
- Are Discovery, Delivery, Marketing, Sales, Support, R&D, and Finance aligned around the same target segment?
- Does conversion + retention keep UE closing as customer flow scales?
Failing any one breaks the chain. The diagnostic priority is top-down: investigate the upstream gaps first, because no amount of work downstream will compensate for an unsound segment-and-Job choice.
12. Next Move Theory as an investment-analysis lens
The same diagnostic doubles as an investment-thesis check on a company:
- Is there a Chosen Company Strategy? A deliberate answer to "which Jobs of which people will we compete for, why these and not others, and why will we win?" — chosen from a visible set of alternatives, not picked by default.
- Is it unified? Product, marketing, and sales strategies are one Chosen Company Strategy expressed in different operational forms, not three strategies in three documents.
- Are functions aligned around it? Or is the org leaking value through misalignment?
- Is there focus? Resources concentrated on one or a few target segments, not spread thin across "everyone."
- Is the cause-and-effect chain intact end-to-end? Or is one upstream node broken in a way no downstream effort can fix?
A company that answers "yes" to all of these compounds. A company that can't burns capital at the broken node and calls it "execution."
Cross-references
- AJTBD key theses — substrate root: Job, Job Graph, Map of Segments, Critical Chain of Jobs.
- Subtraction — meta-operator detail across all four pillars.
- Focus & Attention Management — focus operation detail; five scopes; two-track investment.
- Local vs Global Optimum — two parallel investment tracks.
- The Algorithm — algorithm v1.0 in 9 steps.
- Riskiest Assumption Test — integrative validation.
- ABCDX Segmentation — resource allocation discipline.