A marketplace burned its runway fixing real customer problems for the wrong segment. Why the Problem is never the first cause — and the Job → Solution → Problem chain that should anchor every backlog item.
12 min read
A Job is a structured story of motivation, not a one-line verb. The full eight-element anatomy on one concrete Skyscanner flight-booking Job — and why success criteria split the same verb into different Jobs.
12 min read
People don't want products — they want to reach goals and feel different. Why the unit of analysis is the customer's Job, not your feature set, and what that changes in practice.
7 min read
Everyone says “satisfy customer needs” — but needs are too unconscious to research or act on directly. Jobs are the conscious, reportable layer you can actually operate.
11 min read
Value, communication, funnel, pricing, brand, ops — none of these are independent disciplines. Once you know the focal segment's Jobs, every product artifact derives from them.
10 min read
Product runs on a strict cause-and-effect chain from market to profit. An error upstream corrupts every step below — and the most expensive one is choosing the wrong Job of the wrong segment.
9 min read
Every feature, landing page, and pricing tier silently chooses a segment and a Job. If the team doesn't name that choice deliberately, the loudest customer makes it instead.
10 min read
Company goals parse cleanly as Jobs — the same eight-element anatomy applies. Profit lives at the intersection where customer Jobs and the business's own Jobs align.
15 min read
Three gradients, two actors, hidden competitors — how the Job Graph is actually structured, with motivation above, mechanism below, and the customer as co-author.
One Solution can perform many Jobs — across different people (scale out) and within one person (scale in). The second, under-named axis is where LTV multiplies.
Stakeholder idea → CustDev → ship → repeat. Why the feature is the wrong planning unit, the four failure modes it locks in, and what replaces the cursed cycle.
11 min read
Twelve years into product work — and no operational answer to “how do you create value”. Economics says benefits minus costs; true, and useless on Monday morning.
Barrett's energy-budgeting brain and Coase's transaction costs point at the same shape — value emerges from a transformation of broader benefits and broader costs, as the brain actually accounts them.
The benefits-and-costs equation becomes actionable only on top of the Job Graph. Ask how the Graph itself could transform to lower costs or raise benefits — and the mechanics appear on their own.
Seven Graph transformations dominate practical product work — climb a level, kill a Job as a class, absorb the previous or next Job in the chain, link to a new Big Job, deliver faster, perform better against criteria.
The deepest engine of value creation is Graph simplification — the same Big Job delivered through fewer Jobs. Design by removing rather than adding, or the level below climbs over you.
The two-step shortcut from “we need to create value” to “ship the right thing” — find the segment's dominant success criterion, then map it to a lead mechanic from the catalogue.
The complete working catalogue — 24 moves on the Job Graph in four clusters, each with worked examples, and the rules for stacking them on one Job × Segment pair.
42 min read
A Job sits dormant until a trigger fires it. Why brilliant messaging bounces off habit-state customers, and the canonical trigger types that open the evaluation window.
Sales frameworks describe the surface motion at the close. The shift that cracked the methodology open was studying how people actually change behaviour instead.
People don't swap solutions — they swap Job Graphs. Selling new, unfamiliar products means awakening new Core Jobs in the customer's head before any value proposition can land.
Delivering value isn't enough — the customer acts on what they believe, not on what is true. Fears and barriers are ours to reduce, concretely and one by one.
Around forty segmentations for large companies — half never took root. Why “wow” segmentations quietly die in operations, and the missing pieces that turn segmentation from art into discipline.
10 min read
“Enterprise”, “parents”, “high-intent” — labels that name a slice and decide nothing. The causal-vs-fake test for segmentation criteria, and what it takes to make a criterion real.
11 min read
Every early filter — “talk to churners”, “paying users only” — silently cuts off part of the market. Why Jobs come first in the segmentation sequence, and why that alone is still not enough.
The breakthrough lever inside Jobs-based segmentation — success criteria. Same verb, different criteria means different Jobs, different segments, different products.
We don't compete for segments — we compete for specific Jobs of specific segments. The Job × Segment pair as the real unit of strategic focus.
Choosing a target segment is not adding attention to one group — it is subtracting every other from where the team invests. Why that refusal is structurally hard and cannot be delegated.
Five recurring ways teams quietly pick the wrong segment — from inventing Jobs of non-existent people to refusing to drop C/D customers — each invisible from inside while it happens.
9 min read
The basic six-step segmentation algorithm — map wide, drop the structurally unprofitable, study Jobs in detail, pick Job × Segment pairs, choose the focal segment, validate via sales.
Communication transmits already-created value to an already-chosen segment — it cannot turn an unvalidated Job or undelivered value into fact. Diagnose which of the seven assumptions failed before rewriting copy.
We communicate value through the Big Job, where motivation lives. The one-liner — what it is, the Core Jobs, value by criterion — and why features are proof, not the message.
Fast, reliable, premium are not value until translated into the segment's success criteria — the only place the brain can predict the gain. Dinner in 35 minutes, not fast delivery.
A landing page is a short Critical Chain to enough belief to take the first step. The nine-block sequence as a diagnostic, and creatives as Job-language formulas selected by evidence.
Customer journeys aren't linear — they're chains of dependent Jobs that break at the weakest link. When Goldratt showed up in the methodology, and why the last link hurts the most.
Three structural break sites you own — hand-offs, cycles, the slowest link — plus interruptions you can only design to survive. The throughput-blocker is rarely the step you own.
Conversion is a Critical-Chain problem, not funnel cosmetics. Deliver value as early as possible, and fix the earliest broken Job, not the visible one.
A B2B sale is a chain across champion, IT, security, legal, end users — each with business and personal Jobs. Most breaks are personal-Job failures at the seams.
Sales is the cheapest test of whether value is real — presell before building the funnel. A 30-minute Jobs interview that ends in an offer beats a quarter of building.
A segment is never homogeneous. Scaling means unbundling it into sub-segments and shipping each one's missing piece — value, communication, an unaddressed fear, or an un-removed barrier.