I Was an Expert Without a Foundation
By 2018, companies already paid me to teach product.
I taught customer research, segmentation, interviews, painkillers, and delighters. I looked like a person who understood how products worked.
Then one customer interview made an embarrassing thing obvious.
I did not know, at the root level, how to create a product.
I had practical questions I could not answer:
- How do I segment customers correctly?
- How do I know whether to keep building or kill what I have?
- Why did a competitor with the same features get traction and I did not?
- How do I compete when we have fewer resources and entered the market later?
- How do I create value that is hard for a competitor to copy?
- How do I build a defensive moat when a larger player enters the market?
- How do I make customers understand why our product is different when every competitor sounds the same?
- How do I convince a stakeholder that we should build this specific thing instead of their crazy idea?
My name is Ivan Zamesin. I am a founder and product manager. For thirteen years I have built products, managed product teams, taught product people, and consulted companies that wanted to understand why customers buy, why they do not buy, and why smart teams keep shipping things nobody cares about.
In 2012, I went to UX Week conference in San Francisco. I saw Customer Journey Mapping and absorbed a dangerous idea for a young product manager: you can talk to customers and use those conversations to make product decisions.
At the time, I was responsible for the image-search product at one of the largest tech companies in the market — the product itself, not the whole service. We competed with Google Image Search. I learned to run customer interviews and UX tests properly: we researched users, segmented customers, tested product hypotheses, and put almost every meaningful interface through usability sessions before launch. That discipline became my professional edge.
My career accelerated. My team eventually took roughly 25% of the image-search market from Google Images. The product reached 8 million daily users and 35 million monthly users. I started speaking, teaching, consulting startups, and building a reputation around customer research.
That became my reputation: teams came to me to learn how to find problems, segment customers, run interviews, and build better products.
The Satisfied Customer Who Bought Again
Then one customer interview broke the whole thing.
The company was an author-services startup that helped founders and executives write, publish, and print business books: part editorial process, part status object, part internal-culture artifact. The startup is dead now, by the way.
We were interviewing entrepreneurs who had already published books with major business publishers. They had finished books, public credibility, and no obvious publishing crisis.
We asked the obvious product-research question: "What problems did you have when writing and publishing your book?"
The answer was supposed to give us the roadmap. Find problems. Segment by problems. Fix the painful ones. Capture value.
The entrepreneurs did not report meaningful problems.
Writing was hard, yes. It took time. The process required focus, coordination, editing, approvals, and the usual suffering of turning thoughts into pages. But when we asked whether those were actual problems, the answer kept coming back: "No. It was fine. We liked the process. The publisher was good. The book came out well."
The interview did not give us pain, an urgent complaint, a broken incumbent, or an obvious painkiller.
Then the founders would offer something simple: "We can print the next run for you. Or a special edition for your employees. Or help with the next book."
And the entrepreneur would say, effectively: "Great. Let's do it."
Some bought right there in the interview. Thousand dollars, paid while the conversation was still warm.
I sat there watching satisfied customers buy more of something even though they had no problems for us to fix.
I had been taught, and I was teaching others, that products win by solving problems: find pain, validate it, prioritize it, build the solution. Painkillers were clear. Delighters were the vague bucket for everything valuable that did not fit the painkiller story.
The purchase did not fit the painkiller model, and the word delighter was just a label for the gap.
A few days later, I was walking through a mall, passing coffee shops, phone stores, sneaker stores, clothing stores. Through the problem-first lens, the building became absurd.
Starbucks sells ritual, a sweet drink, a place to sit, a small daily upgrade. Apple sells newness, status, and alignment with who the buyer thinks they are. Nike sells comfort, identity, taste, and the feeling of becoming the kind of person who wears those shoes.
Some customers buy because something broke. The phone battery dies. The old laptop becomes unusable. But look around any modern economy. A huge share of revenue is not created by repairing obvious pain.
I realized I did not know how to build an Apple Watch. I did not know how to build Starbucks. I did not know how to build a pair of Nike shoes. Worse: I did not know how to explain why a satisfied entrepreneur pays thousands of dollars for another book project.
That is an unpleasant sentence to say when companies already pay you to teach product.
Then It Was My Own Money
Then the same confusion became personal.
I was building my own company with my own money: a service that matched people with therapists. A person came in, described what they were dealing with, and we helped them find a therapist who fit the request.
We entered the market late. The largest player already had most of the market, better unit economics, and faster growth. Their unit margin was roughly twice ours. I had a small product, a stronger competitor, weaker economics, and no algorithm for choosing a strategy.
I did not have enough resources to try five strategies. Each serious strategic bet would cost tens of thousands of dollars. I could choose one, maybe two. The wrong choice could kill the company.
That was the real decision in front of me: close the company, or keep fighting with one strategy I could actually afford.
I went to friends, colleagues, and people whose judgment I trusted. The advice came fast: change pricing, change the acquisition channel, kill the segment, rebuild the product, move upmarket, copy the larger player, find a narrower wedge. Each move sounded plausible. None came with a rule for choosing.
I had options, but I did not know how to decide.
I remembered my earlier time at Chatfuel.com, a YC-backed startup. I had sat on investor calls and listened to founders and investors reason about markets, options, trade-offs, and strategic moves. Back then I remember thinking: Do they actually see the game this way? I want to think like that.
Now I had my own company, my own money at risk, and my own stronger competitor in front of me. I did not know which strategic moves were available. I did not know why people bought. I did not know what to do with my own business.
The same problem appeared twice: I did not understand why people buy, and because of that I could not choose what strategic move to make.
I Decided to Build the Methodology From Scratch
I realized I did not know the answers to three questions I should have been able to answer:
- What makes people buy?
- What algorithm helps us build a product customers choose?
- How do I assemble a strategy that makes a powerful non-obvious move and separates us from competitors?
I went looking for answers. I read a lot of books about different product and innovation methodologies. Then I found Jobs To Be Done and went deep: articles, PDFs, books, YouTube talks, everything I could get my hands on.
I felt enormous potential. The cases were interesting. But I could not turn it into actual product work. How do I run the research and form the sample? How do I segment customers? How do I decide which Jobs to compete for, which to refuse, and how to create value? How do I rank the opportunities and turn what I heard into positioning that separates us? The material I found did not answer the operating questions.
So I made an extremely brave and unreasonable decision: I decided to build the methodology from scratch.
I am grateful to my 2018 self for that decision. It became the most important professional decision I have made.
The idea I decided to keep from Jobs To Be Done was simple: a person is in a specific situation and context, and wants to feel different. They want to transition into another state. That was the deepest intuition of the field's creators — customers do not start with features, categories, or roadmaps; they start in a lived situation, with a felt state they want to change — and I trusted it. What I did not trust was the machinery around it, so I deliberately did not import existing interpretations wholesale. I kept myself unframed.
I studied that transition for eight years — while consulting clients, teaching, interviewing customers, talking to founders and PMs, observing my own behavior, and building my own products, including the service for matching people with psychotherapists.
Then I got lucky: I read the right books at the right time. Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain pushed me into the theories that eventually made the product methodology work: theories of needs, theories of emotions, allostasis, prediction, reward prediction error, habit, identity, loss aversion, and the limits of introspection.
Over eight years, I believe I managed to create a powerful and beautiful methodology. It gives a practical algorithm for creating value, a way to build strategy, a way to segment customers, clear positioning and messaging algorithms, and answers to the questions I could not answer when I started. I call it Advanced Jobs To Be Done, or AJTBD.
I originally hoped AJTBD would produce algorithms for every product and business goal. In the process I realised that it was too ambitious. When the work reached unit economics, hypothesis testing, goal-setting, and synchronizing work across a company, I saw that I needed a methodology one level higher. That higher-level methodology became Next Move Theory. AJTBD became the skeleton Next Move Theory needed: the foundation without which the larger system could not stand.
The First Book Builds the Foundation
This book is the first book in the series because the foundation has to come first. It is not a chronological memoir. The insights did not arrive in a clean order; I will tell them in the order that builds the model in your head.
This book is for founders, indie hackers, product managers, product leaders, and marketers who have to make product decisions when the evidence is incomplete and the cost of being wrong is real.
If you are pre-PMF and trying not to burn another six months on the wrong idea, this book is for you. If you have shipped five small products and cannot understand why the sixth should work, this book is for you. If your roadmap feels like a political artifact dressed as strategy, this book is for you.
The goal is bigger than another framework. I want every entrepreneur, product leader, PM, and marketer to look at a concrete situation and see the available strategic moves: which segment to compete for, which Jobs to own, which Jobs to kill, which chain to repair, which expectations to set, which behavior change to engineer, which market to refuse.
The point is to see the logic underneath the move.
The canon gives you the compressed theory, free and public, with free lectures on the main theses to follow. The book has a different Job: the discovery path — the mistakes, the breaks, the scenes, the moments where the wrong model stopped working and a better one had to be built. The methodology is counterintuitive; it usually enters the head through practice, and the path is what makes the practice make sense.
These methodologies are now used by hundreds of companies in my home country. I have used them to build and sell my psychotherapy-matching company, and to build an education company that became one of the top product-management and founder-education companies in its category. Through them, I have consulted hundreds of companies, taught 13,000 practitioners, and helped large companies rethink segmentation, strategy, and the product decisions sitting underneath them. There are dozens of documented cases.
After the first serious workshops, students often say some version of: "I feel like I can see the source code of how people choose and change behavior."
That is the feeling I want this book to give you: clarity, precision, ground under your feet — product decisions that stop feeling like taste, politics, or borrowed confidence. With that foundation, your probability of success goes up. You see the cause-and-effect behind why people buy, and the full set of strategic moves on the table. You defend your ideas to colleagues and investors with logic instead of charisma. Your career grows faster, and the same effort starts producing a bigger business result.
Wes Will Ask the Uncomfortable Questions
One character will travel with us through the book: Wes.
Wes is not a cartoon skeptic I invented so I could win arguments against myself. He is the voice of people who met this methodology while I was building and teaching it: students, clients, founders, PMs, researchers, and colleagues who asked hard questions, raised doubts, named fears, and pointed at places where the model was incomplete.
Some objections were status defense in nicer clothes: "Who are you to rewrite this? Christensen already said it. Ulwick already has ODI. Moesta already has demand-side sales." But many were exactly right:
"If a Job has context, trigger, expected outcome, success criteria, and a higher-level Job, what exactly do we segment by?"
"How is a Critical Chain better than a Customer Journey Map? Ours already works. Why do we need another tool?"
Those questions made the methodology better and fuller. You may hear your own doubts, fears, and objections in Wes's comments. That is the point.
Why Did He Buy?
Before Part I, go back to that interview room one more time. An entrepreneur with a published book, public credibility, and no problems for us to fix — and he paid tens of thousands of dollars for the next one before the conversation was over.
Why did he buy?
Hold that question. The whole of Part I is the path to an answer — and the first thing it cost me was the word that had built my career: problem.
Let's Rock! 🤘