Part One: Strategy · Where demand comes from
It is tempting to believe a good product creates its own demand. But people keep the way they have, because it works well enough, until something in their own life makes it not good enough.
Nobody wakes up wanting software. They have a spreadsheet, a paper diary, or a product they have grumbled about for years. It is good enough, and it is theirs.
The grumbling can last a long time. Picture a hair salon that has run for six years on a paper appointment book. For months the owner has been turning clients away on Saturdays and thinking about hiring. She has noticed that the salon down the road takes bookings online. She has done nothing about it. Then she hires a second stylist, and in the first week two clients are booked into the same chair. One walks out. That evening she is searching on her phone.
Nothing about booking software changed that week. Her situation did. Before it, the best booking product in the world was an interruption. After it, an ordinary one that turns up at the right time gets the sale.
Both parts matter. The long stretch of putting up with it tells you what people will recognize when you describe their trouble. The event that tips it tells you when they will act, and where they will be standing when they do.
Most product ideas skip all this. They begin with the product and go looking for people: "Wouldn't it be useful if..." The team can describe every feature and cannot name one day in a real person's life when the old way broke. Without that day there is nothing to design for and nothing to say on the front page.
Therefore:
Before you build, find the moment the old way stops being good enough. Ask people who recently switched, and people who looked and walked away, what happened that made them start looking.
In practice. Write the scene in three lines: who, what they had put up with, what finally went wrong. Then test your one-line description against it. "Scheduling software" fails. "Booking software for salons that have outgrown the paper diary" says what it is and when you need it.
Goes with. The moment shows you THE PROGRESS THEY WANT (2). It is not enough to make someone switch, which is FORCES FOR AND AGAINST (4). You find it by asking about THE LAST TIME THEY SWITCHED (19).
The idea comes from Bob Moesta and Clayton Christensen's work on Jobs to be Done.