Book Sips #53 — ‘When Coffee & Kale Compete’ by Alan Klement
A
nother one on jobs-to-be-done (JTBD). I think that when you’re learning about a topic, it’s worth spending some time to explore different approaches and authors so I end up reading a couple of books about the same. This helps in consolidating core knowledge while contrasting the particularities of each author, especially for complex and/or subjective themes such as this one… and in case you’re wondering: no, I didn’t buy the kale for taking the picture, luckily it was already in the fridge!
This book is a great introduction to JTBD, however, it falls short on providing actionable steps to use this framework. With an undeniably catchy title, ‘when coffee & kale compete’ by Alan Klement is a high-level discussion about what this approach is and what’s not. It’s also a very useful source to understand the different schools of thought and when you read it you’ll easily get in which side the author is. Finally, the real use cases the author presents are incredibly representative of the consequences of putting this approach to work. A sip:
“Customers can tell you of their struggles, how they expect life to be better, and how they interact with the products they use. But they cannot tell you what to do about it. This isn’t because customers aren’t smart enough. It’s because they don’t have access to appropriate knowledge and theory. Customers do not understand marketing, design, sales, engineering, costs of production, systems thinking, psychology, and statistics all at once. They cannot anticipate all the ways in which their lives will change when they overcome one group of struggles and then face another. They do not understand the system of progress or why they can or cannot move through it.”
👉 Improve people’s life situations till your solution becomes the default
#joshdixit
When Coffee & Kale Compete
by Alan Klement
Why read?
A great introduction to the JTBD approach as well as a source of inspiration of how applying this framework can translate into building the best user-centric products and services. Sometimes it’s just a small tweak in your positioning, who knows!?
227 pages, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018
Get this book here on Amazon!
