(2024-04-24) Maurya Backstory Behind Customer Forces Stories Leanfoundry

Ash Maurya: The Backstory Behind Customer Forces Stories. Good customer / problem discovery is key to achieving problem/solution fit.

Solution #1: The Customer Forces Canvas

Then I met Bob Moesta, Chris Spiek, and Ervin Fowlkes in February 2015 for a joint Running Lean / JTBD workshop we delivered together.

learned about two powerful models they used

The JTBD Forces of Progress

JTBD Timeline

Bob Moesta describes these models in his book: Demand-side Sales 101.

wondered if these two models could be combined into one... That tinkering led to the Customer Forces model that I first wrote about here.

The hill-climbing metaphor was simultaneously able to.......Visualize the model as a timeline - starting with the customer at the bottom of the hill and journeying their way to the top through a series of milestones.

What was missing now was a place to capture these insights after customer interviews.

That led to the 1-page Customer Forces Canvas template. The latest iteration (v4) is shown below:

post-process their interview notes into the Customer Forces Canvas — one per interview.

Problems with Solution #1: Collapsed Timeline

insights get lumped together, and the nuanced interplay of forces influencing the customer throughout the different stages gets lost.

Much like when climbing a hill, the forces acting on us vary throughout the journey.

I wanted to see if we could capture all this, which led to solution #2.

Solution #2: Customer Forces Scenes

realizing that the customer journey is a story, and all stories have structure.

I wondered if the Global Story could be broken into a series of distinct scenes. I identified six distinct scenes — one for each transition in the timeline above.

To capture all these insights, though, meant the interviewer needed to sort their notes into these six distinct scenes — which meant creating/updating six distinct Customer Forces Canvases.

Problems with Solution #2: Too Much Work

Solution #3: Story Guardrails

stories weren’t the problem. We are wired for stories, but writing good stories on a blank page is hard.

I chose to employ the help of mad-libs building upon the job story structure, first popularized by the product team at Intercom and Alan Klement:

and extending it to write out an entire 3-act Customer Forces Story Mad-lib.

This mad-libs structure proved highly effective, not only in getting teams to summarize their insights as stories but teaching the Customer Forces model also got easier.