Predicting the Future with #JTBD

Do you glance at your customers and think you really know them? Many of us know what they’ve done because we track things; like what they bought, when they landed on a web page, when the clicked a link, when they tweeted, when they started buying, when they stopped buying, yada yada yada. We can find all of that in our databases; but unless we ask the right questions, we really don’t know why…we’re just assuming that we know why by interpreting convenient data.

If companies are in the business of thriving, then we are obviously doing something wrong because the vast majority of companies simply do not thrive well into the future. They tend to grow at first (it’s easy to grow from zero) and eventually the rate of growth tapers off to a point where we begin kidding ourselves that our unpredictable growth at or below the growth of the economy is, in fact, growth. It’s not; it’s value destruction plain and simple. There is a growing group who believe we are focusing on the wrong things wit…