Jobs to be Done
People in your company hold strong assumptions about your customers. These assumptions have supported lots of past decision-making and significant investment - in things that might not be valuable.
Context
You have a good product but are struggling to attract new customers at the rate you want to. There is finger-pointing going on between departments about demand generation. Marketing is complaining about the product. But the discussion remains in the feature space - people are asking to add features to make the product more attractive.
Play
First, get out of the building to understand the progress your customer is trying to make and the struggling moment they face. Then, reframe your product so they can see your idea for a new way.
The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework was popularized by Bob Moesta in his book Demand-Side Sales: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress.
He argues that people don't buy products; they hire products to do jobs for them. I like the book because it reframes your thinking away from selling the product you have to helping your customers solve problems. When you do this, you unlock a different kind of value - and, potentially, better pricing.
Moesta suggests looking for contrasting forces - those that promote a new choice, and those that block a change. There's the push of the situation and the pull of the new solution that help with the new choice. On the blocking side, the habits of the present and the anxiety of a new solution.
JTBD starts by interviewing people who bought your product to understand why. At Lottie, we interviewed parents who were using our learning app with their toddlers. When we dug into why one father had downloaded our app, he told us that it was all about cooking lunch. His family had just moved to a new apartment, and he was the primary person responsible for childcare. He needed 30-40 minutes to get food together without having to focus on his 4-year-old daughter during that time. He had 'hired' our app to provide some childcare support during this very important family time each day.