@jonathancolton

Markets Through a Different Lens A market is not people who buy your product. A market is people trying to get a job done. That one swap changes what a builder can see. The lens-switch It is easy to define a market as "people who need my product." That starts with the solution. It assumes the thing you built is the center of the world. The JTBD definition starts with the person: "people trying to make progress in a specific situation." The product is just one candidate for the job, and it can be replaced. The test: stop asking *what market am I in* and ask *what progress is this person trying to make*. What the lens buys you A durable market. CDs, MP3s, Spotify: same market, three technologies, roughly twenty years. A company that defined itself as "CDs" got wiped out. One that defined itself as "listening to music" saw both waves coming. The job is the fixed point. Technology rotates underneath it. Define the market as the job and every new technology becomes something you adopt instead of something that ends you. The real competitor set (Christensen). Define the market by the product and your competitors are the other products in the category. Define it by the job and the set changes. If the job is "feel my photography is seen," the alternatives are Instagram, a personal site, a printed book, posting nothing and showing friends on your phone, or not bothering at all. None of them is a photo app. The last one, doing nothing, is the incumbent you actually have to beat, because the easiest thing a person can do is keep doing what they already do. Why it works Run the lens on a single act of use. Ask not *what does the product do* but *what job is this hired for*, and you see what product-thinking hides: the alternatives already do what the product does, so the real reason someone chooses it is the job underneath. Ask what progress, not what product.

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