Continuous Innovation Blog
Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s lecture on “the simple shapes of stories,” I’ve previously riffed on The Simple Shapes of Startups. More recently, however, I discovered that customer stories too have archetypical shapes.
These archetypical shapes take form when you plot customer happiness over time as customers hire and fire products in the course of getting the different jobs in their lives done.
If you are unfamiliar with the theory of jobs-to-be-done (jtbd) or the specific definition presented below, I’d recommend reviewing this post first.
Understanding the basic shapes of customer stories can help you better understand your own customers, uncover new opportunities for innovation (problems worth solving), and build products and features that deliver on these opportunities.
Our customer starts at some basal happiness level until they encounter a jtbd trigger, for example, hunger pangs. Since jtbd triggers open a gap between the customer’s current state (hungry) and desired state (satiated), they cause a slight dip in happiness level.
