Our Competitive Advantage is Ease-of-Use

When developing a product, often a desired feature is “easy”. Perhaps this is even the planned differentiation: being easier than the competition. But “easy” doesn’t actually exist. It is like “cold” – physics has no concept of cold, only its opposite, heat. To make something cold, you must find a way to remove the heat. Likewise, if we want to make something easy, we have to find its opposite: hard.

We will find it nearly impossible to specify (or later market) “easy” in our product. Instead, we can work to understand what is hard about existing tasks, and remove those hard things. Now we have something concrete to specify in our product development, and something specific to market to our customers.

Tags: Differentiation, Jobs To Be Done, Market Research