This might break some brains, but...
the bike lanes look empty while you're stuck in traffic because the people using the bike lanes aren't stuck in traffic.
Every B2B product team thinks it is solving customer problems, but they don’t understand that their customers have zero interest in solving every problem they’re facing.
Some customer problems:
1) aren’t severe enough
2) provide job security
3) don’t need a perfect solution
4) have pretty okay alternatives
5) don’t need a separate product (yours)
6) have crappy internal solutions
7) exist from solving other problems
8) come with high (perceived or real) inertia
9) are severe only for a few odd customers
10) have users whose pain isn’t heard
11) have users too set in their ways
12) are too diffuse across departments
13) are too hard to justify to finance
14) are too episodic to sustain attention
15) reside only in your imagination
Thing is: you don’t need years of iteration on a B2B product only to fail and then tell others “we learned that switching costs were too high”.
While you couldn’t have predicted this on day 1, it was your job to have figured this switching costs problem out in year 1 or year 2, not in year 6 after burning through $30 million.
And had you figured it out sooner, you would’ve done a better job with how you segmented your customers and/or how you adapted your product offering or commercial model, improving your chances of success.
What gets in the way of this insight?
Skill for sure. It is a skill and it is not equally distributed among founders and leaders.
But furthermore, the thing that gets in many people’s way is their mindset.
They wholeheartedly agree that others could fall prey to the customer problem blindspots above (smiling as they read), but they are sure that they are themselves immune to these blindspots, because they are so smart, so customer-centric, so persistent, such domain experts, so vision-driven, etc. etc.
They are certain they can read their customers’ minds, but alas they fail to read the tricks their own mind is playing on them.
Since violent drivers are recycling that old trope about how bicyclists need to stop at every stop sign, thought I'd recycle this old story about how drivers went apeshit when we did.
When in 2007 the mayor of #Ljubljana proposed to close 12 hectares of its city center to private cars, just 40% of residents approved.
A decade later, no less than 97% were against reopening to motor traffic: “None of us can really imagine cars ever staging a comeback”.
We’re missing a crucial housing type in the U.S.:
Housing over small shops
Life on the ground floor
Starter homes above
It creates the backbone of a walkable city.
Also known as a Residential-over-Retail, a 15 minute street, and a Livable Community.
@ShabazzStuart@NYC_DOT IMO the signature achievement of citibikes/shared bikes isnt the sharing of a bike, it’s the safe and secure parking of a bike - SAFE parking is RARE - a challenge for decades
@BKBPReynoso@StreetsblogNYC seems like outlawing or restricting e-bikes would be a bad idea right about now - and more unobstructed and safe bike lanes would be net positive