Hey, happy Monday, good to have you here!
This is note number ninety-nine, a great milestone that deserves to be celebrated. Don’t miss number 100 because we will be announcing the next STRTGY Meetings. We will be back to meet (still virtually for the time being) and learn from the best.
Contrary to what it might seem when you read the table of contents of this note, I would like to reassure you that I am not going to talk to you (like everyone else) about Job to be Done as a theory for its own sake, and I am not going to give you a list of simple tricks (which do not exist) for bringing it into the company (which is very complicated-but incredibly useful).
I would like to use this space to offer you a new pair of glasses to observe what is going on, to allow you to interpret a part of the world that right now might dazzle us and look different from the previous one, but it is not.
I had already talked about it at Product Management Day, and I will talk about it, elaborating on the concept atItaly’s Growth Talent for which there is still time to get a ticket.
My talk will be on Thursday, February 3 at 7:30 pm. I hope you will have already left the work day behind and can join the1% of product managers (and their leaders) who will want to separate themselves from the pack. I will show you practically how to make a roadmap with mathematical precision, using precisely JTBD.
But in the meantime, let’s start the week by getting our hands on something practical.
I hope to see you soon.
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS
-Antonio
● PRODUCTS / We talk about money
What is Web 3 ?
To understand it you have to go through all the web versions you have experienced:
Web 1. No one knew what it was. The web was a web of HTML pages written in Notepad and blue links. Webmasters were born, and the way to join the world was to have a free email (some people are still ashamed of their email they opened as teenagers and never changed-including me).
The Web was really decentralized in the sense that there was no one in charge. If you knew how to do it you could create your own page and be online.
Web 2. If you’re not on the Internet, you don’t exist, and the companies that have made (economic) sense of this new space before the others have managed to create mega-platforms that have become the primary way to certify our online identity. Log-in with Facebook (or whatever). We inform ourselves, we entertain ourselves (gaming alone exceeds the sales of music and movies-crazy), we buy, and we have traded our privacy for service.
The Web is in the hands of a few big companies that use algorithms (others have algorithms too, but they don’t have enough data to make them smart) to make our lives so quick and easy that we don’t even take the time to question what is happening to us because it has already happened (Web 2 is in real-time).
Web 3. We cannot hide the fact that life has improved because of Web 2 but precisely because there is too much of us out there that we need to take back control. Web 3 does the same things as Web 2 but it is all decentralized which means that the infrastructure is everyone’s and no one’s (the protocol) but the data is yours and the best place to hide it is out in the open so it is public but secure (encrypted). It is precisely this technical inviolability that allows the data to be given a new tangible value on par with the money with which it is exchanged.
The Proof of Profit.
Hegel said that as a phenomenon increases, not only its quantity changes but also the quality of the world in which it occurs. Galimberti (in one of his talks) gives an example that explains this theorem very precisely: if there is a mild earthquake no one notices, but if the earthquake is very strong everything collapses and the world afterwards is visually different.
Going back to our story, if a few nerds had kept exchanging a few bitcoins the world would have remained the same but if the entire planet exchanges billions of dollars daily for crypto text strings then an earthquake happens! Which is what is happening.
Money is what moves the world because it is used to meet people’s needs.
Web 3 is the promise that control of this asset can be returned to people and not to a few organizations.
Apparently (I explain this more in the next block).
● PRODUCTS / History repeating
JTBD and Web 3 ?
Moxie Marlinspike is the pseudonym of Matthew Rosenfeld, an entrepreneur and cryptographer, and has written one of the most important pieces, perhaps because it is the clearest on Web 3 and strongly inspired this note. I invite you to read it. Here is the link.
I want to bring your attention to this sentence of his.
People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. – Moxie Marlinspike
The Web is a technically complicated space.
By itself, the flood of encrypted data available to anyone is incomprehensible and unusable. To make sense of it, you have to build dApps on it, i.e., apps that leverage the blockchain to accomplish a task: from art to video games, from social networks to marketplaces, from memes to insurance. Find a global ranking here.
As you can see, the competition is already very high, and as in all races, whoever goes the fastest wins.
It is when things are complicated that the opportunity to make (lots of) money materializes by making them simpler, faster, cheaper, safer, for everyone. This is the true entrepreneurial spirit!
What happens is that attached to the backbone of the blockchain are two companies you may not have heard of, Infura and Alchemy, which offer APIs to developers who want to build dApps, and it also happens that these services are designed so well that there are no better alternatives (or very few) and so most dApps use their infrastructure. Their competitive advantage is Design!
If Infura and Alchemy’s servers were to go down for some reason no one could use those blockchain-based dApps anymore!
But excuse me, wasn’t everything decentralized? Didn’t everything belong to everyone?
Yes but demand always matters more than supply, shaping the market and making sure that value is always concentrated in those who remove, faster than competitors, bottlenecks from the experience.
I read that Jeff Bezos complains in interviews that too many times they ask him “what will happen in 10 years” while according to him the real question is “what will NOT happen in 10 years.”
From Web 1 to Web 3 (and beyond) the technology changes but not what people want, who yesterday as today do not feel like managing complexity but just enjoying the party.
And that is the power of JTBD and how it influences Design processes. The ability, applicable to every industry and product, to understand what is the most stable level of real purchase motivations that you necessarily need to know in order to build on it for the next evolution.
There is a set of practices that I will tell about in my speech on Thursday, Feb. 3, at 7:30 p.m., that I have made available for members of the STRTGY community to adopt quickly in their own teams.
I look forward to seeing you at the event, but if you want preview access to the work write me privately, I will be happy to show you more.
