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Who is paying, what they are actually buying, and how a tally of what customers do settles it where an assumption cannot.
Paper packet. Every task here also exists on screen, where it is checked automatically; answers written on paper are not assessed by Nydus. When you are back at a device, enter your answers there.
You will name the group of customers a business is actually selling to, say what they are buying rather than what the owner is proudest of, and tell an observation from an assumption about what people are like. You will keep a tally, turn it into a share or a sum of sales lost, and write the one sentence that says what the customer is buying and how you know.
You know what your business creates, how it delivers it, and what it charges. What that leaves open is whose judgment decides whether it is worth the money. This lesson moves the question from the workshop to the customer, and gives you a way to answer it with counts rather than with opinions — including your own.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Customer | The person who pays; sometimes not the person who uses what is bought. |
| Segment | A group of customers who buy for the same reason, named by that reason. |
| Observation | A record of something that happened: a count, a day, a person walking away. |
| Assumption | A sentence about what people are like, which nothing written down could prove wrong. |
| Job to be done | What the customer was trying to get done when they bought. |
| Tally | A count kept over a set period, so the same thing can be counted again later. |
| Share | The count who did something, divided by everyone counted. |
Value is judged by the person paying, not by the person who made it. What an owner is proudest of and what a customer is buying are usually two different things, and the only way to tell them apart is to watch what people actually do: what they ask about first, what makes them leave, what they come back for.
The owner knows which part of the job was hardest; that answers a different question. The customer mostly cannot say why they bought — but they can behave, and behavior is free to watch. Write down three things:
Another way: table
The same business, read two ways.
| The owner's sentence | What the evidence says | |
|---|---|---|
| Maya's Ceramics | two years to get this glaze right | four of the last ten asked for a gift box before the price |
| Neighborhood Kitchen | the recipe is my grandmother's | people leave the line when it reaches the lamp post |
| Northside Repairs | board-level work nobody else does | the jobs quoted at three days are never collected |
The left column is true; the right is what gets paid for. Nothing in the right column says the craft is wasted: the glaze, the recipe and the board-level skill are why each business is worth choosing at all. What the right column adds is the reason a customer chooses it today rather than the alternative on their way home.
Another way: steps
To turn a week of trading into one sentence:
Name the group. Everybody is not a customer group. Name the people by the reason they arrive: office workers with forty minutes, people buying a present, commuters walking past after the last bus. A group named by its reason tells you what to watch for.
Choose what to count before you start. Decide in advance: the first question each customer asks, how many leave the line, which extra people pay for. Counting what you already expect to find is how an assumption disguises itself as evidence.
Keep a tally for a fixed period. Twenty customers, one week, three Saturdays. A fixed period means the count can be repeated and compared.
Turn the tally into a share or a sum of money. Fourteen of twenty is 70 percent. Eight people leaving a line at 9 dollars is 72 dollars a day. Numbers like these can be set beside the cost of doing something about them.
Write the sentence. What they are buying is X, and I know because Y. Then decide what to change.
Check it by counting again after the change. If Maya adds gift boxes and the share of buyers asking for one falls while sales rise, the observation was right. If nothing moves, it was a coincidence, and the tally has told you that too — which is worth knowing before the next decision is built on it.
These two look alike and do different work.
> Takings collapse on the evenings I pack up at six.
> People round here want cheap fruit.
The first could be counted again next week, and if it is wrong next week says so. The second cannot be wrong in any way its author would notice.
The test is one question: what would I point at? A register roll or a person you can describe — an observation. Everybody knows — a theory, worth having as long as it is filed as one.
In many sales, three different people are involved. A child uses the school shoes, a parent pays, and the child's friends shape which pair is chosen. A company's office manager books the cleaner, the finance team pays, and the staff who use the kitchen decide whether the cleaner is kept. A gift is paid for by one person and used by another.
Each of them is buying something different. The payer cares about price and trust; the user about what it is like to use; the chooser about how it looks to others. Maya's gift box answers the payer — someone who wants the present to look considered — while the glaze answers the person who will use the mug for years. Both matter, and they matter to different people.
When the tally is kept, note which of the three each observation is about. A complaint from a user and a hesitation from a payer point at different fixes, and treating them as one voice sends the owner after the wrong one.
A tally does not need to be large to be useful, but it needs to be honest. Twenty customers is often enough to see a strong pattern — fourteen of twenty asking the same first question is hard to explain away. It is not enough to see a weak one: if six of twenty ask about gift boxes this week and four next week, nothing has changed; that is the ordinary wobble of small numbers.
Three habits keep a small tally honest. Count everyone in the period, not the ones you remember. The customer who left without speaking is part of the count, and the easiest to forget. Count on ordinary days as well as memorable ones. A tally kept only on busy Saturdays describes Saturday customers. Decide what counts before you start. If asked about the wait is the thing being counted, decide in advance whether is it busy today? counts, and stick to it.
Finally, beware the tally that confirms exactly what the owner already believed. It may be right; it may also mean the counting was steered. The useful surprises — the wheel-builder whose customers want speed, the potter whose buyers want a box — come from counts set up to find out, not to prove. A good test of a tally is whether it could have come out the other way. If no result would have changed the owner's mind, the counting was decoration; if one result would have, the counting was worth the afternoon it took, whichever way it came out.
A bicycle shop owner is proud of his wheel-building, which few shops still do by hand. He believes customers come for it. For three weeks his assistant keeps a tally at the service counter of the first thing each customer asks. Of 90 customers, 51 asked can I have it back today?, 22 asked the price, 11 asked about a specific part, and 6 asked about wheels.
So 51 ÷ 90 ≈ 57 percent led with speed, and about 7 percent with the thing the owner was proudest of. The tally also showed that of the customers told Thursday, one in five did not come back to collect for more than a week, and two left the bike elsewhere after asking. At an average service of 65 dollars, the counter was losing perhaps 8 services a month to the wait: about 520 dollars.
He did not stop building wheels. He set aside two bench hours every morning for same-day services booked before ten, and put a sign on the door saying so. A month later the tally showed same-day requests up and uncollected bikes down to almost none. The wheels still sell to the few who value them; the shop now also sells what most of its customers were asking for.
Researchers on innovation often describe customers as hiring a product to do a job — a milkshake bought for a boring commute, a drill bought for a hole in the wall. The idea is the one in this lesson: find out what the customer was trying to get done, by watching what they do, and the product that wins is the one that does that job best, not the one its makers are proudest of.
Asking people what they want. They answer politely and wrongly: nobody can introspect on a decision made in four seconds. Ask what they did when you were shut.
Taking the loudest customer for the market. One complaint is one person. The count of people who quietly left is the number that matters.
Assuming it is the price. Price is what owners reach for when they have not looked, because it is what they can change on Monday. Sometimes it is right, and only watching tells you which times.
Confusing who pays with who chooses. A present is bought by one person and used by another. They are not buying the same thing.
Treating the craft as irrelevant. Bad work loses customers too. The claim is narrower: past a standard the customer can detect, more skill is invisible to them.
Name the group Maya sells to.
$\text{people buying a present they do not want to look cheap}$
The segment is named by its reason, not everybody who likes pottery.
Write the owner's sentence.
$\text{two years to get the glaze right}$
True, and an answer to a different question.
Write the observation from the last ten buyers.
$4 \text{ of } 10 \text{ asked for a gift box before the price}$
A count, from a particular ten people.
Turn it into a share.
$4 \div 10 = 40\%$
A share can be compared after a change.
Write the sentence.
$\text{a present ready to give, because } 40\% \text{ asked for a box first}$
The glaze is why it is worth giving; the box is why it is bought here.
Name the group.
$\text{workers with forty minutes and nowhere to sit}$
The segment is named by the constraint they arrive with.
Write the owner's sentence.
$\text{my grandmother's recipe; no complaints about the food}$
Which is why the food is not the thing to work on.
Write the observation.
$8 \text{ people stepped out of the line in one lunch hour}$
Eight sales that did not happen, with a cause you can see.
Find the sales lost that day at 8 a box.
$8 \times 8 = 64$
The observation turned into money.
Scale to a month of 22 trading days.
$64 \times 22 = 1408$
The size of the prize for fixing the line.
Compare with the cost of a second serving hand for the lunch rush.
$2 \text{ hours} \times 15 \times 22 = 660$
A second pair of hands costs less than the sales the line loses.
Name the group.
$\text{households who book a regular clean}$
They arrive with a schedule, not a mess.
Write the owner's sentence.
$\text{the finish on the kitchen is the best in town}$
True, and not what the evidence is about.
Write the observation from last quarter.
$9 \text{ cancellations}; \ 9 \text{ followed a missed or moved appointment}$
A count that points at one cause.
Find the share.
$9 \div 9 = 100\%$
Every cancellation had the same history.
Find what the cancellations cost in a year at 60 a clean, every two weeks.
$9 \times 60 \times 26 = 14\,040$
Regular customers lost are a year of cleans each.
Write the sentence.
$\text{somebody who turns up on the day they said}$
What the customer is buying is reliability.
Decide where the next hour goes.
$\text{an hour on the schedule, not on the kitchen}$
The fix follows the evidence, not the owner's pride.
Write the owner's sentence.
$\text{board-level work nobody else does}$
Whose judgment is it? The owner's.
Write the observation: of 12 jobs quoted at three days last month, 7 were never collected.
$7 \div 12 \approx 58\%$
A count, turned into a share.
Write the sentence.
Four of the businesses in this course, and four things a customer has been seen paying for. Match each business to what its customers are actually buying.
| A present that arrives wrapped and needs nothing doing to it | A stall that is still open after the last bus | Somebody who turns up on the day they said | A phone back in your hand the same day | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maya's Ceramics | ||||
| Monica's Market Stall | ||||
| Bright Home Cleaning | ||||
| Northside Repairs |
Complete the worked solution: a lunch counter's owner counted 20 customers; $7$ of them asked how long the wait was before they asked what was on the menu. On the same day $9$ people left the line without buying, and a lunch costs $12$ dollars. The counter trades $24$ days a month.
Find the share who asked about the wait first.
$7 \div 20 \times 100 =$ s $\%$
A share is the count over everyone counted.
Find the sales lost that day.
$9 \times 12 =$ l
Each person who left is a sale that did not happen.
Scale it to the month.
$(\text{lost a day}) \times 24 =$ m
If the pattern holds on every trading day.
Write what the customers are buying.
$\text{lunch inside a short break}$
Both counts point at time, not at the recipe.
Say how to check it.
$\text{count again next week}$
An observation can be counted again; an assumption cannot.
The owner of Neighborhood Kitchen counts people stepping out of the lunch line when it reaches the lamp post: $5$ a day, every day he counts. A lunch box is $9$ dollars and the kitchen trades $19$ days a month. If the pattern holds, how many dollars of sales a month is the line costing?
Answer:
Five lines from a page in a stall-holder's notebook. Two of them are observations — something seen and counted. The other three are assumptions wearing the same clothes. Mark the two observations.
This task has no paper form; do it on a device.
Monica counts her last twenty customers: $15$ of them asked what time she shuts before they asked what anything cost. What percentage of those customers asked about the closing time first?
Answer:
Four lines from the page somebody keeps on Northside Repairs. They are not four answers to the same question — they are four different kinds of sentence, and only one of them settles anything. Say what each line is.
| What is this line? | |
|---|---|
| the board-level work nobody else in the town does | |
| the jobs quoted at three days are the ones that are never collected | |
| people whose phone is their only way of being reached | |
| that they get the phone back the same day |
A laundry has been open a month and the owner believes people come for the cheap machines. Over two weeks she counts 50 customers: $16$ paid 3 dollars extra to have their washing folded and ready by five, and $6$ paid 2 dollars for scented detergent. What percentage of customers paid for the folding?
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Share who paid for folding, as a decimal | |
| Share who paid for folding, percent | |
| Share who paid for scent, percent |
Lesson test: one question per skill, one attempt each, no hints. Your answers are checked when you submit.
Four lines from the page somebody keeps on Maya's Ceramics. They are not four answers to the same question — they are four different kinds of sentence, and only one of them settles anything. Say what each line is.
| What is this line? | |
|---|---|
| the glaze, which took her two years to get right | |
| four of the last ten buyers asked for a gift box before asking the price | |
| people buying a present they do not want to look cheap | |
| that it arrives wrapped and needs nothing doing to it |
You can say who pays, what they are buying, and which line on the page is evidence for it, and put a number on it. Tell someone the one sentence that shape takes: what they are buying is this, and I know because that. Next: the alternatives those same customers already have.
15. Your turn: Northside Repairs' uncollected jobs, step 3
$\text{a phone back the same day}$
What they are buying is speed, and the count says so.