2. Where segments conflict

§The hypothesis: where two segments' jobs conflict, the first version can serve one without imposing a cost on the other that the other will refuse to bear.

§Four canvases side by side show something one canvas hides: places where relieving one segment's pain creates another's. This chapter is about finding those places on paper, because finding them in production is expensive.

§ 2.1The seam#

§Most products with an operational side have a seam where the customer's job meets the operation's. The customer wants to be recognized without doing anything. The server wants to know the regular is coming, but cannot type anything during service. The manager wants the data captured, but the data is captured by the server, who has no hands free.

§In platform terms, Parker, Van Alstyne and Choudary's frame, the product creates value by connecting sides, and each side's willingness to participate depends on what it costs them. A side that bears cost without gain leaves, and when it leaves the value for the other side goes with it.

§ 2.2Naming it#

§For each pair of segments, one line: what segment A gains, what segment B pays, and whether B has said, in an interview, that they would pay it. In the case:

§The customer builds her own profile, so the server captures nothing during service. The server pays a glance at a screen before seating. Five of six said they would gladly.

§The operation reads the profile before serving, so the manager gets knowledge that survives turnover. The server pays a share of what made them individually valuable. Nobody had asked them; it went on the list as an open assumption with an owner.

§The reservation flow shows other brands when a table is full, so the occasional customer gets a table. The first restaurant pays a lost cover to a sibling. The managers had not been asked either.

§ 2.3Choosing a side for the first version#

§A conflict cannot be resolved by building for both. It is resolved by deciding whose job the first version serves and writing down what the other side pays, so the cost is a known quantity rather than a surprise.

§The rule from the fourth whitepaper applies: the side that depends on no one goes first. The customer could build her own profile without the operation lifting a finger. That resolved the first conflict in her favor for act one, and made the server's cost, a glance, small enough to ask for in act two. The manager's gain and the server's loss of leverage were deferred with the assumption written down, because resolving that conflict required a conversation the team had not yet had.

§ 2.4The absent side#

§The sprint's own honesty about its weakest interviews matters here. Two operations interviewees barely touched the screen; nobody from the kitchen was interviewed; nothing was tested at peak hour. The operation was the under-served side, and business design cannot fix that with a canvas. What it can do is mark every assumption about the operation's cost as unverified and send the team back to the discovery loop, the third whitepaper's conversations with nothing in hand, before act two depends on it.

§ 2.5What has to be true#

§Added to the running list: for each pair of conflicting segments, what one gains, what the other pays, whether the paying side has agreed in an interview, and if not, who will ask them and by when. For the first version: which side it serves and what the other side is asked to bear, in one sentence.