Uncover the emotional and social jobs
When: The product meets its functional spec, the price is right, and sales or adoption still stall. Objections sound irrational or keep changing. Prospects go quiet at the decision point rather than at evaluation.
The action: Go back to the switching stories and probe what people were feeling and who was watching. Every job carries functional, emotional, and social dimensions, and the stall usually lives in the second two. Name the anxieties out loud, then address them in the offer itself rather than in the product backlog.
Forces: Emotional and social dimensions are invisible in analytics and awkward to raise in B2B settings, against the cost of endlessly polishing a functional product that was never the blocker. The temptation to guess at emotions rather than hear them in stories is strong, and guessed emotions are fiction.
Signals: Within weeks, the sales or onboarding conversation names and answers a specific anxiety it previously ignored. At least one stalled deal or drop-off point is explained by something other than features or price. The offer changes in a way the roadmap alone would never have produced.
When not to: When you have no story evidence and would be inventing an emotional narrative to fit a stall better explained by function or price. When the anxiety is rational and the honest response is fixing the product rather than reassuring around it.
Instance: The Detroit condo builder in Christensen and Moesta's account, where downsizers stalled not on the units but on the anxiety of leaving a life behind, crystallised in the dining room table. Solving for the move itself, with storage and moving services, grew sales in a falling market.
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