The trap

Inside every customer’s situation there is a trap: the specific structural reason they have not already fixed the thing you fix. And it is the part of the Customer Story that most people leave out, which is a mistake, because it is the part that does the most work.

The sharpest trap in the system

Here is the sharpest version of a trap in the whole system, worth memorising the shape of it. Picture a company where replacing the thing costs two hundred thousand pounds, visibly. Doing nothing costs the same, invisibly. And between a visible cost and an invisible one, the invisible cost wins every budget cycle. Read that again. Nobody is being stupid. The customer is behaving rationally given how the costs present themselves. That is what a real trap looks like: not stupidity, but a structure that makes staying stuck the sensible choice.