Business Owners Always Get This Backwards
https://jamesarcher.co Successful marketing begins with the product itself, emphasizing the importance of understanding market needs and desires before product development. Many…
Product
Do You Really Know Your Company's Target Audience? (Probably Not)
https://jamesarcher.co Your business has a target audience of customers, influencers, and others who can affect the sale of your product. This is how to figure out who they are,…
Founders, It's Time to Get REAL
https://jamesarcher.co Ensuring your product or service addresses a genuine customer problem is crucial for startup success. Many startups fail by attempting to solve issues tha…
Your Company NEEDS an Audience Profile
https://jamesarcher.co Creating a detailed customer profile or persona is a pivotal step in product or service development, making it easier to target and solve problems for a s…
The Product Design Pyramid
If you make it to the top, you'll have one of the best and most delightful products in your market. The product design and user experience design industries are full of vague phrases like "delightful experiences" without a lot of specifics about how to get there. Many designers find themselves fl…
Smart People Always Mess This Up
Smart teams overthink and smother good ideas. Skip the grand plan. Ship the uncomfortable core, learn from real demand, evolve ruthlessly, and build only what customers prove they need.
Stop Talking About Customer Experience (And Start Doing It)
Your brand story might be a glossy promise your operations can’t cash. Peek behind the ads to the tiny moments that prove who you are and decide whether you’re different.
You Don't Get Long Walks on the Beach with Your Customers
Customers will not study your product. This piece shows how sharp positioning, emotional cues, proactive feedback, and relentless messaging create attention fast and convey your value proposition before interest fades.
Clear Purpose, Clear Decisions
Stop hemming and hawing. A clear purpose turns messy choices into reflex, rallies your team, justifies tough sacrifices, and keeps you advancing like a disciplined chess player while competitors scramble.
Six Hard Questions Every Business Owner Should Be Able to Answer
Rediscover roots. Trade trend chasing for clarity by answering tough questions about purpose, values, positioning, audience, style, and vision that realign teams, sharpen decisions, and build momentum.
What is Design Thinking?
There’s a common thread between companies like Tesla, Airbnb, Uber, SpaceX, Spotify, Square, Netflix and others that have successfully overturned decades of convention and built business empires around solutions that rendered their competitors almost instantly obsolete. It’s called “design thinking,…
The 5 Key Customer Motivators
Far too many experiences are designed around the assumption that people want to be engaging with them. It’s an easy mistake to make. If you’re designing, say, an ecommerce site, it would be natural to assume your customers have an internal drive to find a product they want, add it to their cart, a…
Product Design as Haiku
Haiku’s limits reveal a creative superpower. Embrace real world constraints, balance freedom with discipline, and watch work sharpen, teams align, and surprising solutions emerge where budgets, timelines, and purpose collide.
Project Management? Try Expectations Management
Why identical outcomes spark love or fury. Explore how dopamine, clear communication, and expectation management turn projects into loyalty. Discover healthcare inspired habits that keep customer experience steady.
Why Business Owners Fear Customer Research
Customer research is fundamental to the design process. It’s been well established that relying on assumptions alone leads us to make biased decisions that often fail to reflect the reality of the customer’s needs and wants, leading to poor results (including reduced revenue). Basically, it’s more e…