What are You Replacing?

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes, and I'm joined as always by the cofounders of thirty seven Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen. This week, I thought we'd talk a little bit about product development, specifically about a tweet Jason recently wrote where he is discussing how product development is more about what people are going to have to give up, opposed to what they're gaining from your product. Jason, I'm just gonna start with you. You had a great tweet. I loved it. In fact, there's one line that I particularly was drawn to, which is when you're thinking about your product, think about what it replaces, not just what it offers. Yeah. This is based on the jobs to be done theory. I mean, it's not I guess, it's not really based on that, but jobs to be done incorporates this thinking, which is, there's this idea of the present or the habit of the present, which is, like, what are people already doing? We often think we're making something new, and you might be making something new. And sometimes, I mean, sometimes there is something radically new that is new, new, new that people weren't doing before at all. But in most cases, people are already doing something. They're solving this problem some way that they have. They're dealing with it one way or the other. Like, for example, we launched Basecamp. People are using email. They weren't using other product management tools or project management tools. They're using email, meetings, phone calls, whatever, and they had to give up that habit of the present, what they were used to doing already before they would move to something like base camp. So it's just important to know and to recognize right up front that you're not very rarely are you picking up someone who's not doing anything. So they have to put something else down essentially before they can pick up your thing. They might use both simultaneously for a while until they figure out which one works best for them, but they're already solving this problem one way, and your solution has to be typically so much better or open up new opportunities they didn't know they they needed or new situations they didn't know they had or whatever it might be for them to break free of the habit of the present and to have something new pull them into a new way of doing things. That's what the tweet was about. That's what's always always has to be on your mind as a builder, as a maker, and that's what you're always up against. Rarely are you really up against, like, a competing product that's so obviously a competing product. You're often up against whatever people are doing, and it's often a series of different things. For base games, the way we've often thought about …