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The frameworks the best operators use, pressure-tested across 150+ real healthcare companies. You're not getting one person's opinion. You're getting the synthesis.

DH
Doug Hayes · Marblehead
Twenty years selling and raising in healthcare, as an investor, a founder, and inside a health system. Pattern recognition across 150+ companies and 60+ health systems.
Frameworks drawn from the work of
The idea · 2 min

People don't buy products. They hire them.

A customer "hires" a product to make progress in a situation. Get the job right and the strategy gets obvious: who to sell to, what to build, and what you're really competing against. Get it wrong and you build features nobody hired you for.

What moves someone to switch
Drives change
Push of the problem
Pull of the new way
vs
Resists change
Anxiety of switching
Habit of today
You win by raising the two on the left and lowering the two on the right.
The job is a verb, not your feature
People hire progress, not products. Name the progress they're trying to make.
The decision is emotional and social
The functional task is table stakes. How they want to feel, and be seen, usually decides.
Your real rival is the status quo
Often you're competing with a spreadsheet, a workaround, or doing nothing. Name it honestly.
4 steps · saves in your browser · no email
Apply it to your company

Define the job your customer is hiring you for

The framework behind Christensen’s famous milkshake study, and the product strategy Intercom built a company on.

Step 1 of 4
Saves automatically in your browser.
How this works — what to do, and why
A customer hires a product to make progress. Start with one real customer who bought recently and the situation they were in the week they decided. From that single story, name the job (a verb, not a feature) as a plain sentence: when… I want to… so I can…

Optional depth, for later. Every job has three layers: functional (the practical task), emotional (how they want to feel), and social (how they want to be seen). Four forces decide switching: push of the situation and pull of the new way (which you want to raise); anxiety of the new and habit of today (which you want to lower). And your real competition is usually what they hire today: a spreadsheet, a workaround, or nothing at all. We work these with you on real deals; the two-minute path above is enough to get moving.
Your job statement
Your one next move

Take this to three buyer conversations this week.

Read the statement out loud to three real buyers. If they finish your sentence, you've got the job. If they hesitate on the motivation or outcome, revise that clause and re-test before you change anything about the product.

Want the full read? Request a call.

This is the two-minute version. The full version is what we do together, applied to your live deals.

Want to pressure-test this job with someone who's sold into healthcare?

Getting the job right is where most healthcare go-to-market quietly goes wrong. A short call, no pitch.

Request a call with Doug
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