Before You Build: Study Customer Progress (The Serenity App Case Study)
JOHN GUSIFF
Managing Partner - Customer Centric LLC
Before You Build: Study Customer Progress (The Serenity App Case Study)
You set out to build The Serenity App—a polished mindfulness product with thoughtful features.
But instead of building first, you stopped to understand customer progress—why people seek mindfulness at all.
What you found reshaped everything.
People don’t look for meditation sessions—they look for relief from overwhelm, anxiety, exhaustion, and emotional noise.
They want clarity, calm, and to feel like themselves again.
Studying customer progress revealed:
the moment they say “I can’t keep doing this,”
the desires pulling them forward,
the avoidances and fears holding them back,
and the emotional outcomes they hope to feel.
Then you realized progress varies by person.
Using the Big Five Personality Traits, you saw that different people need different paths—some need safety, some structure, some novelty, some encouragement, some momentum.
This course teaches you how to uncover all of that through a guided, interactive JTBD case study built around The Serenity App—so you design not just features, but experiences aligned with the progress people truly seek.
What you’ll learn
🚀 Learn customer JTBD principles & methods through an interactive ChatGPT case study (30+ scripts) using The Wheel of Progress® framework.
Identify the emotional, situational, and functional triggers that spark the search for mindfulness.
Use those insights to shape product ideas, onboarding, and messaging that feel instantly relevant.
Understand how people move from first thought → passively looking → actively looking → deciding → hiring → consuming → habitual use.
Spot opportunities to reduce friction, increase motivation, and create experiences that support long-term engagement.
Break down customer desires, pains, gains, constraints, and anxieties using a structured framework.
Translate these insights into sharper positioning, clearer value propositions, and more resonant product decisions.
Create realistic personas that reflect emotional patterns, habit tendencies, and decision styles—not demographics.
Tailor experiences, messaging, and activation paths to different psychological profiles to improve conversion and retention.
Learn how to speak the way customers think—mirroring their words, metaphors, and emotional needs.
Use ChatGPT to test website headlines, emails, onboarding copy, and feature descriptions to dramatically increase resonance and clarity.
Who this course is for
The Product Designer seeking to design experiences that reflect how different people pursue a goal, handle friction, and define success.
The Product Developer looking to prioritize features and journeys based on how customers move from struggle to consistent use.
The UX Researcher aiming to uncover deeper motivations, personality patterns, and progress pathways across diverse customer types.
What's included
Live sessions
Learn directly from JOHN GUSIFF in a real-time, interactive format.
Lifetime access
Go back to course content and recordings whenever you need to.
Community of peers
Stay accountable and share insights with like-minded professionals.
Certificate of completion
Share your new skills with your employer or on LinkedIn.
Maven Guarantee
This course is backed by the Maven Guarantee. Students are eligible for a full refund up until the halfway point of the course.
Course syllabus
3 live sessions • 28 lessons
Week 1
Jan
19
Session One: The Wheel of Progress® framework and Cycle of Customer Progress
Core Principles of Customer Jobs to be Done based Research
Introduction to B2C Case Study and Customer Job-to-be-done
Overview of The Wheel of Progress® Framework
The Twelve Elements of Customer Progress
The Four Quadrants of the WOP (Awareness, Expectations, Trade-offs, Experience)
The Cycle of Customer Progress (First Thought through Continuous Use)
Solutions and Constraints (internal, external, time-based)
Jan
21
Session Two: The Twelve Elements of Customer Progress and Switching Behavior
Forces and Desires (Habits, Pushes, Desires, Avoidances, Pulls, Anxieties)
Switching Behavior (Promoting Forces overcoming Blocking Forces)
Customer Jobs, Pains and Gains
JTBD as a Process (a series of steps)
Jan
23
Session Three: Synthetic Personas and Language Market Fit
Product Market-fit vs. Language Market Fit
Determining Language Market Fit (Headlines, Testimonials, Features/Benefits)
Synthetic Personas using the Five Big Personality Traits
Free lesson
Map the Mind: Behavioral Journey Mapping
The Make It Toolkit for Behavioral Design
Making the Design Sprint process more human-centered by integrating the makeit toolkit into it.
The Five Laws of Behavior
The Five Laws of Behavior B=f(P,E), B=f(S1,S2), A->B->C, B=MAP, and B=f(I,E) to inform behavioral design.
Behavioral Journey Map vs. Traditional Journey Map
The core differences between a behavioral journey map and a traditional journey map (focus, design objective, etc.).
Core Components of a Behavioral Journey Map
The core components to a behavioral journey map (prompts, behavior, consequences, barriers, and opportunity points).
Opportunity Points informed by Behavioral Barriers
Uncover different design intervention opportunities (antecedent, behavioral, consequential) across the journey.
Schedule
Live sessions
6 hrs
Three LIVE Cohort Sessions; all sessions recorded.
Mon, Jan 19
8:00 PM—10:00 PM (UTC)
Wed, Jan 21
8:00 PM—10:00 PM (UTC)
Fri, Jan 23
8:00 PM—10:00 PM (UTC)
Projects
3 hrs
Serenity App case study having 30+ ChatGPT prompts and exercises. Performed during the LIVE cohort sessions (no homework assignments).
Async content
2 hrs
Relevant articles and videos to teach additional jobs-to-be-done-related concepts.
Frequently asked questions
$425
USD