Gap-First Thinking
Prioritize ops work by the gaps your customers feel, not the pain your teams feel.
Human truth
Ops teams work on whatever is loudest inside the building. The customer is running into a different set of problems, and nobody on the backlog speaks for them.
The parts
The customer-felt gap
A gap is a place where the buying experience breaks for the customer. They have to chase you for a demo, or spend their own political capital to get a purchase through. Every gap costs you something: they buy less, sign shorter, or don't take you to the rest of their company.
The internal pain
A bumpy handoff between sales and marketing, a messy field, a report nobody likes. These are real, and they feel urgent because the people feeling them sit near you. If the customer never sees them, they wait.
The roadmap
Every piece of ops work on the roadmap ties back to a gap a customer is experiencing. If it can't, it moves down.
When to reach for it
Your ops backlog is long and every request is marked urgent. Or customers buy, but less than you expected, and they're slow to expand. Ask why they didn't buy more instead of why they bought.
The essay
M
ost ops backlogs are a list of complaints from inside the building.
A rep says the CRM is broken. Marketing says the handoff to sales is a mess. Someone in finance wants a new field. Every request is real, and every one comes from somebody with a desk near yours. So that's the order the work gets done in: whoever is loudest, closest, or most senior.
At Go Nimbly we built our practice on a different question. Where does the customer feel it?
Who cares if the sales-to-marketing handoff is a little bumpy internally, if the customer never sees it? That bump can wait. The gaps that matter are the ones the buyer runs into. The demo they have to fight to get. The purchase they have to sell to their own boss twice.
Customers shouldn't have to use political capital to buy your product. Every gap spends a little of it. So they buy less, sign shorter contracts, or never take you across the rest of their company, because it's too much of a fight inside their own building.
That changes what you ask them. Skip why they bought from you, and ask why they didn't buy more, or expand faster. The answer to that one is a list of gaps.
Then you build the roadmap from the list. Every piece of ops work ties back to a gap a customer is feeling. If it doesn't, it goes lower. An ops team isn't there to service the internal ops of the business. It's there to service the customer.
I still work this way. When customer feedback comes in now, I sort it into one of three gaps: a training gap, an account management gap, or a product gap. My job is to point at the gap. The team's job is to find the fastest way across it. Some gaps need a plank. Some need a real bridge.
The internal pain doesn't go away. It just stops setting the agenda. ■
Where it came from
Gap-first thinking is a Go Nimbly idea, built by the team there, and Jason has been one of its public voices since around 2020. Jen Igartua, later Go Nimbly's CEO, teaches it too. The Go Nimbly team also split gaps into customer experience gaps and scale gaps. Jason's own addition in recent years is the three-way sort of feedback into training, account management and product gaps.