John Gusiff, Founder and Managing Partner of Customer Centric Solutions LLC. Twenty-five years spent finding what actually moves buyers — and building the go-to-market that acts on it. Design for customer progress, and growth follows.
Not stages in a sequence — goals a team designs for, usually several at once. Each one fails for a different reason, and each one needs a different kind of evidence to fix. Most of what I do is finding which goal is actually the binding constraint, then getting the evidence that moves it.
Each card below opens the interview type that answers it. Working from a symptom rather than a goal? Start from what's going wrong →
Attracts new customers, users, partners, or opportunities by making adoption more likely.
Increases the frequency, depth, or quality of interaction, creating more value with each use.
Increases the likelihood that customers continue using the product by raising realized value or switching costs.
Enables additional growth from existing relationships through more users, use cases, products, markets, or revenue.
Creates structural advantages that become increasingly difficult for competitors to replicate or overcome.
The one goal you don't pursue directly — it's what the other four produce when they compound. Loop & moats diagnostics →
Conversion data tells you a deal died. It won't tell you the buyer was never going to move, or that the message was aimed at a struggle they don't have, or that the thing blocking them had nothing to do with your product. A funnel is a record of what already happened.
It's also a shape that ends. A funnel converts a prospect and stops — next quarter starts empty. A loop takes the output of one cycle, a customer or a review or a piece of usage, and turns it into the input of the next one.
So most go-to-market work treats demand as something you capture. I treat it as something you have to see first, and then something you can compound. The reasons people switch and the reasons they stay put are knowable — they just aren't in your CRM.
Named by what compounds and what the customer retains — not by the channel it runs through. Co-created with Krzysztof Czubak.
Whether a company actually has a loop, or a funnel dressed as one, is what the two loop diagnostics are built to answer. One looks across the whole business; the other tests a single loop.
Looks across the whole business: which loop types your GTM motion can actually run, what compounds for you, and what the customer keeps.
Takes one specific loop you're running or planning and tests whether it truly feeds itself, or just looks like it does.
Most of my career was spent alongside CX and CMO leaders — strategy and execution both, across the full arc from acquisition to defensibility.
Advisory, strategy, research, and experience design — ecobee, Porch.com, ModeSens, Stillaton, Narrio, erom.io.
American Honda, lululemon, Canada Goose, Citibank, Disney, eBay, G Adventures, TransAlta, Kaiser Permanente.
Working across both ends taught me where the line actually sits. The forces that move or stall a decision are the same ones. How they show up is not: a consumer's anxiety is about wasting money, a committee member's is about their reputation. More people, more risk, and more time change which forces dominate and how long they take to resolve.
Nobody wakes up wanting your product. Demand begins when the way someone gets a job done stops working well enough. Find that moment and you find the market. Miss it and you're writing to people who aren't looking.
Six forces, not four. Three move people toward change; three hold them still. The second three are usually where the answer is, and the interviews are built to surface them.
Naming a barrier doesn't remove it. As a certified instructor in Massimo Ingegno's Make It Toolkit, I turn findings into behavioral design that removes friction rather than describing it.
Most practice concentrates on the left column because those are the forces people volunteer. The right column is why a market with an obvious problem still won't move.
Each one is built to read these forces at a different point in the customer's progress, from the first switch to the decision to leave or expand.
There are people behind every number on the dashboard.
They're trying to make progress on something that matters to them, and something is standing in the way.
Everything else (the interviews, the loops, the moats) is machinery in service of that.
Behavioral research on demand across the Cycle of Customer Progress. Seasonal, five to six issues at a time.
Defensibility, loops, and the moats that turn out to be walls around empty ground.
Whether you need research, which method fits, or whether you need research at all. If the answer is that you don't, that's a fine outcome for a short call.
Boutique means assembled, not small. I lead every engagement and do the analysis myself. Around that I build the team the work requires — recruiters, moderators, quantitative analysts, designers — drawn from people I've worked with for years. Senior judgment on every project, the capacity of a firm, and no bench to pay for between engagements.
