Trade-Offs
We live in a
world where time, energy, and resources are finite. There are only twenty-four
hours in a day, you only have so much available energy, and at any given time
there’s an upper limit on the amount of money you’re able to spend. What do you
do when you can’t do everything you want?
A Trade-off
is a decision that places a higher value on one of several competing
options.
You can’t have
everything you want all of the time. Even if your bank account is large enough
to purchase a private island, you’re still faced with the decision of which private
island to buy. You may want it all, but you can’t have it all, so you do the
best you can by choosing the option with the characteristics that matter most
to you at the moment you make the decision.
Every minute of
every day, you and the people around you are making Trade-offs. Some of these Trade-offs
are economic: which watch should you purchase? Some of them are temporal:
should you visit your friend or go to a movie? Some of them are about effort:
should you go to the team meeting or complete the overdue report?
Predicting how
people will make certain Trade-offs
is tricky — values change quickly, given the environment and context. Values
are preferences — how much we want, desire, or place importance on one particular
object, quality, or state of being versus another. What you value this morning
may be different from what you value this afternoon or this evening. What you
want today may be different from what you want tomorrow.
When making
decisions about what to include in your offering, it pays to look for Patterns
— how specific groups of people tend to value some characteristic in a
certain context. The decisions you make about what to include and what to leave
out will never make everyone happy, so perfection shouldn’t be your goal. By
paying attention to the Patterns behind what your best customers value,
you’ll be able to focus on improving your offering for most of your
potential customers most of the time.
Just one more thing before you go … I’d like to ask you to do one important thing for me – spread the word about this article.
That is all -
David
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