Finds unmet market gaps by ranking jobs-to-be-done on importance versus satisfaction, overlaying them against current solutions and workarounds, and validating that each gap is real, winnable, and worth winning. Use when someone asks "where are the gaps in this market", "what's underserved here", "where should we play next", or is hunting for product, feature, or market-entry opportunities. Do NOT use for profiling competitors and building battle cards - use competitive-intelligence instead; for putting a dollar figure on an identified opportunity - use market-sizing instead; for extracting jobs-to-be-done from raw customer interviews - use jtbd-extractor instead.
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name: White Space Analysis
description: Finds unmet market gaps by ranking jobs-to-be-done on importance versus satisfaction, overlaying them against current solutions and workarounds, and validating that each gap is real, winnable, and worth winning. Use when someone asks "where are the gaps in this market", "what's underserved here", "where should we play next", or is hunting for product, feature, or market-entry opportunities. Do NOT use for profiling competitors and building battle cards - use competitive-intelligence instead; for putting a dollar figure on an identified opportunity - use market-sizing instead; for extracting jobs-to-be-done from raw customer interviews - use jtbd-extractor instead.
---
# White Space Analysis
Find the gaps where customer needs exist but good solutions do not. White space is the intersection of an important, unsatisfied job and weak competitive coverage. The costly failure this skill prevents is the mirage gap: a space that looks empty because incumbents rationally avoided it - no willingness to pay, no economic way to serve it - entered at full cost and exited two years later.
## Inputs to collect
1. **The market and customer segment**, precisely: white space is relative to a specific customer, and a gap for one segment is well-served for another.
2. **Customer evidence**: interviews, surveys, reviews, support tickets, community threads. JTBD must come from research, not imagination - if only internal assumptions exist, label every job "hypothesis" and treat validation as the next step, not a formality.
3. **The known solution landscape**, including in-house tools and manual workarounds the team has seen.
4. **The user's capability base**: what they could credibly build or deliver, since a gap is only an opportunity for someone equipped to fill it.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Define the market and customer
Specify the segment and the context of use. Write one sentence: "White space for [segment] trying to [context]." Every later judgment is relative to this sentence.
### Step 2: Map jobs-to-be-done
List the jobs customers are trying to get done - **functional, emotional, and social**. For each job capture the desired outcome and how customers measure success. Then score each job on two axes, 1-10:… load the full skill through Skill Me