Coda black and white exercise
Pick an application you’re using, and speak to where you think it fits on the BLAC and White matrix.
Or consider Coda (the application you’re using now) and its value proposition. The company is building “a new doc that brings words, data, and teams together.” From launching products to planning marketing campaigns to making information accessible, Coda makes it easy for teams to collaborate, get organized, and get work done. Where does it fit in the BLAC and WHITE framework?
Share your answer below
Coda BLAC and WHITE?
| Product | Is it Blatant or Latent? | Why B/L? | Is it Aspirational or Critical? | Why A/C? | Where is the WHITE space for the product in the market |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coda |
🎙 Hear how Michael taught it the lecture, cleaned & woven in
▶ Watch the original lecture
To close the BLAC & White framework, a student asked me to walk through it once more, and it’s worth restating simply.
A lot of products start out latent and aspirational: things people would like to have, nice-to-haves. But where you want to get to is blatant and critical: a must-have. I don’t need to tell you what a must-have is. Everything that’s subsistence is a must-have: food, water, health, anything that lets you do your job. The things at the other end are nice-to-haves depending on circumstance: entertainment is a nice-to-have compared to health; fashion is a nice-to-have compared to (it’s winter in Boston) something that protects you from the cold. There are just basic ways to distinguish nice-to-haves from must-haves.
The more clearly you understand how to move a need from the nice-to-have quadrant to the must-have quadrant, the better positioned you are. So when you build out your own value prop on your board, place your need honestly, and ask your users how critical it really is, and what they’d spend their money and time on instead.