I've spent my career trying to understand why people buy and why some companies decide better than others

Where I started

I started in words. A degree in English, then journalism and creative work for one of Kenya's larger digital platforms, writing news features and campaigns for banks, property companies and telecoms. It taught me something that market research textbooks do not: attention is not given, it is earned sentence by sentence, and people can tell immediately when you are describing them from the outside.

What marketing taught me, and what it couldn't

Marketing and SEO gave me distribution mechanics — how demand is expressed, how it can be measured, how a business becomes findable. But I kept running into the same wall. Campaigns underperformed for reasons that had nothing to do with campaigns. The product was aimed at a job nobody was urgently trying to get done, or the positioning described an internal worldview rather than a buyer's problem. Executing harder against a bad premise is expensive.

The shift toward research and product strategy

So I moved upstream. Keyword research became demand research. Content strategy became a question about what the market believed and who owned which associations. That is the work I now do at GENIE AI and NO BS Marketplace: figuring out what is happening in a market, what customers are actually trying to accomplish, what should be built or changed, and only then how it should be found.

Why JTBD matters to me

Jobs To Be Done gave me a way of asking the question properly. Not who the customer is, but what progress they were trying to make and what nearly stopped them. I use it constantly — it is why the JTBD Software Advisor exists — but I am wary of people who make it their whole identity. It explains decisions. It does not size markets or tell you what competitors are doing. It is one instrument.

Why AI changes the strategy landscape

The interesting change is not faster content. It is that discovery is being mediated by systems that compose answers, and that software can increasingly be given an objective rather than a sequence of steps. Both push the same conclusion: ambiguity about what you are for is punished faster than it used to be. That makes positioning and product clarity commercial infrastructure, not marketing garnish.

What I work on now

Market and demand research, customer intelligence, product and positioning decisions, and the distribution layer that follows from them — increasingly with tools I build myself, because the diagnosis was too slow to happen before decisions were made.

What I'm trying to become

Better at the ambiguous end. The work I want is the kind where nobody yet agrees what the problem is, where research has to be turned into a decision, and where the answer crosses market, product and go-to-market at once. That is where I am most useful, and it is the through-line of everything on this site.

See the work→