Take the
Masterclass.

CBL helps teams investigate new business ideas, product and service improvements, pricing models, and ways of reaching or serving customers. Start with a concrete decision: which customers to focus on, which offerings to pursue, or how to improve an idea before investing further. It works with both business customers and consumers.

Customer interviews can be open, flexible and exploratory. CBL builds on customer-learning practice with a defined process for exploring needs and offering ideas, then comparing the reasons across customers. It makes your assumptions explicit and invites customers to correct them. You prepare customer profiles, related jobs, pains and gains in Need Bundles, and rough scenes showing an offering's proposed value. Conversations and systematic analysis connect those corrections to recommendations. The point is to understand why an offering meets a real need, with reasons your team can examine.

It is a poor fit if the decision is already made and you only want endorsement, or if you cannot speak with real customers. Internal cost-cutting and process optimization are outside its focus. A broad opportunity such as “do something with AI” needs a concrete customer situation first. CBL relies on lived experience; hypothetical future problems give it little to work with.

Bring a customer-facing idea, the decision you need to make, and what you currently believe about the customers and their needs. A finished product is unnecessary. Include the people who will prepare, run and analyze conversations, with a sponsor who can act on the findings. For the customer work, plan access to real participants and time for preparation and analysis.

Choose two days in person or three days live online. The masterclass combines guided practice with applying the method to your own project. It teaches the process; completing a customer study requires further conversations and analysis. Team workshops are arranged with you, with pricing on request. Tell us about your team and project.

A Decision Brief with a clearer picture of the customers, their actual needs, and which offering ideas fit those needs. The analysis supports recommendations to pursue, reshape or set aside an offering, with the reasoning, supporting material, contradictions and remaining uncertainty. It also explains what those findings mean for the overall business idea. Leadership can inspect the basis for a recommendation and decide what happens next.

Plan around the customer groups, needs and offerings you want to investigate. A total count alone does not establish desirability. CBL considers both the quality and quantity of relevant conversations, including whether you understand the reasons behind a response. The recommendation should make its evidence and limitations clear, so your team can judge whether to act and what uncertainty remains.

AI helps prepare material, organize conversation records and examine patterns across them. People review its interpretation and make the decisions. Analysis follows three questions: are we grouping the right customers, what do they actually need, and how well do the offerings meet those needs? AI-generated customer reactions cannot establish real customer demand. CBL Studio, our planned software companion, is coming soon.

Raise those constraints when we discuss the workshop. Approved tools, what can be shared, participant consent and how conversation data is handled need to be agreed before work begins. The method includes separating identifying details from material used in analysis. That does not replace your organization's policies or approvals. Studio's supported integrations, security and data-handling details will be shared before launch.

CBL builds evidence of desirability: which customers value an offering, why, and what shapes their willingness to pay. That is a crucial part of the decision. Technical feasibility, commercial viability and the size of the opportunity need additional work. A positive conversation is not a purchase, and a strong desirability finding is not a guarantee of business success.