#Products, #Experiences, and #Processes are a critical part of an organization’s unspoken culture. Designing and building products requires an incredible deep understanding of the user, their needs, and their motivations. The key to successful #innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers’ lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs. To increase your chance of creating something that is solving a real problem you need to be more rigorous in your approach. The “Jobs to Be Done” framework is one such approach that helps with better understanding of user behaviors and in-turn cultivates a deep level of empathy towards them.
Great products start with real problems. People buy products and services to get a “job” done. The key to success is understanding the real job customers are using your product for. Thus it’s very crucial to understand the underlying job (task) a consumer is trying to accomplish. And to complete that specific job, they in turn “hire” a specific product or service to help them get to the finish line. People buy quarter-inch drill bits: ”They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes.”
As per Clay Christensen, the guru of Disruptive Innovation theory: "People don't simply buy products or services, they 'hire' them to make progress in specific circumstances."
In the video below, Christensen discusses McDonald milkshakes stagnated sales business scenario. He concluded that people hired milkshake to cover long and boring drive to work. They needed something to have while driving to stay engaged with life during their commute.
Christensen’s analysis showed that McDonald’s milkshakes were not competing against Burger King’s milkshakes. They were competing against bananas, snickers, donuts or even bagels to do the same job.
Let’s shake it up!
Well it turns out that the milkshake does the job better than any of the competitors.
Understanding the job to be done helps in making the innovation predictable. Learning as job exists (The Why?) and if it is made better, we can predict that more customers will buy it.
#JTBD Framework provides the mechanism to:
Define, capture, and prioritize customer’s needs and the associated constraints
Anchor core functional job, and the relative emotional and social dimensions as a result of it’s execution
And to establish desired outcome statements
To frame the Functional, Emotional and Social dimensions of the job to be done, start by asking the following questions:
What causes someone to purchase a product for the first time? What job is the person trying to achieve?
What are the circumstances of the challenges? Who, when, where, while doing what?
What barriers are getting in the way of the person making that progress?
Are consumers making do with imperfect or a workaround solutions through some kind of compensating behavior?
How would they define what ‘quality’ means for a better solution, and what trade-offs are they willing to make? Why and how do consumers switch from product X and start using product Y?
Once we have framed the real problem, barriers, friction points and the intrinsic motivations of the users, it’s now time to create a MVP blueprint of the Product. Innovations during Zero to One stage are primarily facilitated by 3 key parameters to achieve Product-Market Fit:
Enabling Technology
Business Model
Coherent Value Networks
User Focus supersedes the excitement of the accompanying technical challenge. Just because it’s new tech and fun to build doesn’t mean people will actually use it. Key is to get the business model (upstream and downstream) right utilizing the resources, collaboration and capability of the value networks as opposed to perfecting the product.
Disruption is the playbook that helps achieve the business model leveraging Disruptive Innovation and Disruptive Technology.
Disruptive Innovation (as per Clay Christensen) describes a process by which a product or service initially takes root in simple applications at the bottom of a market—typically by being less expensive and more accessible—and then relentlessly moves upmarket, eventually displacing incumbents.
Disruptive Technology is an innovation that significantly alters the way that consumers or businesses operate leveraging a behavioral lever due to it’s superior attributes.
Disruptive Innovations are NOT breakthrough technologies that make good products better; rather they are innovations that make products and services more accessible and affordable, thereby making them available to a larger population. The success of disruptive innovation is driven by understanding and satisfying consumers unmet aspiration. And driving higher engagement, eliminating barriers and elevating product stickiness once product-market fit is achieved. You can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter.
The hero of the disruption story is the User, not the Product. Thus the catalyst to a successful product launch is the Experience Design. Experiences that the customer needs creates differentiation for better products from competitors. Apple’s success with its music player, the iPod, was because Apple supported the entire ecosystem involved in listening to music: discovering it, purchasing it, getting it into the music player, developing playlists (that could be shared), and listening to the music. Primarily Apple disrupted the value network of the music industry and transformed it for ever.
You’ve got to start with the Customer Experience — to get the job done!
““You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to sell it.””