Before I begin, a lot of research professionals have taken the AI prompts from my Masterclass to help them pre-build product and service innovation, customer experience, and messaging research catalogs.
I’ve stripped out the fluff and and created a bundle of just the prompts to provide an even faster and cheaper version. Still explained, but no videos.
Your professional competitors are using these to gain an advantage. I hope you’ll consider giving them a shot, or sharing them with a friend who might benefit. Here’s a link to the new bundle called The Complete Guide to JTBD + Artificial Intelligence Prompting.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. 👇🏻
Note: I realize that I’m mashing up CX, designing thinking and journey mapping. Feel free to comment 👇🏻
It should be obvious, the design world has taken over innovation whether they have a right to, or not. Everyone strives to get the word innovation in their title, whether they are in marketing, product, design or the janitorial staff. It has become almost meaningless.
The term customer experience suffers a similar fate. Many people believe that experience is how they become aware of a product, purchase a product, using a product, and/or recommending a product. Typical journey stuff. But is that a complete picture of customer experience?
I would argue that it is not.
But how do you get enterprises with various groups who all think they own the customer to work together to achieve a common goal. They tend to work in silos and there is no real backbone of customer knowledge or insights that can be used to coordinate the competencies in a more effective way.
There is no one really in charge of customer experience from end to end … or someone who really understands what it means. And it means far more than you think it does!
Here is what we are not seeing in the larger enterprise:
A collective agreement as to the customer-focused objective of the enterprise and how they could be enforced and measured in a meaningful way.
A corporate imperative is driven by actual customer needs, either functionally or experientially, and not the whims of a detached CEO
As a result, enterprises are not able to address the core challenges of a market
… because they actually don’t understand how to define a market at all!
Identification of true value gaps that could be exploited for maximum differentiation, and potentially moat-building
Products and services that get the job done completely differently, with fewer features, and better. We’re seeing more features, whether they be functional or experiential.
… this just adds cost and complexity and eventually overserves the market
The elimination of friction. Every feature we add to a service that supports an offering is potentially adding cost and complexity that customers do not value.
The elimination of repetitive research and design exercises because no one has figure out a stable and predictable way to do research.
If your company is not Disney, you are not selling an experience. Your services need to be - in essence - invisible. If Disney fails at transportation, food service and other things their customers need to consume every day, it would diminish their memory of the experience they purchased.
Friction is the enemy of experiences during the lifecycle of ownership. If you remember a service experience it was almost assuredly a negative experience. You don’t remember how promptly the food was delivered to your table. You remember the smile on your child’s face because Mickey Mouse delivered it.
Are you selling experiences? I hear this language the time in companies that are actually commodities… because they don’t what to do. This has simply gotten in the way of the their customers’ ultimate Job-to-be-Done.
The solution is not going to be solved by a design exercise where you task people with an idea and ask them to validate a problem. This is completely bass-ackwards. There should be a logical progression along the backbone of your enterprise objective with clearly noted separation between competencies. Yes, they do need to be integrated and coordinated. However, integration does not mean expecting teams in one competency to be proficient in an upstream, or downstream, competency.
Allow me to list this out based on the observations of a former colleague, Rob Schade (Strategyn):
Design Thinking's Popularity and Flaw: Design Thinking has become widely popular, making companies feel innovative like Apple. However, it has a critical flaw due to its lack of a semantic model for understanding customer needs, which could lead to its decline like other management fads.
Historical Context and the Issue with Design Firms: The roots of Design Thinking trace back to the 1960s, gaining significant attention with the launch of the Apple iPod in 2001. Companies hired design firms (e.g., IDEO, Frog Design) to innovate, but these firms often found a lack of essential customer insights at the companies, leading to a mismatch of capabilities.
The Semantic Disconnect: Design Thinking focuses on designing solutions (a physical activity) but lacks a robust method for understanding customer needs (a semantic activity). The first two steps of Design Thinking (empathize and define) require semantic input, but there's no clear definition or structure for what this input should look like, leading to ambiguity and errors.
The Solution - Embracing Jobs-to-be-Done: Integrate the concept of the customer "job-to-be-done" within the empathize phase as a significant improvement. Innovation expert Clay Christensen highlights the importance of deeply understanding the customer's job for successful innovation.
Three Tenets for Success:
Core Functional Job: Focus on the core functional job of the customer as the foundation for value creation.
Customer Success Metrics: Identify a finite set of success metrics (~50–150) that define the “perfect” 😂 execution of the job, sometimes referred to as outcomes.
Quantification and Measurement: Quantify these outcomes through surveys to precisely understand where customers demand new value.
Jobs-to-be-Done Integration: By adopting these tenets and integrating them into the first two steps of Design Thinking, the process can gain the necessary semantic inputs to ensure success, as suggested by Clay Christensen.
Ironically, I also wrote on this topic in the same publication, although I put a different lens to it. Here are some highlights from that piece:
Misconceptions of Empathy in Design Thinking: "The term Empathy is bandied about by many people who don’t really know what it means, or what it should mean. It has become a proxy for not being able to articulate customer needs completely, and reliably"
The Importance of Understanding Customer Needs: "Understanding which needs of a target customer group are unmet is arguably the most important step in designing winning solutions that are actually based on winning market concepts"
The Problem with Current Design Thinking Approaches: "There is no evidence to suggest that Design Thinking has solved the problem [of developing a deep understanding of the customer challenge]. We still hear that product failure rates are as high as 95%"
The Limitations of Empathy in Innovation: "Understanding the feelings of a customer is not going to inform designers with information that will lead to successful products and services in the market"
Advocating for Jobs-to-be-Done and Outcome-Driven Innovation: "A better approach is to focus on the core jobs that customers are trying to get done... This approach is called Jobs-to-be-Done; an innovation method with an 86% success rate that has been developed and fine-tuned over the past 25 years"
Replacing Empathize and Define within the Design Thinking process with JTBD does not diminish the value of Design Thinking. In fact, they are highly complementary. Providing tangible and quantifiable semantic inputs into the Ideation and Prototyping stages only makes them better…because the there is no guessing or ambiguity about the customers needs. This makes it faster and more reliable to test ideas and also provides a clear roadmap for product development over time.
But we need to think even bigger
When it comes to the phrase customer experience - often abbreviated as “CX” - we often see this assigned to what many innovation thinkers call the consumption chain. Essentially, this is the space occupied by customer journeys.
👉🏻 They don’t exist without a product … soooo, why would you interview someone on a journey if you’re part of a product planning team, or service innovation team (I didn’t say process engineering)?
If you’re talking about CX and also focused on the buyer journey, I’m sorry, that simply is not a complete picture of CX. In fact, even if you focus on all 16 universal journeys, that’s still not CX.
Customer Experience is an all encompassing challenge for enterprises. Most get it fundamentally wrong, just like they get innovation fundamentally wrong. In order to get it right, we need to remember this…
Customer Journey optimization is not a substitute for the wrong solution.
As such, the model depicted below demonstrates how everything should fit together. If any of this work is done in a silo with no broader coordination or executive leadership…
“You are wasting your money and potentially destroying your brand”
👉🏻 and you can quote me on that 👈🏻
It seems daunting when you think about it. Everything outside of the phase layer is a Job-to-be-Done + Steps + Success Metrics + a lot of other things. If you’d like to explore my catalogs, I’ve posted many of them on this blog in the past. I’m building thousands more in my JTBD Pyramid.
Jobs-to-be-Done has essentially existed in secret, well outside the reach of most innovators, service designers and experience designers due to a perception of complexity and obfuscation from practitioners. In fact, it’s actually quite simple. However, historically the cost associated with eliciting all of this together was time-consuming and expensive, mostly because it was made to be that way. The business model was consulting.
Fair enough.
But that’s no excuse for a purely creative approach to innovation and service design that’s based on the consensus of internally derived ideas, or worse, the highest paid person’s opinion (HiPPO) 😨
The good news is that there are now ways to accelerate both the qualitative (developing the model and metrics) and the quantitative (prioritizing the model with customers). Not only are we doing this infinitely faster - it’s cheaper, and more scalable.
How? Because we do it complete differently (just like any disruptive innovation would).
It’s no longer an expensive consulting engagement, or a massive internal team effort. Completing the model I’ve depicted above takes hours instead of weeks or months. It takes a single human resource, not a team. It leverages new technologies that have emerged (we’ve been waiting for them).
So, enough bragging, let’s focus a bit more on why we need this.
The new approach, using the same basic framework, checks all of the disruptive innovation boxes and allows us to think about new business models beyond consulting.
It gets the job done better
It gets more of the job done on a single platform
It has fewer features, because it gets the job done completely differently
Therefore…It’s faster
Therefore…It’s cheaper
It gives customers (of all sizes, not just the big boys) access to data-driven answers that will help them compete for growth (or any other specific problem they wish to focus on).
You will always be 10 steps ahead of your competitors, who are all still hiring customer journey consultants for the nth time to map out what they want customers to do. We all know that never happens. Customers’ intent never aligns with corporate programming.
It’s not about what we want. It’s about what they want. When will we all figure that out? 🤔
You can’t possibly know that unless you take the cold plunge into the abyss of the extremely antiseptic, and uncreative work of Jobs-to-be-Done. That’s right, it is a clean look at customer needs without all of the assumptions and bias … and worse … theater.
Let’s look at the real goals and benefits enterprises should strive for and achieve when they compete for growth - because they are all trying to accomplish these at end of the day.
How well are you doing?
Economic Viability - Economic viability is the foundation of a business's long-term survival and its ability to consistently generate profit.
Your offering will not be viable if you don’t address a core, functional gap in the market. Journey mapping will not find these with any precision, or repeatability. Function and consumption are joined at the hip.
Markets are not industries - dirty little secret: a market is actually a group of people trying to get the same job done (although they may do so in different circumstances, which the method also covers). If you consider nail pounding devices to be a market, I’ve got some buggy whip stock to sell you.
Profit Maximization - Profit maximization is crucial as it directly impacts a company's financial performance and shareholder value.
Understanding value gaps in the market and what people will pay to close them is integrated into this approach - with statistical representation.
Journeys have nothing to do with this … unless you implement expensive journey experiences that customer didn’t ask you for. At that point you have profit minimization.
Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty - Customer satisfaction is a key driver for repeat business and referrals, which are vital for an enterprise's growth.
The dirty little secret here is that customers are not loyal to the brand, that’s simply a symptom of something deeper.
They are loyal to the Jobs they are trying to get done, and they will seek solutions that help get the job done better, or get more of a higher-context job done, or get multiple jobs done on a single platform - even if it means switching brands.
Switching behavior is a backward looking lens. Differentiate yourself with a forward-looking foundation. The unmet needs of today will drive the winning solutions of tomorrow.
Innovation and Adaptation - Innovation allows a business to stay ahead of the competition and respond to changing market demands.
The framework introduced above is just that, a means to help enterprises identify and execute on innovations by clearly identifying where the value gaps exist in the market.
Gaps are targeted by prioritized customer success metrics (needs) and recognizing that there might be several groups of customers who struggle differently (in my definition of an innovation market above). Marketing segmentation will never be able to see those distinctions with clarity or foresight. Debbie Downer is not a segment.
Employee Satisfaction and Development - A motivated and skilled workforce is essential for the success of any enterprise.
One great way to up-skill your employees is to help them clearly understand the customer challenges they are there to support.
Their ability to anticipate challenges, or what resources need to be shared during different interactions will give them a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. It is that simple.
It is unclear to me how these can be attained when R&D, product strategy, marketing, design and other groups are all acting independently, and with tools and frameworks that were designed for different types of problems.
An organization needs to operate as an integrated whole, focused on a common objective. This requires extremely strong leadership because individuals will always try (and fail) to outperform the system. Beware of the people in skinny pants who love to present decks, provide donuts, and basically over-engage with you. It’s individual performance theater, not the optimizing of a system’s performance. I always ask for data. I do understand it annoys people.
Everything you need to target opportunity is embedded in the rigor of true Jobs-to-be-Done research. Use your other expertise to execute on the insights you glean from it.
I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it takes more than coffee, donuts, and a canvas. 🤣
If you'd like to learn more...
I do offer end-to-end consulting if you’re just not ready to do it all your own. I’m 20x faster and at least 10x cheaper than your alternatives. Big Brands: This means you can get many more problems solved with your existing budget (I work with a global team of experienced practitioners)
I also offer coaching, if you’d like to know someone’s got your back and you want to do the heavy lifting and get some knowledge transfer, I'm there!
I can help you get your qualitative research done in 2 days for mere budget scraps.
I’ve also got an academy where you can find a number of options for a do-it-yourself experience. This portfolio of AI prompts eliminates the pain of learning how to perform proper qualitative JTBD research.
Do You Have a Complete Understanding of CX?