Most of you that follow me have done some sort of market research, or product research as a part of your career. You’ve probably tried Switch interviews, and some of you may have tried ODI-style interviews without really understanding what lies beyond the interviews themselves. I get it, certain entities have built a moat around their castle to make it difficult for competitors to follow.
But after 30+ years of circling the castle, we’ve found a way to cross the moat and breach the walls that kept us out for so long. To do that, we need to accept that there is a new way of doing things. Very much like the difference between workflows that music enthusiasts executed 40 years ago to consumer music, and how we consume music today, workflows for market research are going to change as well - at least for the structured approaches to qualitative research like Jobs-to-be-Done.
In fact, so much of the process will eventually become invisible that we’ll all be able to achieve our desired outcomes faster, and less expensively than ever before. After all, the reason we’re doing all this research, and often repeating the same work over and over again (for some reason), is to know what do to next to compete for growth. Right?
RIGHT?
This secret knowledge has been hidden in plain sight for a long time. Threat of legal action has always been present, and the battle for words and phrases has been destructive. But these things will soon fall by the wayside because what was opaque, time consuming, and purposely expensive, is about to become invisible, and automated. How often do you think about electricity? How about your central air system (which runs on electricity), or all the new ways to stay in touch with friends (also built on electricity)?
Can the innovation process become a commodity, one where we barely remember those who’s shoulders we stand on because they couldn’t embrace the future they claimed they could guide others to? (the answer is yes, by the way!)
Aside from the stiff, uninformed, scared, angry, or simply depressed…most ODI-trained practitioners in the JTBD universe know that they’re going to need to step up their game. In fact, our new capabilities probably enable so many new business models, that we’re all going to be very busy not thinking about JTBD processes and simply tapping into the outputs the process generates to solve higher context problems. Modern practitioners will need to migrate to new business models that create new value (which is a good thing) because all of the processes they hug so hard are going to be smothered with automation.
To the point that no one will even know how they work…or even care. How many of you study electricity every day?
The struggle stack, and the struggle multipliers of the consumption chain always get automated away. I mean, the practitioners have always said so…until it’s their struggle stack. It never fails, incumbents continue to chase high-margin customers and completely ignore the lower end of the market (where disruption comes from).
The biggest obstacle for many of you is exactly how this new workflow will work. So, I’m going to do my best to demonstrate how I achieve the goals of the qualitative JTBD research - at least how I’m currently doing it (not automated completely just yet). This should give you a peek into the mechanics that you will probably never have to worry about again. And for those of who love doing interviews, or programming surveys, or designing data models, or analyzing data, or formulating strategies…I apologize in advance. Your world is about to be flipped upside and your in-the-know competitors will…
…get the same job done 20x faster and 10x less expensively. And that’s the starting point, not the ending point. 🤷♂️
I urge you to begin learning how to implement solutions and business models from the outputs of this completely new process. Building JTBD point solutions is not gonna make anyone rich. Tapping into the outcomes and delivering them in completely new ways is where the money will be. I recommend skating in that general direction very, very soon (the incumbents are frozen with fear).
So now that I’ve got that off my chest, let’s dive into how the early iterations of this new process work.
The real purpose of this post is to clarify what I’ve developed for my JTBD Masterclass.
Please watch / listen to the companion podcast so you can see me walk you through this step-by-step. I’m only covering the basics in written form, and seeing how I do it might inspire you to come up with an even better approach (please share, though). And it goes something like this:
Identify the area (level of abstraction) that supports your research questions - I’ve done an entire YouTube video on how to determine where to land in your industry hierarchy here.
Identify the end user - this is the role solely responsible for performing the Job from end-to-end. Also included in that prior video.
Identify potential contexts - The term context in problem-solving refers to the surrounding information that is necessary to understand the problem and find a solution. Context matters, whether it’s in considering a respondent’s context as they answer questions, or generating questions specific to a particular context.
Generate a Job Map - While you don’t always need to create job maps or metrics, this is one of the core characteristics of Jobs to be Done
Generate Customer Success Metrics - Every step in a job can be measure by several performance metrics. They are not mutually exclusive and end users will rate each of them along whatever dimensions you choose. It does not need to be importance and satisfaction, necessarily.
Generate Situations - These are the conditions in under which an end user might be performing the job. We will want to know what the end user faced on the spectrum of possible conditions and we may also want to know how important it is as a factor when the are performing the job.
Generate Related Jobs - these are job statements that might occur before the core job, during the core job execution, or after the core job. End users just rate the job. There are no maps.
Generate Emotional and Social Jobs - In this version of Jobs to be Done we don’t start with emotions, but we do capture them in the context of getting the core job done.
Generate Financial Metrics - these are important to know so your go-to-market offer and related messaging positively influences the people who ultimately make purchase decisions - which is not always the end user.
Generate a Few Other Surprises! - I cover the Ideal state performance measure briefly.
Finally, Find Out What Customers Want...