I'm not satisfied with the satisfaction question in jobs-to-be-done, are you?

What if we replace it with a different question in Jobs-to-be-Done Research?

When we unwittingly approach disruptive times, even the best methods can obscure the future by asking customers questions that can only be answered based on what they know. "Are you satisfied" is one of those questions, in my opinion.

Let's pretend we are in the 1980's again and we've just been unshackled from component stereos systems. We knew we wanted to listen to hi-fidelity music and we could. We just couldn't do it on-the-go. We literally could not transport component stereo systems around with us.

Suddenly Boom Boxes came on the scene to solve that problem. But the 24 D-cell batteries you had to put in them lasted an hour, and they were clunky and heavy. You might recall people carrying them on their shoulders

Everyone wanted to hear what we were listening to, right? Right.

We ultimately solved the portability and privacy problem with the Sony Walkman, and related devices. It was portable (unified and compact), it was private (headphones), and the batteries could spin that CD the length of a moderate bike ride. We had it made!

If you asked people if they were satisfied with their ability to listen to music on-the-go, they would have told you they were pretty satisfied. If you asked them about their satisfaction with their Walkman, then they might have had some quibbles about battery life, or the form factor. But given that they had lived through the 70's, they were relatively better off.

But how could they have been satisfied given what we know now? Shouldn't we always be in a state of utter dissatisfaction?

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Given what they knew (nothing) about technology and the future of infrastructure (e.g. the Internet) why would they be dissatisfied? Dissatisfaction comes from knowing that there is a better option (feel free to shoot me some academic research if you know otherwise). While they might think of ways to make the Walkman incrementally better, most people couldn't describe a future where the solution worked in a completely different way. Therefore, it would be difficult to understand satisfaction across an entire scale if they couldn’t know what the future looked like. How does dissatisfaction with a current solution inform the conceptualization of solutions that are completely different?

For example, someone in 1985 might suggest that the capacity of a CD be increased to hold more songs because they are dissatisfied with the number of songs on a CD. Still, since albums were released as separate CDs by separate artists that would mean each customer would need to craft their own CD catalogs and while they might be satisfied, that would also be a pain in the a**. What they would be doing is trying to optimize one part of the struggle stack (one of a number of solutions that have to work together to get the job) and not really thinking about that big “what if I could…” question.

Most customers wouldn't have thought of a device that accessed streaming music from the cloud because music gets delivered by CDs (or cassettes), a physical product - and the cloud didn’t exist yet. This is why innovation shouldn't rely on customers to direct the innovation process. They can only think in the context of what they know - the jobs they are trying to get done.

So how is satisfaction problematic when we are focused on customer jobs?

"How satisfied are you with your ability to organize your music?" The guy who has a meticulous system of milk crates and folder tabs to organize albums alphabetically and tag them by category is absolutely satisfied. Someone else might look for a fit-for-purpose solution to organize their albums and only be moderately satisfied. Either way, they would both tend to skew to one end of a 5-point satisfaction scale because there is no differentiating alternative to storing a vinyl album, or a CD (that are basically the same shape). The media was not yet digital, and people had no way of knowing that it would be some day.

What would cause them to be totally dissatisfied given that there is nothing to compare it to? Satisfied compared to what?

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There is a question we can ask that will always be relevant and doesn't require us to compare a solution to a future we don't know. Our goal would be to get people to use the entire 5-point Likert scale, and not just the top (or bottom) 2 or 3.

"How difficult do you find it to organize your music?"

This doesn't require a customer to think about a better way, because they will always default to what they know as the baseline - which is unhelpful. This essentially becomes an effort question, or a struggle question. These are two words that you will hear people in marketing yap about incessantly but can't figure out how to measure. So why don't we give them what they want, while finding a more reliable balance to the importance question?

When asking a prospective end user (of an unknown future solution, that gets the job done in a different way, faster and more accurately) to respond to a performance metric, ask them:

"How important is it to you know where to find the desired music?"

and

"How difficult is it for you to know where to find the desired music?"

If someone tells me they find achieving an objective difficult, it becomes much easier to understand what could be done to make it less difficult. Satisfaction seems rather abstract in comparison.

And once you capture these responses, and segment around these struggles, you can go back to people who fall into these categories and get their verbatims so you can describe why to the senior leadership who have to sign the checks. Verbatims at this point have much more meaning.

I’ll be discussing that more in another post.