I made an update to this piece with regard to the prioritization of these metrics:
=================================== 👇
Each of the metrics in each step will be rated on two scales:
Importance - How important is it that you are able to…”know how your solutions address the needs of each target audience”
Difficulty - How difficult is it for you to “know how your solutions address the needs of each target audience”
For ODI purists, you will notice I’m not using satisfaction. This will be an experiment, and here’s why: people can be satisfied with a solution because they are unaware of the possibility of a new solution make the outcome less difficulty to achieve. So, let’s just ask them how difficult it is ;) Of course, this means the opportunity algorithm will not work because the two metrics are not necessarily correlated. Stay tuned…
For each of those metrics, go through a simple exercise:
1. Ask yourself if you do this
2. Ask yourself how difficult it is to do
3. Ask yourself how much time it takes to do
4. Ask yourself how accurate the results are
5. Ask yourself how effectively you are able to leverage the results
I can think of many more questions, but at the end of the day are these things important? If so, how difficult are they to do? Are the so difficult you don't even bother.
Vendors, you think though these too, because I can guarantee you your customers want to do these things better, faster and more accurately.
You put some really tremendous effort into this, so I want to share back.
We are currently analyzing our market, which is (we've realized after reading all your posts and finally getting to grips on how to think about all this): "Marketers trying to Develop Qualifed Leads" - the one you wrote about here.
You have given us a large chunk of the solution for free here. We are a small company (14 employees), and I'm doing this on my free time after all the other duties as a CEO, so should your Job Map apply to us, it will be of tremendous help. I want to thank you for that.
So what we wanted to do was to validate whether your Job Map and Outcomes can apply to us, in a quick and easy way, before conducting our quantitative research with our customers based on it.
The questions we asked ourselves was: "Can we take Mike's solution and apply it to our situation to get answers to which of our current solutions to market, which new solutions to develop, and answer important questions about how to develop our delivery process?".
We did this study by imagining a segment we believe we have, rated the outcomes we believe that segment is likely to rate as important and difficult, and then took those findings to answer the above questions.
We're fully aware that a real study will likely reveal completely different segments and underserved outcomes, but the purpose of this study at this point was not to get real answers - but see whether the job map and outcomes you have proposed can be applied to our case (and really anyone who serves the same market).
The answer was a resounding yes! We got very clear answers to some of our most important questions! I'm amazed at the clarity of direction this has already given us, even with "imaginary data"!
I'd love to share our full study if you believe it can help you and your readers. We took some shortcuts, but I think it can be very interesting. Let me know if you'd like that and I'll share the link to the Google Doc here.
I'm glad you found my work useful. The big Martech companies are too busy doing what they've done to stop and consider what I found when modeling this. Disruption is not going to come from them, so I'm hopeful that companies like yours can make a difference.
Yes, do share. I will also have a look at perhaps write something about what you're finding as well.
If you want to use some of these insights, feel free to use them in any way you wish, but I'd be really happy if you linked to us if you do so :) As any business, genuine inbound links are super valuable.
There is room for improvement across the steps. But, as I pointed out - and I think your document shows - there is a big gaping hole on the front-end in the area of planning, and integrating that planning into execution and measurement
Hey Mike. First off, this is amazing work. It must have taken a huge amount of time. Thank you.
We are currently trying to do exactly this for our market - which is in fact "marketers trying to develop qualified leads" - same as you.
We have a plethoria of sub-jobs and currently deciding if we can and should focus on the top one or one of the sub-jobs.
I noticed that, for the outcome statements, you use "know", "use", "coordinate", "monitor" etc.
I might have gotten confused about what you're trying to do here - but aren't those supposed to be outcome statements for each job step, formulated as "Minimize" + [time/likelihood] + [object] + [contextual clarifier]?
In my experience this language confuses and frustrates both end users, and the leadership you need to sign the checks. I'm not sure how much fidelity you lose by using my adaption. Probably not much. If you want your research to get used, it really does need to be simplified. There are a number of approaches to this that are in play. I'm just writing about mine. I'll leave it to the community to test and adapt as necessary (and hopefully share back).
I've written a number of posts about the changes but I believe this one wraps it up and has some links you can explore.
I made an update to this piece with regard to the prioritization of these metrics:
=================================== 👇
Each of the metrics in each step will be rated on two scales:
Importance - How important is it that you are able to…”know how your solutions address the needs of each target audience”
Difficulty - How difficult is it for you to “know how your solutions address the needs of each target audience”
For ODI purists, you will notice I’m not using satisfaction. This will be an experiment, and here’s why: people can be satisfied with a solution because they are unaware of the possibility of a new solution make the outcome less difficulty to achieve. So, let’s just ask them how difficult it is ;) Of course, this means the opportunity algorithm will not work because the two metrics are not necessarily correlated. Stay tuned…
For each of those metrics, go through a simple exercise:
1. Ask yourself if you do this
2. Ask yourself how difficult it is to do
3. Ask yourself how much time it takes to do
4. Ask yourself how accurate the results are
5. Ask yourself how effectively you are able to leverage the results
I can think of many more questions, but at the end of the day are these things important? If so, how difficult are they to do? Are the so difficult you don't even bother.
Vendors, you think though these too, because I can guarantee you your customers want to do these things better, faster and more accurately.
Hello Mike!
You put some really tremendous effort into this, so I want to share back.
We are currently analyzing our market, which is (we've realized after reading all your posts and finally getting to grips on how to think about all this): "Marketers trying to Develop Qualifed Leads" - the one you wrote about here.
You have given us a large chunk of the solution for free here. We are a small company (14 employees), and I'm doing this on my free time after all the other duties as a CEO, so should your Job Map apply to us, it will be of tremendous help. I want to thank you for that.
So what we wanted to do was to validate whether your Job Map and Outcomes can apply to us, in a quick and easy way, before conducting our quantitative research with our customers based on it.
The questions we asked ourselves was: "Can we take Mike's solution and apply it to our situation to get answers to which of our current solutions to market, which new solutions to develop, and answer important questions about how to develop our delivery process?".
We did this study by imagining a segment we believe we have, rated the outcomes we believe that segment is likely to rate as important and difficult, and then took those findings to answer the above questions.
We're fully aware that a real study will likely reveal completely different segments and underserved outcomes, but the purpose of this study at this point was not to get real answers - but see whether the job map and outcomes you have proposed can be applied to our case (and really anyone who serves the same market).
The answer was a resounding yes! We got very clear answers to some of our most important questions! I'm amazed at the clarity of direction this has already given us, even with "imaginary data"!
I'd love to share our full study if you believe it can help you and your readers. We took some shortcuts, but I think it can be very interesting. Let me know if you'd like that and I'll share the link to the Google Doc here.
I'm glad you found my work useful. The big Martech companies are too busy doing what they've done to stop and consider what I found when modeling this. Disruption is not going to come from them, so I'm hopeful that companies like yours can make a difference.
Yes, do share. I will also have a look at perhaps write something about what you're finding as well.
Here's the full "test study" we did to validate your job map: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lfVvnIxnxIK65pioSCnYbKWVL3BuUtt4I8AK3dpJnsg/edit#
I've made the doc commentable by anyone.
If you want to use some of these insights, feel free to use them in any way you wish, but I'd be really happy if you linked to us if you do so :) As any business, genuine inbound links are super valuable.
There is a lot you can do with a qualitative model in a market that isn't as mature as it thinks it is, as I toyed with here https://jobstobedone.substack.com/p/the-subjective-quadrant-for-digital?r=4wccx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
There is room for improvement across the steps. But, as I pointed out - and I think your document shows - there is a big gaping hole on the front-end in the area of planning, and integrating that planning into execution and measurement
Hey Mike. First off, this is amazing work. It must have taken a huge amount of time. Thank you.
We are currently trying to do exactly this for our market - which is in fact "marketers trying to develop qualified leads" - same as you.
We have a plethoria of sub-jobs and currently deciding if we can and should focus on the top one or one of the sub-jobs.
I noticed that, for the outcome statements, you use "know", "use", "coordinate", "monitor" etc.
I might have gotten confused about what you're trying to do here - but aren't those supposed to be outcome statements for each job step, formulated as "Minimize" + [time/likelihood] + [object] + [contextual clarifier]?
In my experience this language confuses and frustrates both end users, and the leadership you need to sign the checks. I'm not sure how much fidelity you lose by using my adaption. Probably not much. If you want your research to get used, it really does need to be simplified. There are a number of approaches to this that are in play. I'm just writing about mine. I'll leave it to the community to test and adapt as necessary (and hopefully share back).
I've written a number of posts about the changes but I believe this one wraps it up and has some links you can explore.
https://jobstobedone.substack.com/p/the-simplification-of-jobs-to-be?r=4wccx&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thank you, I've read it now - very interesting!