JTBD & Data: Moving Beyond Infrastructure to Strategic Outcomes
Is your organization swimming in data but thirsting for wisdom? Do expensive dashboards gather dust while critical decisions are still made on gut feeling? You're facing a common challenge: treating data infrastructure as the goal, rather than enabling the real job your business needs information to do. It's time to shift perspective.
Applying the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework offers a powerful lens to move beyond managing data assets towards enabling strategic outcomes. It forces us to ask: what fundamental progress are our people trying to make when they interact with data, and how can we help them achieve it more effectively?
This post outlines how a JTBD approach can fundamentally reshape your data strategy, uncover critical unmet needs, and ultimately help you build an information ecosystem that acts as a true strategic asset. We'll explore:
Defining the real 'job' of your data.
Identifying the struggles and desired outcomes hindering that job.
Using 'elevating abstraction' to design better solutions.
The strategic implications for your business.
What is the REAL Job Your Data Strategy Should Be Doing?
Jobs-to-be-Done isn't about the data itself, nor the technology that holds it. It's about the 'why' – the underlying goal a person is trying to achieve in a specific circumstance. In the context of data and information, this means looking past activities like 'accessing reports' or 'querying databases' to understand the higher purpose.
Potential core functional jobs your teams might be 'hiring' data and information management systems to do include:
Make informed strategic decisions: e.g., evaluating market entry, assessing competitive threats, planning long-term investments.
Optimize operational efficiency: e.g., identifying bottlenecks, streamlining workflows, managing inventory, improving resource allocation.
Mitigate business risk: e.g., ensuring compliance, detecting fraud, managing cybersecurity threats, ensuring data privacy.
Personalize customer experiences: e.g., tailoring marketing messages, predicting churn, customizing service offerings, improving support.
The key is defining this job from the perspective of the user – be it an executive needing a high-level overview, an analyst seeking granular insights, or an operations manager monitoring real-time performance. Their context and goals dictate the 'job'.
From Data Points to Decision Power: Defining the Core Job
Focusing on the job reframes the entire strategy. Instead of asking "What data should we collect?", we ask "What job are we trying to get done, and what information is essential for success?".
Uncovering the Struggles and Desired Outcomes in Data Management
Once you start defining the job, you inevitably uncover the friction points – the struggles people face with current tools and processes. Common struggles include:
Data Silos: Information trapped in disconnected systems.
Slow Reporting: Time lags between data generation and insight delivery.
Complex Interfaces: Tools requiring specialized skills or excessive effort.
Inaccurate/Inconsistent Insights: Lack of trust in the data or analysis.
Security/Compliance Hurdles: Difficulty accessing needed data due to rigid controls, or conversely, concerns about breaches.
Integration Challenges: Difficulty combining data from different sources for a holistic view.
These struggles point directly to unmet Desired Outcomes – the metrics users employ (often implicitly) to measure success when getting their job done. These are framed as direction, object, and context. Examples related to the struggles above might be:
Minimize the time required to access relevant data from multiple sources.
Increase the confidence in the accuracy of strategic reports.
Reduce the effort needed to generate actionable insights for operational adjustments.
Minimize the likelihood of compliance breaches related to data handling.
Identifying and prioritizing these unmet outcomes becomes the foundation for innovation in your data strategy.
Elevating the Level of Abstraction in Your Data Ecosystem
Often, current data 'solutions' force users to perform many low-level, fragmented tasks. Think about manually exporting data from three different systems, cleaning it in a spreadsheet, importing it into another tool for analysis, and finally building charts in a presentation. The user is bogged down managing the process of data integration and manipulation, rather than focusing on the higher-level job of gaining insight or making a decision.
Elevating the level of abstraction means designing solutions that handle more of this underlying complexity, allowing the user to engage directly with the higher-context job.
Consider the manual reporting process above. An elevated solution might be an integrated platform where the user simply specifies the strategic question (the job), and the system automatically gathers, integrates, analyzes, and visualizes the relevant data, perhaps even suggesting initial insights. The complex steps are hidden, automated.
Note: Gee, this sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? 👆🏻
From Fragmented Tools to Integrated Insights: The Power of Abstraction
This shift has profound implications:
Tools Change: Focus shifts from individual point solutions to integrated platforms or intelligent automation.
Skills Evolve: Less emphasis on manual data wrangling, more on interpreting insights and strategic thinking.
Job Performers May Change: Tasks once requiring data specialists might become accessible to business users, or completely automated.
Elevating abstraction isn't just about efficiency; it's about enabling users to perform their core job more effectively and at a higher strategic level.
Strategic Implications & Building Your JTBD-Informed Data Strategy
Understanding the Job-to-be-Done for your information users transforms how you approach data strategy:
Technology Investment: Prioritize tools and platforms that directly address the highest-priority unmet outcomes and enable higher levels of abstraction, rather than chasing the latest tech buzzwords.
Data Governance: Design policies that enable the job while ensuring security and compliance, rather than creating unnecessary roadblocks. Focus governance on the desired outcomes (e.g., ensuring data trustworthiness).
Team Skills: Invest in training that enhances analytical thinking, data interpretation, and strategic application, not just tool proficiency.
Innovation Roadmap: Use identified struggles and unmet outcomes to pinpoint opportunities for developing new internal tools, data products, or information services that solve the job better than existing alternatives.
Vendor Selection: Evaluate potential vendors based on how well their solutions help your users achieve their desired outcomes for specific jobs, not just on feature lists.
Audience Tailoring: Recognize that different segments have different jobs. An SMB owner might prioritize a job around "Quickly identifying the most profitable customer segments," while an enterprise executive focuses on "Continuously monitoring competitive landscape shifts." Tailor solutions accordingly.
Data as a True Enabler
Shifting to a Jobs-to-be-Done mindset moves your data strategy from a reactive, cost-center focus to a proactive, value-creation engine. By deeply understanding the progress your people are trying to make and the outcomes they use to measure success, you can build an information ecosystem that doesn't just store data, but actively enables better decisions, smoother operations, and ultimately, strategic advantage.
Stop asking what your technology can do, and start asking what your users need to achieve. That's the foundation of treating information as the strategic asset it should be.
What's the primary 'job' you hire your data systems to do in your organization? What are your biggest struggles or unmet outcomes? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
If you’d like to take action, I would love to help. Here’s are some steps you can take to make that a reality for us:
Join my community and get access to more content and tools
Apply for coaching so we can do projects together and build a new business-as-usual with someone who will share the knowledge, and hold you accountable. (I have limited seats so hurry!)
I do project work as well. Use the coaching link and we can discuss.
Why Me?
I’ve been trained by the best in Outcome-Driven Innovation. Part of that training involved how to understand what the future should look like. As a result, I’ve taken what I’ve learned and begun innovating so I can get you to the outcomes you’re seeking faster, better, and even more predictably. Anyone preaching innovation should be doing the same; regardless of how disruptive it’ll be.
How am I doing this?
I’ve developed a complete toolset that accelerates qualitative research to mere hours instead of the weeks or months it used to take. It’s been fine-tuned over the past 2+ years and it’s second-to-none (including to humans). That means we can have far more certainty that we’ve properly framed your research before you invest in a basket of road apples. They don’t taste good, even with whipped cream on top.
I’m also working on a completely new concept for prioritizing market dynamics that predict customer needs (and success) without requiring time-consuming and costly surveys with low quality participants. This is far more powerful and cost effective than the point-in-time surveys that I know you don’t want to do!
I believe that an innovation consultant should eat their own dog food. Therefore, we must always strive to:
Get more of the job done for our clients
Get the job done better for our clients
Get the job done faster for our clients
Get the job done with with fewer features for our clients
Get the job done in a completely different and novel way for our clients
Get the job done in a less costly manner for our clients
You could be an early tester of the latest developments, but at a minimum take advantage of an approach that is light years ahead of incumbent firms that are still pitching a 30 year old growth strategy process but haven’t grown themselves. 👈🏻It's worth thinking about.
All the links you need are a few paragraphs up. Or set up some time to talk … that link is down below. 👇🏻
Mike Boysen - www.pjtbd.com
Why fail fast when you can succeed the first time?
📆 Book an appointment: https://pjtbd.com/book-mike