Situational Section of a JTBD Survey

Constructing Powerful Jobs-to-be-Done Surveys - Part 3

What is it?

In a JTBD-based survey, situational questions play a crucial role in gathering information about the competitive solutions used by respondents to accomplish their job and the unique circumstances or complexity factors they encountered during the process.

Competitive assessment questions help identify the specific products or solutions participants used for the job. When focusing on the last instance of job execution, respondents are asked to select the product they used from a list of options. This choice serves as a baseline for assessing their satisfaction with the outcomes achieved using that solution.

In cases where the job was executed over time and respondents may have switched products, participants are asked which product they used most frequently or most recently to inform outcome satisfaction assessments. Multiple questions about competing products, including brand and technology type, enable a detailed analysis of potential advantages.

Situational factor questions are designed to uncover the unique circumstances or conditions participants faced when completing the job. These questions are polarizing and aim to identify specific factors that could contribute to segments of customers having distinct underserved or overserved outcomes. Typically, a survey includes about 20 such questions, emphasizing brevity.

Complexity factor questions are crucial for understanding customer segments after performing factor and cluster analysis based on their customer success metrics (or desired outcomes), helping answer why certain customers may have unique outcome experiences. It's important to specify that situational factor questions relate to the last time the job was executed when applicable.

Here is an example set of situational factors related to a Consumer switching telco providers. These factors can be included in a Jobs-to-be-Done survey and rated on a spectrum as you see below. One or more of these individually or in combination could be highly correlated to a needs-based segment of underserved, or overserved end users. This will help you create a data-driven persona for innovation.

Example

Since you are surveying people who have actually switched you can perform a high quality competitive analysis. You’ll be able to compare competitors across any dimensions you want. You’ll just need to make sure you set proportional quotas and also to ensure your sample size is large enough to account for how many slices you want to take on your data.

There are certainly more questions you can ask - and we did ask - but the basic ones are who was your prior carrier and who is your current carrier. This gives you an easy way to compare competitors against any dimension in your data that you want, not just situational factors.

Below is a list of situational factors that might help us understand what different groups struggled through the process in different way. I generated this list for the consumers who are considering switching telco providers; but of course I survey people have switched recently.

It can really be as simple as asking respondents to rate each situation on a scale of 1 to 5 and you’re focusing their attention on the last switching process that they completed. Ideally, this would be within the past 3 - 6 months.

But, if you want to understand more about what drove them to consider switching, there are more questions you will want to ask about their prior telco provider. You could do it on a spectrum like the one above, or you could ask straight questions with a set of responses. Here’s an example you could use:

You might ask them the importance of these factors as well…we did

We basically broke our questions down into 3 areas, but this is because we conflated multiple jobs together out of convenience:

1. What put the consumer into the switching mindset

2. What pulled them into the current telco’s funnel

3. What kept them in the funnel.

Next time, I’ll go over the core / consumption job and outcome section to show you how that gets put together.

End the Analysis Paralysis

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You can reach me at mike@pjtbd.com