Should I fire my Garmin running watch and hire the new Apple Watch ?
Here is how I think about that decision from a jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) perspective.
But first, I’ll describe my thinking without JTBD theory. This will be more like the the story I tell a JTBD interviewer for why I’m thinking about switching. Time is an important dimension to any switching story, not just the point of purchase so you will see how my thinking evolved.
“What they hire — and equally important, what they fire — tells a story.” — Dr. Clayton Christensen in ‘Competing Against Luck’.
The switching decision is like a story embedded in screenplay for a movie. There is a first scene where you get to know the main characters, the protagonist and the dilemma that must be overcome. And all of it is geared to evoke emotional feelings of the protagonist’s struggle and progress.
After the interview story, I’ll take apart that thinking using a JTBD switching analysis. This is intended for the product innovator to show how to process and structure the data from the interview into a JTBD switching framework. I won’t cover all the analysis that could be conducted but this will at least get you going in the right direction. Understanding how a potential user/customer thinks about switching to your solution allows you to make the relevant adjustments in your product roadmap, experiences, marketing, sales and growth efforts.
Jobs-to-be-done, broadly, allows for a repeatable, structured understanding of what a person is trying to get done. It is much more thorough than talking about needs, problems, pain points, and friction. These terms, while helpful are isolated, interpreted widely, rationalized and unconnected to a repeatable way you and the people in your organization think. There is no documented framework or theory to hang those words on to.
Without consistency in thinking you can’t expect your organization’s daily decision making to align to making a prospective target market better off with your solution. You will be in endless reviews (looking at more PowerPoint slides) trying to adjust organization wide decisions towards the leader’s understanding of the problem to solve.
The lack of alignment will show through to the target market very quickly. The uniqueness and relevance won’t be apparent. Products and related experiences reflect the organizational chart and culture that built them. Weak internal alignment on the JTBD will cause the target market to see, very quickly, that your solution won’t give a strong enough answer to the fundamental question: Why should I switch?
JTBD reduces innovation risk because you can clearly see what will cause the person hire and fire products.
The Story
First Thought
When the Apple Watch came out last year (2015), I read the reviews, checked it out at the store, talked to friends, but didn’t buy one. That’s odd for me. I’m in Silicon Valley. I worked for Apple for 7+ years. I’m an early adopter.
But, for me, at the time, the gains didn’t seem beneficial enough. I have a good Garmin running watch (my third). And for a daily watch, I like my Timex Ironman plastic watch that can be worn for any activity, never needs charging, is readable at night, and can take abuse. I incur a loss on these criteria switching to an Apple Watch.
I saw even more cost in the Apple Watch. I didn’t really want to carry my phone when running (necessary for good GPS tracking). I didn’t want the hassle of charging every night. I wasn’t sure I really wanted the notifications that many people saw as a benefit. So many losses, few gains.
My Garmin did have its own costs/losses. On almost every run, I have to wait 1 to 4 minutes to get a GPS signal. It’s worse on a rainy day. The battery can last a week without charging. But, the charging cable is unique and when I travel I usually forget to bring it. And uploading data is a pain.
But the overall costs of Garmin compared to the sum of the costs and benefits of the Apple Watch, caused me to conclude that I would not fire the Garmin watch. [Be sure to read my in-depth analysis of solution switching.]
Did I consider other fitness trackers? Not really. I’ve only heard about the Fitbit. But many people I know try it for a few months then drop it so I didn’t look further. Turns out there are over 50 fitness tracking type watches in the US today….interesting to think about why so few are on my radar.
Event 1
After I looked at the Apple Watch and decided not to buy, a good friend of mine got one and gave me a demo. He talked about what he liked and didn’t like. To him the biggest gain was the notifications for when he was walking around his small office and left his phone on his desk. He also said that charging it wasn’t as big of a hassle as he thought. He wasn’t actively recommending the Watch. As such, it reinforced my belief that it wasn’t for me.
As a side note, word of mouth is probably one of the biggest factors in influencing someone to switch. The recommendation can sweep away a whole set of perceived costs/losses and push someone over the line. Or, it can double down on the costs with more reasons not to switch. In fact, it’s been shown that the speed of adoption of new innovation can be measured by the “coefficient of imitation” (The Bass Diffusion Model) which is the rate at which people copy what other people do. Said another way, the sales of new products are primarily driven by the word of mouth from satisfied customers…hence “imitation.”
Event 2
About a month before the Series 2 Apple Watch was announced I ran into a problem with my Garmin Watch. After uploading my run data, via USB, to Garmin Connect (the website that archives my run data) I noticed that about 6 months of my running data in 2015 was missing. I’ve uploaded my data to this site for about 3 years. I’ve never downloaded it. I couldn’t image why the data was missing.
I called Garmin support. They answered fairly quickly. I explained the situation and the support rep tells me that I must have deleted it as there is nothing they did. I said: “Seriously, that is your response?” After some back and forth, he agreed to take a report, let Engineering know, and then proceeded to tell me they would get back to me. Five months later, nothing.
It’s odd that the deletion of data is a big loss. I don’t use the uploaded data much. I occassionally look to see how many miles I’ve run in one year. Or how many hours I’ve run in one year. So why does data loss matter that much? (Hint, losses hurt much more than the pleasure of gains…see my switch article for the theory behind this). Does this loss cause me to consider firing the Garmin?
Probably….
But net, net, I perceive it as a big loss. My thoughts have shifted to firing Garmin. It’s interesting how one experience can seriously change the loss vs. gain picture in my mind. It’s probably because emotion weighs larger than function. It’s emotionally more jarring to lose something (data) that was not expected so it sticks much harder in the my mind. And, Garmin’s poor response compounds the problem. In one study they found that 68% of customers leave a solution because of perceived indifference from the company. The company just signals that they don’t care. This is Garmin to me.
Alan Klement, in his new JTBD book, “When Coffee & Kale Compete,” talks about looking for the “struggle” in getting a job done. Not having a solution easily let’s me know if I’m maintaining my fitness level is a struggle. The growing Garmin costs of GPS signal acquisition, data upload, custom charging cable increase struggle. The data loss upped the perceived cost and resulting struggle quite a bit.
Then, Apple announces the Series 2 Apple Watch. It has a much stronger focus on fitness now with GPS (fast signal acquisition and no need to carry my iPhone) and, surprise, it’s water proof. Turns out I swim and I have a separate digital watch (a different solution) that I keep in my swim bag just for timing my swim. Apple says you can bring the watch swimming and it will count laps. If you swim, you know that is a big hassle (i.e. cost) having to remember your lap count. Generally I know what lap I should be on at what time so if I loose count, I adjust based on my time. Cost, cost, cost.
I’ve heard of watches that count your laps but didn’t want the expense of a custom watch just for that. Now Apple has peaked my interest since they are addressing another important JTBD.
Interestingly, now that I’m thinking of running and swimming, maybe a new daily watch would be ok. Then I have one watch to do three things.
The Jobs to be Done Analysis
Timeline
There are many tools to use in analyzing my self documented interview above. As a starting point, here is a timeline of the events:
What you also see in the initial question (the problem framing) is a focus on the running JTBD. I mention the daily time JTBD but I don’t have much of a struggle with that job compared to running JTBD. And, Apple, at the first Watch intro, was marketing the Watch as a solution to a whole bunch of JTBD that are not important to me: apps and notifications on your wrist. So the calculus of how I (and others) could make a losses and gains analysis is seemingly more complicated.
Multiple Jobs, Multiple Solutions?
It’s important to note that my initial question was centered around firing the Garmin watch for running and hiring the Apple Watch. That is how I framed the problem to solve in my mind. As time went by and Apple showed up with new version, the firing expanded to my swimming watch and daily time watch. This has implications for the product innovation teams. Is your solution going to solve for multiple jobs (and can you effectively communicate that?)….and therefore improve the odds of getting a consumer to switch?
To summarize, here are the jobs I’m thinking about and the solutions I’ve hired. Apple is pushing me to consider more JTBD.
Because there are many JTBD at play, there is a need to add a weighting scheme to help sort out how I would make a decision. A good high-level starting point is to look at the relative importance and frustration generated by a JTBD. This was first discussed in “An Innovator’s Guide to Growth”, by Scott Anthony.
Importance and frustration are subjective (even emotioinal) measures that are determined by asking a consumer to rate these two attributes on a scale from 1 to 5.
[Note: You can go much further with this approach by apply the Opportunity Index described by Anthony to the JTBD. Even better is to apply the Opportunity Index to each of the hiring criteria uncovered at each step of the job map. A job map shows all the steps a person goes through to execute the job. The hiring criteria are exposed at each step. The segments of people that show a higher Opportunity Index on similar sets of hiring criteria are the ones to go after when marketing the solution.]
Using the importance and frustration dimensions, here is how I look at it:
I’ve discussed the green high priority jobs around swimming and running and the low priority job of time. The Weights JTBD is to measure the number of reps I do on the same weight lifting circuit at the gym in order to make sure I’m maintaining my level. I don’t plan to advance, just maintain. My solution is to track it in my mind. It works for now. The Apple Watch won’t help me on this one as far as I know.
Apple wants to me consider all the ways Watch apps can be hired to solve other JTBD but this is not on my radar. Why? Not sure. And, they want me to be happy with all the notifications I could receive on the Watch while my phone is on the desk or in my pocket. My current work and lifestyle approach don’t place much value on that. I could see situations where it would help but I don’t have those situations very frequently at this time.
In summary, the Apple Watch would take on all the jobs in blue:
The above diagram is an important insight to product planning. Can your product cause a consumer to fire multiple products and hire just this new product? The justification to switch goes way up if a new product solves for multiple important jobs that have frustrating solutions.
In order for the picture on the right to occur, your company has to be very clear on the jobs it should be hired for. Apple did not get this right in the first version. The Series 2 it much more clearly targeted at a higher level fitness job. This probably allowed them to have strong conviction around supporting the swimming job as well as adding improvements to the running job (team with Nike and adding GPS).
Gains vs. Losses
I’ve previously discussed a JTBD tool I developed called: The Switch Decision Canvas. The Tool provides a way to document how a consumer thinks about switching to a new solution. It builds up an understanding of the perceived losses and gains of switching to the new solution, compared to the current solution.
In this case, after Event 2, there are multiple jobs and solutions to analyze. Before getting into a job map and hiring criteria, I first start with a gain/loss matrix. As I mentioned, there are gains and losses with the current solution as well as the new solution. If you are doing customer interviews of people that switched, you need to separate out the gains and losses.
Here is part of the gain/loss analysis going on in my mind, post Event 2:
Clearly there would be some weighting to each gain/loss and some quick mental math to net this out. And there are gain/loss aspects to my swim and time job not listed above.
As previously mentioned, word of mouth can reduce the perceived losses of the Apple Watch. A friend might tell me that they get 2 days of battery life for their usage pattern. Surprisingly, that would be a big plus even though my Garmin will last much longer. That’s because my expectation was set at 1 day so 2 seems like a gain.
While I’m skeptical of the apps and notify job, I did just find out, while shopping for which style to buy, that there is a night stand for the watch. I actually do wear my watch at night to see what time it is when I randomly wake up. And, my bedside alarm clock is very old and needs to be replaced. So, smells like a solution to a latent job. A latent job being one where I have a solution; I don’t like it too much but it’s not bad enough to search for a new solution.
Summary
I’ve talked through my story of what I’ve hired for particular jobs. Extracting that data over time helps you see that it is more like a crime scene investigation than a user needs analysis.
The losses from my Garmin hire were starting to add up so the intro of the first Apple Watch (Event 1) caused me to listen to see if it was a new hire possibility. I had framed things in a one job one solution context at this point.
Overtime, my framing expanded, with the help of Apple, to multiple jobs and one solution. That means, however, I had to do more mental math on the losses and gains of firing more solutions.
I didn’t show how to extract the hiring criteria from job map. This is an important step in the process.
Jobs-to-be-done is a powerful theory but it’s still early in it’s life. How to implement it for an innovation project is not well defined. Hopefully this article has provided you with some additional implementation help.
Update December 28, 2016: So did I buy one? Got one for Christmas. Just started using it. Did my first run. I’ll update after I use it more.
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