Customer Motivation is the fundamental unit of analysis
Knowing that someone is a 56 year old woman with a high paying job commuting daily to and from the city’s financial district is probably going tell you that it is likely she reads the Financial Times in the morning. But it is not going to tell you why she reads the Financial Times, which sections are most important to her or how she uses the information to make better decisions.
Knowing only her sex, age and commute is not going to make you able to improve the product (please try :). But knowing her why will. And with why we mean knowing what progress she is trying to achieve or struggle she is trying to overcome and how she measures success.
Because knowing what motivates her helps us know what good looks like and how to measure our own ability to improve our delivery of value to that means.
This is why we use Customers’ Jobs-to-be-done — to better understand how to improve our offering and measure our ability to be successful at it. This could be through improving an existing offering or inventing a new one.
The Customers’ Jobs-to-be-done helps us understand and articulate what job / activity in her life she is hiring our offering for.
It is a simple and efficient tool that both takes us into the world of our customers and through its simplicity and accessibility effectively aligns the team around a shared customer understanding, language and goal. Which is key especially if you are in a cross functional team where every member brings their own language, world view and priorities pulling them all in different directions.
Customers don’t want technologies or functionalities. They don’t want cheaper or faster. You are most likely not going to buy insurance just because it’s efficient and effortless to do it. There needs to be a job first, something that motivates the customer to use your product to achieve their wanted progress or overcome their struggle. Customers hire products and services from companies to solve their own needs. To paraphrase Clayton Christensen:
Understanding who the customer is, is the wrong unit of analysis.
What we want to know is what the customer is trying to achieve. What goals or progress are they hoping to realize or what struggles are they trying to overcome in a given situation. How does the customer make decisions and how does she measure her own success?
Classic customer segmentation is based on demographics and stems back to 1664. It is a valuable system to organize populations through correlation, but it doesn’t help you understand what motivates a parent, guitarist, finance director or early riser. It doesn’t help you understand what influences their decisions and motivates their actions.
If we want to produce new or improve current value offerings to our customers we need to know what makes something better at solving their needs. Correlation isn’t going to help us, but causation through understanding their need and motivation will.
By identifying what the customer is trying to achieve, you can better know what good looks like and start improving it. The customer need, their motivation and desired outcomes becomes our lens through which we understand how to make better products and services to support our customers and deliver business value.
Image from earlier article on how to articulate the a Customer Job-statment:
Note! to be fair. Customer Jobs-to-be-done reaches far deeper than what this article touches on. For deeper and more brilliant insights into Jobs-to-be-done please visit Strategyn.
