JTBD: How to find the opportunity for innovation
Once you have derived your outcome statements from your in-depth customer interviews (I explained outcome statements in this blog), you will want to create a survey to get quantitative feedback to see which pain points are felt most by which segments.
It always take a bit of time to get a survey prepared and sometimes longer to get the results back. However once you get the results, some really juicy insights can jump out to take you closer to creating a winning product that solves a genuine problem.
I’ll continue with the example from the previous blog for the job to be done:
Listen to music privately
Profile and competitor questions
Begin the survey with some profiling questions in like age, location, income etc as these are very useful to segment results later.
Ask how they get the job done today e.g. “How did you listen to music privately today?” I would answer “Apple Earphones” (It is better to use a multi-choice question that consist of top 4 to 5 products in the market that solve this job, so you can do competitor analysis later). This also helps the respondent visually recall the last time they executed the job, which gets their mind prepared for the outcome questions that follow.
Outcome Statement Questions
Layout the outcome statements as questions and allow participants to score each of the following criteria out of 5:
- Importance: How important is it for the respondent to achieve this outcome when they are performing this job.
- Satisfaction: How satisfied is the respondent with the outcome when they last performed this job.
Let me continue explaining using the following outcome statement for the above job “Listen to music privately”:
Minimise the time spent to start listening to music
As a recap, this was around the pain point discovered in the interviews whereby customers were having to untangle their earphones each time they wanted to begin listen to music.
Importance
[When listening to music privately], how important is it for you to minimise the time spent to begin listening?
Try it yourself. Rate between ‘1 — extremely unimportant’ and ‘5 — extremely important’. For me this is a ‘5’ as I like to listen to a song or two whenever I get a free moment, therefore I want to maximise listening time. It could be a ‘1’ for people who usually listen to music for a long period of time each time, as their set up time is at a relatively small percentage of their total listening time.
Satisfaction
[The last time you listened to music privately], how satisfied were you with the amount of time you had to spend to begin listening?
Notice I changed to ‘the last time” at the beginning of the question. I do this because the way humans recall memories is just plain flawed (for more information, I highly recommend the books Power of Moments or Homo Deus). It’d be easier for them to more accurately recall the last time they executed this job even though they may vary how they perform it over time.
Again, try to rate it. For the 5 years ago me I would give it a ‘1 — Extremely unsatisfied’, purely because when I used the Apple earphones above, whilst the rubbery chord makes it more durable against breakages, it is harder to untangle each time I wanted to listen to music compared to cheaper plastic materials.
How many questions?
Theory states you should have 75+ outcomes for a job, however in my experience this creates a mind numbingly boring exercise that sends people to sleep, and you will probably get very inaccurate results in the second half of the survey as the respondent’s concentration has wane. In my opinion, 20–30 is the maximum number of questions people can handle in a single session. My team recently did a 50+ questions survey for low income mothers in Indonesia and even though it was a guided survey outside of convenience stores, we found we had to split it in half and join results later.
How many people?
It depends. Textbooks tell me 150–5000 respondents depending on what kind of market and how much you want to segment your data later. The larger sample size the better, however it comes at a cost and you may just not be able to find that number of people for very specialist jobs e.g. performing heart bypass surgery.
The Results
Aah, the great feeling of anticipation when the results comes back and you are (im)patiently waiting for the summary to be reported. But what do you do with the results? Well the good news is they can be used for many very important things.
- Product Strategy — As a product manager, the thing I love most about JTBD and why I really can’t wait to get my hands on the results is it literally outputs my product strategy.
- Value Proposition Creation — Discover needs-based segments of potential customers and market the product to them in ways they will respond. I’ll write more on this in another blog.
- Competitor Analysis — If you included ‘how did you get the job done today’ in your survey, you can easily see where that product is failing.
- Market Strategy — Allows selection of needs based segments so you can formulate how you will attack each one. e.g. people tend to type the job or desired outcome as the keyword for google e.g. ‘quick way to untangle earphones’. We can create a bidding strategy around these keywords.
- Business Strategy — The survey lets you know what areas are under-served or over-served so you know which strategy to employ in the market e.g. People want better performance when listening to music privately and are underserved. If I can solve for this in my product, I can charge more.
Example of using output for Product Strategy
A quick example of how I might use the survey results for my product strategy is: a single outcome that score favourably might literally map to a feature that I need to include as a high priority in my first release.
According to my (fictitious) survey, it shows that the entire market also agree with my personal frustration around the set up time to begin listening to music. We can create a needs-based segment and differentiate on solving that pain point. I was very happy when Apple finally did solve this with the AirPod launch. As we weren’t limiting ourselves by thinking of current solutions, we can now take a look at how good enough Bluetooth has become to play a role in solving this problem. This is real product innovation.
I’d still only give them a ‘4 — Satisfaction’ instead of ‘5 — Highly satisfied’ as I still struggle to switch between my MacBook and iPhone.
