Research Managers:

There is a whole series of methods that can define how a product or system works and help you understand where the system problem is. Then there are creative strategies that you can use to build the fastest route to the solution.

This is where my business partner Adrian and I came up with our company name, Disruptive Lemonade. From one of these creative strategies we learned about turning ‘lemons into lemonade’, and for a business, what that means is turning something potentially harmful into a delight, just by adding in a simple ingredient to transform your system.

We help companies figure out how to innovate by looking at their customers and how that customer is struggling to get a job done. To identify the struggle, you need to define the job, based on the analysis of why customers buy products. Because, ultimately, they don't actually want your product. They want the outcomes a product can give and that's about getting the job done.

Your Customers Don't Want Your Products - They Want Outcomes

There is a lot of granularity when it comes down to defining a break in a system and how to fix it, even more so when scoping out opportunities for innovation. I’ve also found its a lot more complex in trying to explain how to get there.

Since defining the customer job is the first step, I like to look at it as the customer's goal, meaning what goal they really trying to achieve when they use your product or service, or from a higher level, the core reason they use it.

For example, let’s look at the role of a coffee shop. One customer could go in because they want to have an ‘informal business meeting’. They’ll probably need to order some refreshments too. They need to focus on facilitating the meeting and ensuring it goes smoothly, whereas another customer will be there because it's lunchtime and they're looking for a ‘quick bite to eat’.

If you start to analyse the customer value model around an ‘informal business meeting’ and ‘quick bite to eat for lunch’, they're very different jobs. As the owner of a product, you have to really understand what the core job is that your customers are trying to get done. And that’s a useful way for us to analyse customers, segment markets and find growth opportunities.

As an entrepreneur looking to innovate the coffee shop business, you may want to think about ‘informal business meetings’ as a potential market because they're not particularly well catered for unless one rents a meeting space. In a coffee shop, the benefits are clear for such a meeting, the cost is low with low risk.

However, a coffee shop is not optimised for ‘informal business meetings’. There are many outcomes and related jobs you are trying to get done that are not satisfied with this market. This is a big opportunity for an entrepreneur.

With coffee shops alone, our studies have shown there are around 40 different jobs to be done. What we do as a business is help organisations untangle all of these jobs and organise them, which allows us to see which of these jobs are satisfied and which are not. It comes to drilling down and getting the metrics on an unsatisfied job by mapping out all of the customers desired outcomes and understanding why they might be struggling.

It starts to make sense that you rather try and design a better product to facilitate better ‘informal business meetings’ than introduce new products that compete with the coffee shop experience. Because it bears repeating; your customers don’t want to buy your product, they want the outcomes your product gives them.

Your System of Innovation is Broken

A business should always be looking to innovate. This is how companies like Apple have stayed at the top while others, like BlackBerry, have become irrelevant.

Through the lens of a brand like Land Rover, there are many ways to approach the market to improve innovation. In our project we looked at two perspectives. The first, which is the most obvious, is that as a consumer, once I have decided to go somewhere, I have to ‘drive the vehicle’, thereby overcoming various challenges. For example, its often different from summer to winter. If it’s winter, then contextual environment factors, like snow, will impact the drive. Upfront, we need to know if this will be the focus of the study or, do we need to focus more narrowly on other specific steps, like ‘prepare a vehicle to drive when it's snowing’. Before we focus on ‘drive the vehicle in the snow’ as the whole study, we could investigate through tests of related ‘jobs’, where the struggle is more acute. What we ended up focusing on for Land Rover was a broader understanding of the jobs its customers primarily used the car for, which is the second approach.

What we discovered from our sample, was that for a robust 4x4 vehicle, the Land Rover Evoque rarely ever went off-road. It was mainly driven for school drop-offs and local family commutes, surely not the purpose it was intended for. While snow may very well be a factor that impacts dropping kids off at school for many in the U.K, a car of this nature comes with the insurance that should you need it, the benefits of 4-wheel-drive will come in handy.

What this meant for Land Rover engineers in the case of our study, was their core market wasn’t to help people go off-road, a significant focus of projects at the time, but rather to manage the adverse weather conditions. We analysed the whole picture and from that, gave the engineers actionable customer data that helped their innovation, not how to market to the various consumers who would buy their car, which is where the company’s data collection focus had been on. Land Rover’s extensive marketing data spoke to the various consumer profiles and feature feedback paralysis, guessing how and which features would be useful, but with none of the data to back it up.

The engineers were fed-up of guessing. Our opportunity focus was now clear. We were able to identify that the innovation required was to further assist Land Rover consumers to get their jobs done more effectively and which segments of the market required which features, making everyone happy.

Engineers Fear Customers

Perhaps saying engineers fear customers is an extreme statement, but many engineers certainly understand very little about the customer and avoid them where possible. How can we blame them? Customers are complex and they’re not brought up in a culture that is focused on people, but rather the system, which becomes their focus.

Of course, an engineer knows the customer’s needs are important, but they don’t understand how to define customer value or measure the value with precision on a market and thereby segment the market usefully for innovation.

They’ll do some qualitative research, sure. They may even cover a wall in Post-Its or do a quick survey, but even this will be incomplete and biased in asking consumers if they want this or that feature. If you have heard of Kano, you will know its methodology is about products and features. Jobs to be done is different, it is focused on customer value, the outcomes customers want not the products. They are very different metrics.

What engineers need to know is what outcome a specific feature will give the customer, and if the market actually cares if you improve this outcome. Improving the outcome is the customers measure of success.

A few months ago I spoke with an autonomous road sweeper company. They were comfortable getting data about system operators' pain points but didn’t know where to start with road sweeper interactions with the general public, especially considering factors like the disabled and children running about, and not to mention emotive public perceptions of autonomous systems. By identifying the core ‘job’ we can hang all the research off the same hook. Yes, the system operators, the councils, the general public, etc. This integrated approach benefits product development, brand positioning, PR and ultimately sales.

As well as innovating the core functional job, it comes down to identifying a strong market position and compelling messaging. Knowing which customer groups need to be the focus of value creation is crucial, particularly when you want to take an existing product, turn it up a notch and target a new market. A company we worked with did their own research, marketing and sales for a year and a half and got nowhere. They were convinced their current product was wrong for this new market and were about to throw the towel in.

We were able to quickly identify they didn’t need to innovate their product at all, but rather message and position it to the right stakeholder, in the right room, delivering the right outcomes. It was about resonating with the financial decision maker and their unsatisfied outcomes.

The Value Model

In our research, we are trying to identify the growth opportunity in the market. So if I said that a customer segment makes up 20% of the market, we really need to know the dollar value of that percentage. It won’t be 20% of the overall population size, but of the total willingness to pay for that segment.

We collect the data around that 20% of the market and determine how price sensitive they are. If they’re a premium segment, it could be up to 50% of the total willingness to pay.

Dyson is a good example. Hairdryers traditionally go for between £60-£100. Dyson enters the market with a £300 hairdryer, everyone thinks it will fail but they’re making an absolute killing. Why? Their differentiator strategy is that a premium segment of customers are willing to pay a lot more to get the job done better. Our data helps us identify and size the growth segment. We get to see what they’re willing to pay to get the job done and also their willingness to get the job done perfectly. Dyson is aiming for perfection and there are customers that will pay for it.

Once the job becomes the epicenter of what we’re studying, the value model and all the detail we require fits around it. We call it ‘job’ framing.

Imagine a square. In the center of it is your core customer job statement. On top of the square would be the different customer groups we are interested in targeting and analyzing. The bottom would be the outcomes, related jobs, emotions, and consumption chain jobs that we are going to study. To the left we capture what is causing them to struggle with this job, specifically complexity factors and difficult contexts they might be in. Finally, to the right, we need to know relevant personal attributes the individuals have, for instance, their attitudes towards new technology and demographics.

This is essentially the value model we build for our studies. Once we have all this, we can do a survey, segment the market and answer the big growth questions your team wants answering.

The Value Proposition

Lastly, I want to talk about the heart of this research. The value proposition is about delivering a promise that is both credible and viable. This promise has to be aligned to the value gap of the target customer segment, which we need to establish. Through the process of understanding how customers struggle to get the job done, we will know the underserved outcomes and the value gaps of each segment. If we have four segments, each segment may have a different value gap that needs addressing. Any value proposition needs to align to that segment and their value gap to ensures it can get the job done better and/or cheaper.

Essentially from a jobs-to-be-done perspective, you’re trying to pinpoint the value gap within a specific segment, but also build a quantitative profile of that segment to enable emotional positioning and messaging around the job.

Think about the classic buying proposition of the iPod: 1000 songs in your pocket. The customer job was to ‘listen to music on the go’. The value proposition Apple developed was unique, compelling and right there in their slogan because you know you can’t carry 1000 songs in your pocket today, but with this product you can. The ‘pocket’ becomes the key metaphor for being ‘on the go’. ‘Songs’ reference the core job ‘listen to music’. ‘1000’ is a direct measure of the promise that can be achieved.

There is obviously a whole process for how we go from a set of customer outcome statements to a precise value proposition, but you’ll need to start by using the value proposition formula. You’ll need to extract that into a consumer-facing message by looking for metaphors or cues the consumer can respond to and then test. It all feeds into the optimal buying value proposition until you get that golden consumer facing message. Now in the case of the iPod, the product engineers needed to ensure the hard-disk was small enough to fit in your pocket and not feel like a lead weight. Without it, the value proposition was gone.

Suffice to say, you can know exactly who you want to target and know exactly what to say to them, but without addressing the ‘value gap’ in the job to be done, there really is no point to putting the product out there to begin with.