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Tackling the internal Jobs-to-be-done for improving Innovation

@paul4innovating — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 08:24:57 +0000

We are constantly nudged toward understanding the needs of customers through the jobs to be done approach to shaping our innovative solutions. So why do we still seem to not achieve this ‘higher purpose’ of providing solutions to customers’ needs?

Predictable growth has run its course as we live in unpredictable times; we need a better way to identify ALL those unmet needs that our customers have.

That need comes from knowing the “job which needs to be done”. We need to sharp shoot to hit clear targets, we need to become a lot more explicit in our knowledge of a customer’s unmet needs, and they need to make the connection of that need with our product (or service).

Mapping the hierarchy of customer needs

We need to map the jobs and generate desired outcome statements that are specific and of real interest to the customer, not our list of multiple ideas generated based on where we are or what we think we know. We need to build a hierarchy of customer needs.

By even attempting to follow a ‘needs first’ approach we are often left to figure out the unmet needs. The flaw lies in not having these fully understood. All needs can be captured but this requires combining a more rigorous, controlled approach, coupled with astute observations.

The key still requires us to accurately quantify the degree to which a proposed solution will increase customer satisfaction – and that means knowing the jobs they want to complete.

We need to segment by jobs and to do this we need to capture this in clear, precise job outcome given statements. We need to become clearer on the product, service or business model ‘job’ it is intended to perform, measured by a customer’s desired outcome.

I really believe our internal processes are letting us down.

There is real scope to do a jobs-to-be-done (JtbD) evaluation internally, let me explain. We can become so intent on finding out the customer JtbD that we might be forgetting the internal ones that need addressing as well, they get ignored and continue to ‘undo’ all the hard work of customer need discovery.

We need to fix the internal need for innovation first, the job we are trying to achieve. We are failing on this considerably.

So what is the internal job to be done?

Is it to keep everyone employed in developing and launching new products, to keep our innovation structures humming along or just because it is expected from us?

Surely the job to be done might be “to reduce the product failure rate” – the end need is to get into the innovation pipeline only high-value products that are sustainable, offer clear market differentiation and have a distinct demand. Often we allow products into the development pipeline that are less than stellar.

Actually, we have a wide range of reasons for ensuring failure before the product even gets launched. These are the jobs to be UNDONE that need to be eliminated.

Can you spot these happening within your organization? Do you sense you have seen or been part of this set of actions that had the triggering effect of altering the product from its original discovery point?

Failure Points	Activity outcome and its potential impact on failure
Inattention	Someone decides to deviate from the original detailed specifications and this impacts significantly on the JtbD originally identified but accepted internally as ‘an acceptable’ risk, without any tracking back and validating this ‘internal’ change and how it compromises the original need.
Lack of Ability	The skills, conditions or training to execute the JtbD that has been identified, so as to successfully translate this back into a product that delivers on this need are not available within the organization. They are not brought in to offset this lack of internal ability, it becomes ‘let’s reinvent here’ failing to understand critical experience points.
Deviance	The internal process suddenly gets short-circuited to speed up the process, the missing ingredient of understanding gets overridden by this need for speed or someone up top overrides the process and the deviance has a knock-on effect that (radically) alters the final product intent.
Process Inadequacy	The discovery and development process is faulty, they miss critical signs or ignore them and keep pushing on to keep to the prescribed project timeline for fear of being singled out. To call stop is bad and indicates weakness, not strength, so the process continues regardless
Uncertainty	The initial idea lacks the type of real clarity researchers require, gaps begin to be filled in by one person’s assumption, which was ‘best’ judgement and ‘reasonable’ but produces undesired results that are difficult to call a stop to. Actions adjust going forward with future consequences
Task Challenge	The task becomes far too difficult to execute reliably every time and the eventual production quality becomes variable and compromised and the products lack consistency on that final finish and fail to meet the expectancies of the customer
Process Complexity	Those well laid out plans, built on a complex final production layout suddenly encounter constant and sometimes novel interactions unexpected and cost overruns, delays, and final product rejections all suddenly rise with variable final product results that should have been unacceptable but forced to be acceptable, but on to the consumer.
Hypothesis Testing	The hypothesis sounded great, it was heavily backed as a winner but suddenly fails, sometimes when capital commitments have been made. Instead of simply ‘pulling the plug’ it begins to have a momentum of its own, heads go down to prove the hypothesis irrespective.
Exploratory Testing	Some adjustments or experimentation made it into the final product, it was meant to be a clever addition to expand knowledge and cater to the JtbD need but has undesired results unforeseen or not thought through.

Tackling the internal JtbD is not easy. While we deviate, while we let internal interpretations into our new product development process we are building in the chance of product failure.

Managing the internal JtbD really does need thinking about.

Knowing the need of our customers and markets is the place that will get us towards growing our business. Yet we do need to focus more often on the failures we have in the internal Job to be Done to actually improve our product success rate. Internal ego and the innate wish to constantly meddle along the innovation development process seem to have many jobs that need to be undone.

We need as much internal discipline to stay focused and true to a discovered customer need within our internal processes and pipeline.

How often does a product in its development get altered to accommodate internal wishes? This internally driven perspective, intent on ‘just’ getting the product out of the door, because keeping it in its original state seems simply too hard for all sorts of reasons.

The emotional factors kick in and you hear “compromise and cannibalise” and a host of other fear factors to protect existing products, systems or structures that are ‘turf’ driven.

Internally we have this need to identify the true internal jobs-to-be-done and that often centres around deviations from the “customer need discovery point” and it is these which might be causing more failure than you realized, well before any product gets launched. These internal failures need to be undone.

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Publishing note: This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Tackling the internal Jobs-to-be-done for improving Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Grounding innovation through convergence and intersections

@paul4innovating — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:39:17 +0000

Discovering intersections is where ideas collide, according to a theory brilliantly put together in a book some years ago by Frans Johansson called “The Medici Effect”. Johansson recommends we step into these intersections and then you can see how different thinking can meet head to head, as in this case from numerous innovation experts, to give you a deeper insight into your own innovative thinking.

I often have a habit of opening up a file on a subject when I feel it needs further exploring and jobs-to-be-done has become one of these. It is the convergence of many experts repeating sometimes their personal mantras has finally given me a growing realisation on how important this understanding of satisfying these jobs-to-be-done becomes too successful innovation.

Now this ‘light bulb’ moment of mine may not come as such a great surprise to some of you selected few but I’d argue it might be worth reflecting upon by taking a fresh look at this ‘idea’ of jobs-to-be-done a little deeper in your thinking also. There are many who tell you we should.

The power of many innovation thinkers
Firstly why is it that many of those renowned exponents of innovation are all beating the same drum?

There is Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn in countless articles and in his book “What Customers Want” talking about “Outcome-Driven Innovation” that really has mastered the methodology of addressing unmet customer needs.

Recently Lance Bettencourt, a colleague of Tony’s , has delved even deeper into customer needs in his book “Service Innovation” arguing we must shift our focus away from the solution and back to the customer and stop taking those often educated guesses into a clear model to guide us to help people solve problems.

Clayton Christensen talking about customers buy products and services, to help get jobs done in his book ‘The Innovator’s Solution”. Christensen went even further into this with in many articles and subsequent books as he expanded on his “Disruptive innovation theory”, including references in the one “Seeing What’s Next” with Scott Anthony and Erik Roth.

Scott Anthony then picked up on this even further when he returned to this jobs-to-be-done in “The Innovator’s Guide to Growth” with Mark Johnson, Joseph Sinfield and Elizabeth Altman. Also Scott brings this out again in his “The Silver Lining”- an innovation playbook for uncertain times”.

You also see further reference in articles entitled “Finding the right job for your product” in MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2007 by Christensen, Scott Anthony, Gerald Berstell & Denise Nitterhouse . There are so many references to this subject you must wonder why it is not more ‘top of mind’ in all that we do in innovation?

Their ‘collective wisdom’ is focused on the job trying to be done.

All focus upon specific techniques, methodologies, processes to understand the customer and what they are trying to get done, that is a present day potentially unmet need –something being missed by a product or service in any space applied to business-to-business or business-to-consumers. Some talk of designing a “jobs tree” others a “universal job map”.

A key takeaway is placing unmet needs, jobs-to-be-done BEFORE simply idea generation. Open-ended idea generation gives you an abundance of ideas but if you don’t really understand the customer needs and don’t have a clear standard that defines just what the structure, content or format of a valid customer statement need then all your efforts will potentially not lead to that more predictable innovation expected from all the innovation activity.

In Tony Ulwicks clear view “it is the job the customer is trying to get done will offer the stable, long-term focal point around which value creation should be centred”

He calls these the ‘desired outcomes’ customers want and to achieve this point they ‘hire’ products and services to do the job. It is how we see the world in innovative opportunity that will lead to better innovation and this collective insight argues this well.

So ‘jobs-to-be-done’ is a fundamental building block to presenting possible business opportunity as customers want to buy solutions. An often quoted comment from Professor Theodore Levitt “people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill- they want a quarter-inch hole”. We need to learn the difference through closer observation and clarity of our thinking perhaps?

Recently we are going one step further- Jobs-to-be-done for Business Model Innovation

Mark Johnson in his recent book “Seizing the White Space– Business Model Innovation for Growth & Renewal” returns to jobs-to-be-done as essential for future Business Models.

They form the customer value proposition and he suggests three important metrics come from this approach. 1. How important the job-to-be-done is to customers. 2. How satisfied customers are with the current solutions and 3. How well the new offering gets the job done, relative to the other options.

The more important the job, the better the match between the job and the (final) offering will generate a potential new value proposition for Business model innovation- discovering unsatisfied jobs-to-be-done that might take you beyond the existing offerings in the market into a new terrain.

He argues you must first develop this ‘eye’ for discovering the most-promising opportunities, his ‘white space within’ so as to alter the basis of competition.

Needs-based is different

I think it is important to clarify something here. This jobs-to-be-done is not needs-based analysis. You must stop asking “what do you need?” and start asking “What are you trying to get done?” In Mark’s view and all the others before him “this will set you down the road to the jobs-based approach”. Reduce asking “what is desired?” you need to certainly delve a little deeper it seems.

Equally when you get into this unfilled jobs-to-be-done you have not just the functional aspects but you can explore the social and emotional aspects that all make up the experience to accomplish something.

Service approaches need to think more about the social and emotional parts; again you can gain a greater insight into this from Lance Bettencourt’s book “Service Innovation” to grasp the real differences that could make a product, service or new business model truly innovative.

Adding even a further voice to this jobs view is Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur

Additionally Alex and Yves are lending their innovation weight to the value of jobs-to-be-done and often refers to this in focusing here in the application of their book “Business Model Generation” aim- a book for visionaries, game changers striving to defy outmoded business models to design tomorrow’s enterprise”.

To describe the rationale of how and organization creates, delivers and captures value it has to go back to the job-to-be-overcome. His suggests value proposition needs to seek to solve customer problems and satisfy customer needs (and unmet ones especially) with a newly selected bundle of products, services, concepts etc.

It can be an aggregation of existing combined in new ways or a new, sometimes disruptive offer.

Jobs-to-be-done offers a clear way to innovate

So whatever we do, we need to understand the unfilled job that needs satisfying, no matter if it is a product, service or business model. It comes from a distinct mix that could be quantitative or qualitative but it must contribute to new customer value creation.

This could be in the form of newness (entirely new set of unmet needs), performance, customization, design, reduction on the existing offer (cost, price, risk, and complexity), giving accessibility, convenience and improved usability.

When thinking ‘collides’ we do need to understand it far deeper.

I’ve tried to step into this specific jobs-to-be-done intersection of thinking so you can see how such diverse innovation thinkers can converge too finally given me a growing realisation on how important this understanding need of satisfying these jobs-to-be-done becomes so important for successful innovation.

It requires plenty of backtracking, researching and reading to fill in the gaps but if you recognise “Outcome-Driven Innovation”, “Disruptive Innovation theory”, the assorted guides to growth and wants, “Service Innovation”, “the Silver Lining” along with “Seizing the White Space” and “Business Model Generation” you realize this is a powerful point of convergence we cannot relegate or delegate, we need to fully understand it totally to make it connect in most of what we do in innovation discovery.

One final caution though is from Scott Anthony in his book ‘The Silver Lining”, “really nailing the job-to-be-done is not an easy task. It typically requires blending together multiple market-research techniques and acting like an investigative reporter or detective piecing together multiple clues”.

Who said successful innovation was easy anyway? It is certainly my ‘job-to-be done need’ in exploring the DNA of innovation.

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