I’d add one thing to asking customers about their jobs, which in truth, they can only half express, especially if they haven’t imagined or don’t believe there is solution for what they really want to do. That is, go out and visit the customers, watch them work for a few hours, ask why they do things the way they do and observe broken processes and workarounds. The truest expression of behavior and of needs is what people do, not what they say.

Still, this is a minor quibble/addition to some good insight.

What I find troubling is when execs believe they know better and don’t want to be confused with the facts. This is not the same thing as Steve Jobs stating “customers don’t know what they want”. Actually, Steve was correct in that customers often sublimate what’s wrong with the way they do things now, and aren’t aware of their workarounds. But, he and his team were very keen observers of behavior, which is why they got the needs and designs right. But many senior execs are convinced, even when they don’t talk to or visit customers, that their ideas about what needs to be done and how it should be done are better.

You’d think what you document here would be intuitively obvious. How could you possibly design a solution to a problem if you don’t really know what the problem is? But, we still have a long way to go.

“It takes a long time to pull out of customers what they really want, and it takes a long time to pull out of technology what it can really give.”

http://www.inc.com/magazine/19890401/5602.html

Thank you for a thoughtful post.

I agree with your comment “You know what? Customers love talking about their jobs-to-be-done”

Hutch, you are correct. Your approach is sort of radical. However, when all is said and done about the need for firms to be customer-centric … generally more is said than done and radical approaches are useful.

My experience is that elicitation … a conversation with a customer about the job-to-be-done … is the most productive tool for market analysis in the front end of new product development. It also helps tone down ineffective decisions made by executive fiat and usage vectors. http://goo.gl/AmNNE

Elicitation fits into the following range of primary marketing research tools.

Surveying — surveyor asks closed-ended questions that can be answered in a few words.
Interviewing —interviewer clearly keeps control of the interview.
Elicitation — elicitor controls the conversation without revealing the agenda to the respondent.
Conversation — two people talk and exchange information freely and unplanned.

This is especially true when considering elicitation as a primary research tool for the job-to-be-done. Below are three reasons corporate employees do not use elicitation more often.

1. Elicitation sounds exciting (and it is) but it is also just hard work. A seasoned elicitor gathers and analyzes data and information from many conversations with customers, end users, and competitors.

2. Customers are seldom happy when you discount their knowledge and probe for job-to-be-done knowledge in conversations with their end users. (I am sometimes surprised about how little some of my clients’ customers understand about their customers’ job-to-be-done.)

3. Corporate employees cannot pick up the phone and elicit sensitive data and information from an employee of a competitor.

George

I’m not sure that things need to go slower in order to get them right though.

I think you’re two points are spot on, but once you establish a routine of responding to consumer JTBD and experimenting/rapid prototyping, I think it can be done very quickly.

In fact I’ve seen many instances when JTBD insights uncover opportunities at the low-end that make product launches faster and easier than what was initially planned (take features out and launch!!).

If speed is indeed to blame, from my experience it would be due to teams rushing to pass insights from one function to another (e.g. Ideation or early product research groups to the dev / supply chain / scale-up groups). If this info-transfer is rushed, and the key insights are watered down along the way, great products can launch as less-than-great.

Thanks for being on the tour and sharing your thoughts on the book.

You alluded to focus, which I believe is critical, but with focus who aids the development and research of break through technologies? Certainly, quarterly earning calls curtail innovation to some extent, as companies become highly focused and partially myopic in favor of maintaining a business lead.

I suppose there could be a utopia, where you can bake your cake and eat it too…but in order to sustain cognitive diversity, I would imagine that “talent” would need more freedom, which could conflict with the direction of business goals?

With all the forces at play, can we reasonably expect another Bell labs for our generation?