💡Product Circle ⭕ Chat - Aligning with Customers Around Their Jobs to be Done
💡Product Circle ⭕ Chat 14 with Eckhart Boehme on Aligning with Customers Around Their Jobs to be Done and the Wheel of Progress.
Product Circle Chat is runs every second week as a Zoom call that anyone can join to talk all things product, product management and problem solving. Creating value for customers and the business.
“Using jobs to be done as a shared purpose helps to align organizations with customers and deliver outstanding customer experiences” - Eckhart Boehme
Topics discussed are from the Product Circle Chats Trello board.
This Product Circle Chat was run 31 January 2024 at 6pm (Sydney Australia time).
Product Circle Chat 14 - Topic
Aligning with Customers Around Their Jobs to be Done (Wheel of Progress)
✨Customer Discovery in Weeks NOT Months✨
Eckhart’s Wheel of Progress with the AI Copilot takes Customer Discovery from 3-5 months to a few weeks.
Product Circle Chat 14 - Video
Product Circle Chat 14 - Speaker
Product Circle Chat 14 on 31 January 2024 was presented by Eckhart Boehme.
Eckhart Boehme is a Product Legend revolutionising Customer Discovery with his approach to JTBD and aligning organisations around Customer Jobs. With 30 years experience, he’s passionate about solving the right problems for customers and sharing his method around the world.
After a career at Microsoft in the US in product and marketing roles, Eckhart became the subject matter expert to the German editions of the Jobs to Be Done "bible" Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen et. al. and Eric Ries' The Startup Way.
Over the years, Eckhart has built on Clayton Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done work, developed the Customer Progress Design method and co-created The Wheel of Progress® Canvas - recently adding AI to super power insight generation.
Eckhart is currently a Founder & Managing Director - unipro solutions. He has been sharing The Wheel of Progress® and the Customer Progress Design Method in his lectures to students at RheinMain University of Applied Science, Germany and Michigan State University, US. You can follow Eckhart Boehme on Linkedin or find him at unipro solutions.
Product Circle Chat 14 - Slides
Product Circle Chat 14 - Transcript
Eckhart: At Microsoft, we said
“build what you sell and sell what you build”.
Otherwise for the customer, it's going to be super confusing. These are really great points is exactly what I've heard many, many times and these other things that create a lot of pain.
Misalignment
So, let's move on and look at like an example how misalignment is manifested. And typically looks like that. Of course, we have the customer and we love the customer. Right and we have the organization we have engineering, product management, of course marketing, sales, other departments. And what connects us with the customer, of course, is the product or the service. That's kind of the other thing that we need to deliver.
And I'm going to share a story that I researched in a case study when I did this consulting project a year ago and it was about a machine, a kitchen appliance. As you can see you can guess what this is. Maybe we can write it in the chat. What do you think this machine is?
It's a tea brewer. Exactly. It's not a coffeemaker. It's a tea machine.
And my client was an OEM for coffee machine. So, I thought tea machine coffee machine is a kind of appropriate case study and the manufacturer is here….the team was here based in Germany and they thought they knew what the customer wanted.
So, there was engineering who said that customers want the latest features. These capsules are very popular. They work very well in the coffee area. So, the customers wanted and capsules, no question about it.
Product Management, and I talked to the CEO of that company. He said they did customer research, even customer jobs we done research. And what they come up with was customers want a digitally enhanced Tea entertainment.
Whatever that means.
Sounds like a good idea.
But the question is, okay, are there many people with that need of Tea entertainment?
There was marketing and it was a very popular brand here in Germany that a number of very successful devices and they thought the customer will buy the product because they love our brand.
Sales had one machine that thought like Wow, very easily super popular. And they thought, well this Tea machine is also going to sell. We have nine stores and people are going to walk in and buy the machine.
Unfortunately, what they did is they forgot the customer, the real customer need.
And most customers what do they want? They want an easy and inexpensive way to make tea. Right and they have done this for centuries. And they will just walk in the kitchen. They boil water and have a tea bag or maybe loose leaf and so on.
So, what that company did, the company of my case study was they made something very easy and inexpensive, complicated.
And so, the machine failed.
And of course, 600 euros or $600 was expensive.
It took up a lot of space on the countertop. It was in competition with other products. And after four years, they had to close the business and they lost millions.
And so my customer realized, okay, we don't want to do the same.
We want to create a product, if we bring it to market that it's going to be successful.
And that is proof for a real customer need that has been fulfilled as best as possible. And that will be a market opportunity.
They already had the coffee machine that they had the mind develop on paper and they asked me to do research, find out what customer jobs are and if there is a problem solution match between both things.
So, this is huge let's say this organization with alignment with customer. But that's not everything.
There's also internal misalignment.
There's kind of finger pointing that kind of we don't think the other department gets it. So, like Marketing doesn't bring any value other than writing pretty collateral. Product teams they live in a cocoon and never deliver on time. Marketing thinks sales are incompetent in positioning the product and not willing to learn. And they think marketing is far from reality, living in an ivory tower and doesn’t understand customer needs.
So, a lot of misalignment and that creates a lot of pain.
It's an internal and external misalignment issue.
So, what are the root causes? Let's take a look at that. Key challenges in strategy development and execution in my mind are a
Silo mentality - between engineering, marketing and sales. They work on their departmental objectives and departmental views of the world and they don't talk very much with each other about the customer.
And also many organizations make assumptions about customers and that's really not good advice to make decisions based on assumptions and not having listened to the customers before. These are opinions and who has the strongest voice and the strongest opinions gets their way. This is not good way to make decisions.
And strategic direction is a power struggle problem. Right? It's more a power struggle than a rational process to make decisions.
So, these are the root causes in my mind and looking at Irene’s comment solving a problem no one needed solved.. Exactly!
If you looked at the Chinese market now, I was amazed when I was in China. So, they have a cup of hot water and then they put a tea leaves in it. Sometimes it's like that's a culture right. So, would they even switch to such a machine? I'm not so, sure about that.
Eckhart: I hope this was a nice explanation of what jobs to be done is. The key idea is that we observe people doing certain things using products but we still may not understand the reason why are they using like the milkshake in the video. And we try to understand that through not only observation, but also asking people questions. Doing interviews with customers and trying to understand why they did certain things and what the context has been.
And that gives us a great idea of what people really wanted to achieve.
Senior Living
A number of years ago I did a series of interviews with children trying to find accommodation for their elderly loved one.
And the interviews were all around finding senior living place or assisted living opportunities and things like that. And after the interviews were done, we understood it was not about finding that new place. It was about achieving a dignified last phase of life. There was a much bigger issue that people had, but nobody was really talking about.
This is really at the heart of jobs to be done, it’s finding out purposes reasons why people are using certain products, and then using that knowledge to extrapolate what they could use next.
So, let's take a look at more specifically what kind of drops we could research.
There are, of course, very obvious functional jobs and as kind of rational people we love functional jobs. We love to know that people want to move something from A to B but that's not enough.
We are all human beings. We are all driven by emotions. We have emotional jobs as well. Jobs that make us feel good, make us feel good about ourselves, and also
social jobs. So, jobs where we need like a third party to feel good about ourselves. So, it could be like helping other people to accomplish something and could get recognition or love from a third party.
Here's some examples. of functional drops, carrying something from A to B calculating a value. Bring a child to school safely. These could be great consumer jobs. We know in the B2B space I also include jobs obviously.
Then the emotional drops. Enjoy yourself peace of mind. A number of years ago I did a project in the freight area in the air freight area. I also interviewed pharmaceutical companies that need to ship their goods over airports. One of the key issues or customer needs was getting peace of mind. Being sure that their medication is safe, even if there's like 40 or 50 degrees on the runway, right also feeling proud of the achievement.
And as I said social jobs are about getting recognition, achieving higher social status and having the feeling of doing good.
Someone posted a link to a ”Competing Against Luck” by Clayton Christensen. This is a great book. This is a book actually that I helped to translate into German and it's great at storytelling there. What is not good is telling you exactly how to do jobs to be done, how to find all the customer jobs, but it's a great book to get into the topic of you if you're interested.
6 Building Blocks to Building Customer Job Alignment
So, six building blocks of building Customer Job alignment.
I thought I’d formalise this. It's easier to remember. And also there's a logic behind how to build that alignment, how to solve that issue.
The first building block is about a (1) shared purpose.
If you have a shared purpose, that is very powerful. This is how a shared purpose looks like. You identify a job to be done or several jobs to be done and say to the organization that's a job to be done we want to take on. That job to be done, becomes the centre of all your activities. It's not about the product. It's about the problem. It's about the job to be done and that then will determine the customer experience. This is really at the centre and if you're able to agree with your organization on that job to be done,then it's kind of much easier for everyone to follow through.
But I'll show you how to align on the job to be done. But find that common purpose or the job purposes in my mind, that's one of the most important tasks like your mission or vision statement.
The second one is about the sources of information or the data you will use to make decisions. What you need is (2) trustworthy and transparent data. So, when you are in a project and you create that data, you need to have a way to do it in a very kind of trustworthy, transparent way. Also share that information with your team and not in this example having some kind of customer data as posted on a cork board or a whiteboard but having it available and transparent for all your stakeholders in the organization. In my mind that is super important. Keeping them involved in the process, even inviting people to attend customer interviews. That goes a long way - hearing it with your own ears what the customer said. That builds trust and trust for the data you created.
The third one is about (3) rational decision-making criteria. When you can have super discussions like this picture I mean, who knows who has been in a meeting to discuss what the customer needs and whoever is the loudest gets kind of their way. You need to find a way to democratize the decision-making process to involve all stakeholders, giving them a chance to voice their opinion. But you should do this in a way that is productive, not just discussion. And I'm gonna give away how we do it.
Then there is also an (4) externally moderated process. I think it's super important. There are so many interests, so many hidden agendas involved in decision making. It is most productive to get some external person to moderate the process. If you have internal consultants, which are maybe scrum masters or agile coaches or something like that, that have come from external that also may work. But they need to be familiar with the moderation of the process. But having that kind of neutral person who has no interest in the outcome, right? They don't care, whatever the decision is they have no agenda. This the most productive thing you can do and to have that decision making. It's also the decision that will be more accepted. And I think an external person may always be the most trusted person in the room because as I said they have no interest in the outcome.
The fifth building block is the (5) joint customer job prioritization. It is where you have a process in place where everybody gets a voice. Where everybody is involved and you make a joint decision. It's like a workshop that you do and I'm going to show you how to do it but it's important that everybody is involved. Imagine what a message you sent throughout the organization. If you say okay, in the definition of our problem, not only was engineering involved, but also sales and marketing, of course, product management, maybe some other discipline that you deem helpful in the decision-making process. What a message you send! Like everybody has a voice. We want the entire organization to get behind that decision. This is incredibly powerful. This is the building block where I say this is where the magic happens. This is where the alignment happens.
And the last one is (6) collaborative strategy development. So, you want to have a process where you develop a strategy collaboratively based on the decisions you make, based on the data that you created. And I do this with people in a room. The room has four corners. We look at four phases customers go through. We are marketing, sales, engineering. They all have their seats. They all sit maybe in a certain corner, discuss the ideas, ideate and then share it back with the group. This is what collaborative strategy development looks like.
Of course, it shouldn't end after the workflow. So, let me take a look at the comments.
Irene is very busy and posted comments always invite stakeholders to watch the discovery interviews. Excellent. This is the best practice. The only time it may not work to invite stakeholders is if they have a relationship with the person you're interviewing, then the person being interviewed may not be as open.
I had that recently where one of my customers invited his best customer and he wasn't in the room and the customer didn't show up. But that was a special situation and most of the times totally makes sense. At least offer the recording of the interview or have quotes from the interviews. When you create slides,always put customer quotes on it. That that's very powerful…. unbiased interviewer without skin in the game..yes, yes.
Process & Tools
Okay. So, let's take a look at the process and some more specific tools.
The first one is identify customers jobs to be done. That is something we do through interviews, which I'm going to show on the next slide. Then we prioritize customer jobs and then ideate strategy.
It's very straightforward process which only covers part of customer progress design, but this is like at the centre.
Let's take a look at (1) identifying customer needs. So, we do these one-on-one interviews. Sometimes we do it as a group with an interviewing team. One lead interviewer takes notes and the other interviews customers. Interviews are typically consumers for 45 minutes and the business customer for at least an hour, maybe an hour and 15 minutes because you have some kind of deeper conversations. But usually focusing on 45 minutes is fine.
Then Irene talked about the Wheel of Progress(r) and this is how it looks like.
So, I can show you this. Yes, that's a canvas. So, we also have that on paper. It has a timeline. It starts at nine o'clock. This is a place where we collect forces of progress. Because it's a wheel, there are forces driving the wheel forward and there are forces that keep the wheel from turning.
And then in the middle are constraints. The constraints are like the hub of the wheel when the hub is badly breezed or rusty then it's squeaky the wheel does not want to turn.
Then we have these four quadrants, where we collect certain data about opposing forces. Opposing kind of objectives is kind of the question from where I am as a customer, do I want to leave or do I want to go and we have these fighting forces throughout the whole buying process that the customer goes through. So, we try to get visibility into what these issues are and the conflict between them.
As you can see, we collect data on that wheel of progress. It's colour coded, for example, jobs to be done with their pains and their gains in yellow, red and green at the lower left side.
And as I said in the middle we have in pink the constraints.
And green and red is always a kind of force. Green is a positive kind of force helping the process or from the customer point of view, something that is liked. Red is something customers don't like. And this we collect 12 of these elements or we call them and put them on the wheel with trained and experienced people who can do it in real time.
So, you can imagine when we are done with the interview, we have like 90% of the documentation. So, there's no backlog of analysing transcripts and doing all that work. So, no pain.
I've done several interviews in a day. Not only conducted but evaluated. This is how quickly it can be done and with our AI solution, it can be quicker.
What we do, especially with customer jobs, is putting them on a Customer Job map.
As you can see here on the right-hand side, we have a hierarchy of customer jobs. And from left to right we have a sequence of customer jobs. So, you get like the whole landscape of customer jobs presented in a way that is kind of easy to read. And you can make decisions about what customer jobs are the ones from let's say you find 75 Customer jobs,you can see on a map which are the customer jobs that you want to evaluate later on. Evaluating all customer drops you can do but that would be too much work, So, we can pre select Customer jobs and also see how they all build upon each other.
As I said, we have an AI companion, for the last months that helps us to evaluate customer interviews. So all we need to do right now is record them in real time then we can upload the audio file to create the transcript and pass them into these 12 elements and even get them on a wheel of progress and then export them into Mural.
So we have, kind of the whole flow of data, almost seamlessly, with AI.
You can just imagine how quick you can be. Because analyzing customer jobs, or the interview using AI takes maybe like 5 minutes. And then you're done. And the AI is pretty good. I mean, we have to train it. But it's doing a great job already.
Let's take a look at the second one. As I said before, this is where the magic happens. When you have criteria that you can apply to customer jobs and these are criteria we applied, it's much easier to get people behind.
And, this is what it looks like. We use the model developed by Alexander Osterwalder, the author of “Value proposition design”. Our proposals and we have just applied it. So you have a list of customer jobs, you have decision making criteria.
You evaluate customer jobs by their importance. Is that a job that people really care about? Are they tangible?
So are they here and now - “I can feel the pain, I can see the gain, the potential gain” - what's the satisfaction?
Are people satisfied? With doing this job.
And, the last question is how lucrative might this Job be to our organization? So it's like business potential. Are there many people with that need?
Maybe they will pay us a little or maybe they are a few people who will pay a lot to get that job done much better.
So the 3 criteria related to customers and one criteria related to us. Of course you can always add more criteria. Like, is this even legal? For example, that could be a knockout criteria. Maybe for some startups they don't care whether what they do is a hundred percent legal or a legal risk in large organizations. I can see them adding even more criteria. This is like, this is feasible and does this respond to our company's mission.
And this is how it looks like. This is an example from that healthcare study I did a couple of years ago. And with that OEM, I talked about, I did it in this evaluation with 8 people in 2 virtual rooms in Zoom. And one team went up, drop by job from the top down, the other one, bottom up. So they could not cheat at the same time. And then we had that list and then we compared.
So team one, team 2. Why did you only assign 1 point to this to the importance of drop and we did 4 or 3?
So you have that dynamic of the process. You have discussions. You can clarify maybe misunderstandings about the criteria or the customer job.
So this is really, it's a wonderful way. It needs to be moderated well, but when you have the results and everybody looks at it, you can say, hey, this is What we did as a team of 8. There's different stakeholders. To come up with our prioritized list of customer jobs.
So if you disagree, now is the time to disagree. So let's clean this up. It's very powerful.
And remember, this is about the problem. This is not about the solution.
So, what is in the next step is Ideate Spring. And this is how we do it.
This is the fifth step of our 5 step process, of course. This is a strategy development canvas.
You can see maybe in the middle. You have the same symbol. And so it's a representation of the timeline. It's a representation of 4 phases customers go through the process of acquiring a new solution. From the first thought until they use the product and have experience. So we are closing the loop like - This is what we found in interviews and we use data and the prioritized customer jobs. To program this canvas.
It's like programming a flight computer. So in order to know where to go and how much fuel you need and everything you need to program this thing.
Right? So you have these 4 phases. We have the passive search. We have the active search. The phases where customers might trade off decisions. What is right right solution for me? What's the best value? And the experience phase.
And in these red areas, you can see these frames. This is where we put in the data from the research.
Because we want to have that one to one relationship between the data points from all research. With our solution idea. That can be anything from messaging, channels, products of course. We are product managers so we care about products and services and creating meaningful value propositions.
Value propositions where the product meets the customer's needs and the problem we want to solve. And you can see it's a completed strategy canvas.
I call it the Wheel of Progress(r) Transmission Canvas, because it connects these 2 worlds - your company with the customer like a transmission belt.
You can see advertising ideas in the first quadrant at the top left. The “how do we even create awareness for the problem?” - this from the customer point of view the process does become aware. “OK I've got a problem. I didn't know. I didn't realise. I didn't feel it.” So we want to create that awareness. And help people to stop procrastinating. Procrastinating, for the customer, can lead to harm or regret. “If I had just started 3 years ago I wouldn't be in that trouble.” We can help people become aware.
And the second one at the top right, is about the Solution space. We can help people to explore that solution space. Many people don't even know what to search for or to put in Google, because they don't know the solution so we can offer our help. Here's an assessment, a little consulting thing we created for you. To help you to explore the right solutions. Of course we can bring in our brand. As one of the options at that time.
And in the lower right, it's about marketing, sales, helping the customer make the right decision. About offering them a test ride. This is about objection handling. Maybe you would create an FAQ that answers the most obvious questions from our research that we heard that people struggled with.
And in the lower left it's about the solution, how we solve that core problem, not the customer, not the buying jobs, of course. But the actual job I want to solve, “I want to find a new place for my elderly loved one.” “I want to achieve dignity for the family in the last phase of life”.
And at the top I think I don't show it's like the organization purpose statement. All things considered. All customer jobs, all data. Consider this is what we want to be for customers in the long run. This is our North Star.
So this concludes that last step. Of course the process doesn't doesn't stop. You can do deeper research on the customer needs, you can throw it out, you can do research on solutions, you can test solutions, you can do design thinking and other practices to come up with the right solution for the customer.
But that's not the purpose of this canvas. It's just fusing or creating the right ideas based on the data that we create. Otherwise, I mean, why do we do research, right?
Yeah, research is fun, but that's not the reason. To have fun.
It's a reason to make the right decisions.
Want to learn how to use the Wheel of Progress?
If this all sounds really exciting and you really want to learn more?
Want a better understanding of Jobs to be Done and learn how to use the Wheel of Progress Canvas?
Come to the Mastering Jobs to Be Done with The Wheel of Progress® Workshop (APAC Time Zone). First cohort starts in May. Plus if you want a sneaky discount, send me an email at irene@phronesisadvisory.com
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