Do You Know the Crux of Your Growth Challenge?
Richard P. Rumelt, famed strategy professor and author of The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists, defines the “crux” as the most critical aspect or central issue that must be addressed to unlock the path to achieving your strategic objectives. It’s the pivotal part of the problem that, once resolved, can drive significant impact.
Determining the crux of your growth challenge is a quintessential C-level responsibility. Yet, those on the front lines often see things more clearly because they interact with customers and hear their frustrations daily. For many companies, the crux of their growth challenge lies in understanding their target customers’ needs.
If your team can’t agree on:
- What your target customers are trying to accomplish with your product or service
- How they measure success
- Where they struggle
…what’s the likelihood that your business is performing to its full potential?
This has always been challenging for companies that serve customers with complex needs. With recent disruptions – such as COVID, the rise of AI, and sweeping policy reforms in the U.S. – virtually every market is in flux. New market opportunities emerge because new technologies and regulations create new jobs to be done. For example, AI has made it necessary for companies to:
- Reskill employees for AI integration
- Develop governance frameworks for AI
- Optimize data analytics for AI
But customer needs are NOT changing as much as you may think.
I would argue that, even today, most changes in any given market result from continually improving products, services, and technologies – not changes in the customers’ needs themselves. People’s underlying needs (the jobs they want to get done) remain remarkably stable over time. What’s usually changing is how those needs are getting addressed.
Regardless, there’s obviously a lot of change going on, and companies that fail to understand their target customers’ needs inevitably become misaligned with their market and lose competitive advantage. It’s very hard to address your target customers’ needs if you’re not sure what they are!
How You Can Reclaim Your Competitive Edge.
One proven way to re-establish your competitive advantage is by helping your target customers get their “jobs” done uniquely well. A “job to be done” is simply a problem to solve or an objective to achieve. Helping your customers get their jobs done uniquely well can be relatively simple if you know what customer inputs to obtain and how to get them.
The Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) approach enables companies to pinpoint areas of opportunity with clarity and precision and drive competitive advantage by:
- Obtaining a comprehensive set of the target customers’ needs including most “latent, unarticulated” needs, i.e., needs that often remain hidden without JTBD.
- Identify and prioritize these needs based on how unmet they are.
An “unmet” need is an important, unsatisfied need and an opportunity for new value creation.
Obtaining this information makes it possible to reveal existing market segments of opportunity based on what customers are trying to accomplish. This segmentation is NOT based on demographics which are often just a rough proxy for the customers’ true objectives. Your competitors probably have no idea these segments even exist.
This information also enables you to conduct a more robust competitive analysis by comparing your satisfaction scores with your rivals’. These satisfaction scores are NOT based on features but, rather, based on the target customers’ ability to solve their problems and/or achieve their objectives. These insights identify where competitors are falling short and where your solutions can deliver unique value. By understanding satisfaction at the level of outcomes, not features, you gain the clarity needed to prioritize efforts that resonate with your target customers.
This level of insight transforms innovation from a haphazard guessing game into a repeatable business process, reducing risk, speeding up time-to-market, and ensuring a high degree of product/market fit at concept creation, before development.
Why Focus is the Missing Ingredient for Growth
Most companies don’t lack creativity or ideas; they lack focus. They lack clarity about where the market is underserved and where the big opportunities lie. The Jobs-to-Be-Done innovation process delivers that clarity. It complements and precedes other innovation processes such as Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile. It makes all customer-facing, value-creation activities downstream more effective.
The JTBD approach is industry-agnostic, enabling companies to uncover opportunities in their markets and then apply their own expertise with precision.
As Stephen R. Covey once said: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” For many companies, the main thing is knowing where target customers’ needs are going unmet and how to address them.
What about you? Are you confident you’ve pinpointed the most critical opportunities in your market?”
Interested in learning how JTBD can help you uncover the crux of your growth challenge? Our Lean JTBD program is designed for leaders like you—sign up here to learn more: Waitlist for “Lean Jobs-to-Be-Done.”
Or Schedule a time to explore your situation.
