The Startling Truth: Your Customer Metrics Are Probably Flawed

Many companies rely on customer metrics that provide a false sense of security.

While traditional customer metrics provide valuable insights for transactional purposes, they’re often misaligned with customers’ most important needs. That misalignment can hold you back from making the very innovations your business needs to stay competitive.

The Value of Traditional Customer Metrics

There’s no denying that traditional customer metrics have value. These metrics, like engagement rates, task completions, and drop-off points, help you track user behavior and monitor customer health. For Agile teams, these metrics guide incremental improvements, providing feedback on how customers respond to new features and allowing teams to address short-term usability issues.

In many cases, these metrics are essential for keeping your product running smoothly and ensuring that customers are engaging with your offering. They provide valuable insight into how customers interact with your product, helping teams optimize specific touchpoints and track the overall health of the customer journey.

However, while these metrics can help with monitoring interactions and fixing immediate problems, they don’t always reveal the deeper insights necessary for driving long-term innovation.

The Limitations of Traditional Customer Metrics

The challenge is that most product teams use metrics that focus on what happened, not why it happened or whether the customer is actually making progress toward their goals. Traditional metrics can help optimize certain aspects of customer interactions, but without understanding the underlying job your customers are trying to accomplish and how they measure success, you may be missing the most important insights for innovation.

While many modern product analytics tools attempt to measure progress toward user goals, they often struggle to capture the full depth of customer needs and motivations.

JTBD Flips the Script

This is where the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework comes in. JTBD helps you move beyond tracking customer actions to understand why customers are taking those actions, what they’re trying to achieve, and how well your product or service supports their success.

JTBD asks:

• What job is the customer really trying to accomplish?
• What steps must they take to complete the job?
• How do they measure success at each step?

The ideal customer performance indicators for designing products, services, and digital experiences are the criteria customers use to measure success at each step that they must take to accomplish their core job and/or to obtain your service—independent of any product or service language. These outcome-based indicators give you the clearest picture of whether your product is actually helping the customer achieve their goal.

Traditional metrics may not fully capture this. While they track actions like feature usage or drop-off rates, they might miss the most important question—whether the customer is truly accomplishing their desired outcomes.

Fundamental Insights of JTBD

JTBD is based on the insight that people buy products or services to get their jobs done (i.e., solve a problem or achieve an objective). This means that if you focus only on tracking product features or engagement metrics, you’re missing the bigger picture—the job the customer is actually trying to get done.

JTBD changes the game of innovation because, by decoupling customer needs from product and service solutions, customers can tell you what they want if you ask them about what they’re trying to accomplish, rather than about product or service specifications. JTBD enables you to reveal customer needs that are often hidden—latent and unarticulated. By asking the right questions, you can discover the real needs driving your customers’ behavior and know exactly what you have to do to design solutions that help them succeed.

Conclusion

JTBD helps you measure the criteria for success that actually matter to customers—whether your product is helping them achieve their goals more efficiently, with fewer risks, or at a lower cost. By complementing traditional metrics with outcome-based metrics rooted in JTBD, you’ll uncover the real drivers of customer satisfaction and unlock new opportunities for growth.

The most successful companies will be those that leverage both traditional customer metrics and JTBD insights. This combined approach allows for both operational optimization and deeper customer understanding, providing a comprehensive view that drives both incremental improvements and transformative innovations.

Key Takeaways:

• Traditional customer metrics are valuable but limited for innovation.
• JTBD reveals the deeper, hidden needs that drive innovation.
• Combining JTBD with traditional metrics leads to better outcomes.

Curious about how to unlock hidden customer needs with JTBD? Reach out for a free consultation.

How are you aligning your customer metrics with your customers’ true goals?