What If You Could Know In Advance How to Win in the Market?

Most companies have an incomplete understanding about their target customers’ unmet needs. This makes creating winning new and improved offerings very challenging. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) knew all about this.

Like most organizations, NFPA thought the best way to create new or improved offerings is to generate ideas and run experiments as quickly as possible and iterate their way to success. As they learned, however, this approach can be very costly, impede learning, and prevent you from ever achieving product/market fit.

The problem with this approach is that, unless you identify your target customers’ unmet needs first (or, more specifically, their important unsatisfied jobs to be done and criteria for success) before testing your product solution ideas, you will inadvertently confound two experiments: one testing customer needs and the other testing your solution’s efficacy. This is not good science.

“Previously, much of NFPA’s market research was comprised of us developing ideas and testing those ideas/concepts with our customers. But asking them if they would like an option or feature which wasn’t necessarily related to a job didn’t help us develop more or better products.”
– Kim Fontes, VP of New Products, National Fire Protection Association

A better approach is to first identify your target customers’ unmet needs, then determine which of them are attractive to pursue for new creation, and only then generate solution ideas. Contrary to popular opinion, customers CAN tell us what they want if we ask them what they want to accomplish rather than asking them for product or service specifications.

Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) makes it possible to identify and rank the target customers’ unmet needs in a highly actionable format with statistical validity. This gives companies the information and precision they need to create a “blueprint” for product/market fit at concept creation, before development.

This accelerates learning, quickens time to money, increases success rates, and provides a way to drive revenue growth in a repeatable manner.

“Working with Urko and JTBD allowed our organization to take a step back and listen to what our customers were saying about the steps they need to go through in order to successfully complete their job. He helped us get to the root of their needs and develop a more sustainable process.”
– Kim Fontes, VP of New Products, National Fire Protection Association

Have you faced similar challenges in your product development process?