Why Your Customer-Centric Strategy Might Be Failing: A JTBD Perspective
Most organizations aspire to be customer-centric. They sincerely want to prioritize their customers’ needs in all aspects of the business. Yet, they often fall short. Why?
There are a lot of challenges companies face to become customer-centric but one stands out above all others: how we understand our customers’ needs.
We cannot be customer-centric if we misunderstand our target customers’ needs.
One example of “falling short” is the stubbornly high failure rates for new products. Although there have been advancements in product development processes, the overall success rate has not significantly improved over the past two decades.
Why is that?
The number one impediment to consistently winning at innovation and being truly customer-centric is confusion about what a customer “need” really is (shout out to Tony Ulwick for his pioneering work on this). Most companies don’t know what type of customer inputs to obtain, how to get them, or how to use them.
Trying to “understand the customer” can be like trying to understand the ocean; there is no end to it.
It’s not uncommon for companies to spend months doing customer discovery, generating hundreds of pages of transcripts and notes, and still be confused about how to create product/market fit for a new product or how to differentiate a current offering.
The Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) innovation approach solves this problem by defining customer needs at two levels. At a high level, customers are trying to get a functional job done like “make a hole.”
At a lower, more actionable level, customers are trying to get their functional jobs done according to specific criteria for success (that they can articulate).
For example, when carpenters are making holes as part of building residential homes, they want to “Minimize the time it takes to determine where to make the hole,” and “Minimize the likelihood of making the hole in the wrong place,” etc.
The specific information that a company will need to obtain from its target customers will depend on the firms’ business, objectives, and situation.
Nonetheless, to win at innovation and new products, the information needed will most likely include the target customers’ functional, emotional, social, and related jobs (i.e., other functional jobs they’re trying to get done before, during, or after executing the main functional job), the criteria they use to measure success, and where they struggle when performing the main job.
Where customers struggle when executing the main functional jobs are their important unsatisfied needs and your opportunities for innovation and growth.
For any organization that wants to truly be customer-centric and win at new products, as the late Professor Clayton Christensen said:
“The unit of analysis must be the job the customer is trying to get done.”
Not the customer.
Of course, other demographic information is needed to reach customers for marketing and sales. Nonetheless, one of the great strengths of JTBD need statements is that they are easily understood and universally useful for every customer-facing, value-creation function in the company.
