Clayton Christianson used to argue that you need to have a technology core to achieve disruptive innovation. One of his favorite subjects, jobs to be done theory needs a technology core.
“Scott Anthony, a senior partner at the growth strategy consulting firm Innosight, shares the keys to innovation: put customers at the center of everything you do, understand their needs, and identify their jobs-to-be-done.”
These two key items are paramount to breaking the old cycle and surviving in a post-pandemic world. Customer centricity is not new but what is it? How do you know if your customer-centric if you truly can’t measure it well or easily?
I argue that customer centricity cannot be achieved unless you understand the psychology of decision making, namely traits that are causal to decision making. I believe that customer-centricity is achieved when you understand customer traits. Traits are not emotions. Emotions are temporary. Traits are hardwired like…. honesty. It’s something that’s probably with you for a long time. That feeling you get when you finally make your decision is for a number of reasons but when I measure traits and connect it to revenue and profit, I see a clear story being told through language psychology.
After doing this for 10+ years, very few traits drive 5:1 or more of the sales volume. Traits define who the good customer is and who the bad customer is. It’s not their fault it’s just that you don’t have product-market fit. The real tragedy is when we try to force-feed products through costly and poor performing media.
It is said that buying something is all emotional. We justify everything else. If you don’t connect with something – you don’t buy it. I’m not disagreeing with jobs to be done. It’s a valuable concept but it takes far too long and too much consulting cost to pull it off. My challenge is for organizations to embrace customer psychology as a technology built into jobs to be done. The entire process goes faster and with more certainty.
“The foundation of innovation is customer centricity—the company’s capacity to place the customer at the center of everything it does.” Now automate it and make it affordable and accessable.
If placing the customer is at the center and it’s critical to innovation then not measuring the deep reasons why people buy at scale may imply that you’re not achieving real innovation.
Context, circumstances, compensatory behaviors, and constraints: By utilizing quantifiable consumer psychology the four key points of discovery for jobs to be done must be automated and move much faster. Here’s one clear reason what I keep discovering: Even though traits are driving revenue, other factors such as location can seriously change the order of prioritization of traits. It could be a number of factors that influence this. So if you’re going to pull off jobs to be done you might need to pull it off too many times to determine how to reach product-market fit.
Instead of manufacturing intent, it would be far better to foster formed intent. Because traits are causal to revenue and profit and can be measured in great detail, we make Jobs to be done affordable and accessible to a much wider audience with great need.
My comments are about this fine article. https://www.ie.edu/insights/articles/jobs-to-be-done-innovation-guided-by-an-understanding-of-the-customer/ Big fan of CC. Nice work Maria
software…….go faster.