Traditionally for a product company the user journeys that were focused on were the ones accrued during the usage of the product. With barriers to entry in a lot of marketplaces high, a company need only be better than its competitors to win customers. Bad reviews were localised and complaints were made by mail or over the phone.

This has changed with the advent of large numbers of people connected with (relatively) high speed connections to the internet. Customers can get in touch by email or social media and expect responses instantly. Bad reviews are global and can disseminate quickly. Add further the lower barriers to entry into digital markets (and a lot of non-digital ones) and simply beating the competitors is no longer a strategy as the number of competitors is much larger.

In order to keep loyal customers companies must now consider the whole user journey and think before and after the purchase, offering a whole solution much more similar to a service than a product.

Moving forward

This new wave of customer expectation also brings with it the opportunity to provider greater value. The products you provide can offer lasting value in connected ways integrating with other services. This is a paradigm shift from random transactions to on-time regular value creation, customised to the individual.

In this new model the line between product and service is thin, and companies can use this as an opportunity to better serve customers and keep up with their rising expectations.

Product and service boundary was originally published in Design Thinking Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When interviewing customers you are trying to dig down to the emotional, social and functional value and contexts in which they make decisions so that you can seek to provide more value.

The problem is asking questions only goes so far as people find difficulty in explaining every aspect of what they do. This is where prototypes come in.

What is a prototype?

A prototype is a physical manifestation of a question. A customer does not respond verbally to this question, but instead responds with their actions.

Prototypes are important because people find it very difficult to answer questions such as: will you use X or do you think you will use Y. These questions are poorly answered verbally and so need another tool.

“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.” — Linus Pauling

Prototype versioning

Just as with verbal questions, you start at a high level and drill down when you find an interesting piece of information. The ideation space is large at the beginning of a project as the cause of a user behaviour is not well understood and therefore there are hundreds of different variables that need to be uncovered.

As all these early prototypes will be discarded you do not need to spend a lot of time on them. Instead your aim initially is to remove as many bad ideas as possible as quickly as possible.

These early prototypes will point in the direction of customer value, and refinement of them will further lead you in the right direction. It is important that these early prototypes are very different from one another to make sure you have covered as much of the idea space as possible.

Minimum Viable Product?

An MVP is a well refined prototype and serves to answer a single question:

“Will this exact product provide value in the marketplace?”

If you start a conversation with an MVP without prior prototypes it is pure luck whether you provide value or not, and worse you have sunk time into a product and will be less willing to throw it away if it doesn't work — which might lead you to try to force it to work.

Prototype Pyramid was originally published in Design Thinking Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Rewards of the self (the need to seek out new things/challenges)
2. Rewards of the tribe (the need to feel connected)
3. Rewards of the hunt (the need to acquire things)

These link to our JTBD spec:

1. Emotional spec
2. Social spec
3. Functional spec

This gives examples of the phycology behind why we do what we do, and why the 3 levels of the job spec are important.

Unifying Hooked and Jobs To Be Done was originally published in Design Thinking Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“We create products to make you perform at your best, by keeping hunger at bay during the day. Our current solution is our oat bar, try it today” ✅

In Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why, he advocates that your company should have a core belief, a Why. Any products you make are in service of that belief (you are not defined by your products, you are defined by your belief).

This is especially true in a world where markets change rapidly and the products need to change just as quickly to survive.

People value potential over current performance, so a company that implies it has potential to keep innovating will be valued above those that boast current performance.

One of my favourite examples of the JTBD spec is in the book Competing Against Luck; selling nappies to new markets.

The functional purpose of nappies is obvious (i.e. collection) and the company thought that if nappies sold in other countries why not expand into those that do not use them e.g. China? So they analysed the context of the JTBD (price families could afford for example), and made a product that fit (this is an example of glocalization).

They didn’t sell well. They asked people who did buy them why they bought them. The answer was interesting. They said that babies wearing nappies slept longer which meant they could spend more time with their partner (emotional aspect of the job). Also, sleeping longer meant better performance the next day (good performance is well regarded in society, so this forms the social part of the job).

They changed their marketing strategy by starting with why. They pushed the functional aspect of the nappy to the back of the sales pitch, and focused on the emotional and social aspects of the job.

They were no longer selling easier collection, they were selling more time with family, and more energy the next day.

This implies there is a hierarchy in the 3 aspects of the JTBD spec:

1. Emotional
2. Social
3. Functional

Start With Why suggests organising your sales pitch as follows:

1. Why you do what you do (emotional)
2. How you do what you do (how you compare to others = social)
3. What you do (functional)

Which complement the JTBD spec nicely.

Unifying Jobs To Be Done and Start With Why was originally published in Design Thinking Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[ When _____ ] [ I want to _____ ] [so I can _____ ]

This story framework is remarkably similar to Emma Coat’s story principle at Pixar:

Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

This principle is used by Dan Pink in his book To sell is human to describe a way to effectively pitch a product when trying to sell it.

This leads to the conclusion that a good JTBD description has the same message as a good sales pitch.

The old adage “Good products sell themselves” seems to ring true.

The above makes intuitive sense, if you know the user problem inside out, parrot it back to them, only with your product as the solution at the end of the story, they will give you that “take my money” look.

Humans and stories

We are hard wired to think about things in terms of stories to help us try to understand the world. So much so that given a series of random events (hindsight for example) we easily formulate a (false) story tying the events together.

When interviewing a user to try to find a JTBD Clayton Christensen recommends asking the user to tell a story around the purchase. Stories are very good at packaging experience, so this is not just a nicety. Users will very easily formulate a story rich with experiences that you can plan to improve with your product.

People aren't buying products they are buying experiences.

Well defined products sell themselves was originally published in Design Thinking Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s not the number of hours you work, but rather the type of work you are doing.

For example, you might love designing apps, you could do this all day and not think of it as hard work. But spend 5 minutes on a financial spreadsheet and it seems like hours have passed.

So when you hear that in business you have to work hard, it means you have to do lots of the things you don’t enjoy in order to do the things that you do. You might not like spreadsheets, but without them your business will be at risk.

To power through use this checklist:

1. Write down everything that needs to get done
2. Check you have got everything on that list
3. Break up the list into small chunks
4. Start a chunk and set a deadline for finishing it
5. After finishing each chunk celebrate the small win

The take away? Working hard is about going outside your comfort zone, doing the things you don’t like, to enable the things you do.

Boosting productivity was originally published in Design Thinking Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When making a film, animators are given a scene to bring to life. They discuss what this scene needs with the director and then start animating it. They first create a draft, or a blocking animation, to show the director to make sure their vision of the scene matches up with the director.

Every scene has different blocking, if the scene is an action scene, the animator won’t animate the lip sync in blocking as it is unnecessary, the movement of the characters is more important. If the scene is a close up, the lip sync will be animated, but the background and ancillary objects won’t be animated.

The same is true of an MVP. You have an idea you think will suit the market (the director in the previous example) but rather than build the full version (or polished version) you build something small to make sure your vision, and the markets vision, are in sync.

Each market is different, so MVP’s will vary depending on what is important to that market. Some directors are fussy and want to see a more polished scene before they can agree it is what they want (e.g. B2C), others can see this with a rougher version (e.g. enterprise).

The point? An MVP is designed to test how close your vision is with the markets vision. No two MVP’s will be alike as different markets will have different expectations, your MVP will allow them to judge if what you are offering is something they want.

How to build an MVP was originally published in Design Thinking Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wisdom suggests to hire for strength, not lack of weakness. But this means picking only one thing and working hard at it, at the expense of the other things. There is an opportunity cost i.e. doing one thing precludes you from doing the others.

Back to the shopping analogy, picking a line means you cannot pick another line that is perhaps faster. But even worse is to never get in a line, as even those in the slowest queue will have been served.

The point? No matter what you do, there will be an opportunity cost. You need to get all the facts you have and make the best decision at the time and believe in that decision.

Other people might simply get in a line that happens to be the fastest, but don’t let competitive thinking get in the way of a decision.

Peter Thiel refers to this as definite thinking.

This concept is explored in the book “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely in chapter 8.

How to decide what to do was originally published in Design Thinking Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mission orientated management is all about decentralising decision making so that those with the information to hand can act quickly.

To achieve this employees need to know what they need to do, but more importantly they need to know why they are doing it. This way if something happens that prevents the work from being done, they can very quickly switch to doing something that will have equal impact because they understand the overall aim.

For example, being told to implement features X,Y,Z in a set time period is one thing, but if it becomes clear that it is not going to happen, how do you respond quickly? If the team knows the reason these features are needed, they can come to a compromise that it good for the customer whilst they find time to implement the other features.

How to make your business more agile was originally published in Design Thinking Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To cross the chasm, and go from early adopters to a mainstream user base, you need to meet the expectation of that new user base. Mainstream customers do not want to do any wiring themselves, they want your solution to do everything to solve their problem.

You don’t need to do everything yourself initially, you need to focus on your core product and bring in external products to fill the expectation gap between what you have and the mainstream market (you can later bring these external products in-house).

Two different types of synergy: user-side and business-side allow business partnerships to accelerate growth for companies. This article refers to business-side synergy.

How to work out what business partnerships you need was originally published in Design Thinking Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.