Design Thinking & Product Discovery
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”
– Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”
– Albert Einstein
Design Thinking
The term ‘Design Thinking’ might leave one guessing about its meaning, and where exactly it fits within an Agile Product Delivery framework.
In the context of new product development it represents a shift in emphasis into the problem space. It brings a focus on clearly defining the problem that a user wants solved before rushing off to define product features and capabilities. It can be considered as a framework, or set of methods, that match customer needs with solutions in order to create value for the customer. In a traditional (waterfall) model, product development usually starts with ‘Product Requirements’, – basically a list of product features – often with little focus on defining real user needs. Design Thinking focuses on thoroughly exploring and discovering the users problems before creating solutions. The Design Thinking ‘Double Diamond’ illustrates this process.
Leveraging the JTBD Framework to Define Customer Needs
The Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework is based on the idea that people buy products or services to get a ‘job’ done. A ‘job’ is a statement of what the customer is trying to accomplish in a given situation. People tend to ‘hire’ solutions to get a job done better and more completely. If you can identify the real reason why people might adopt your solution, you will have a better chance of success.
JTBD is a framework for identifying a customer’s underlying needs independently of any solution. By identifying the underlying needs of a customer – the ‘jobs’ that customers need done – businesses can tailor their products and services more effectively to create solutions that better meet the needs of their customers.
JTBD Principles
- People ‘hire’ products and services to get a job done, not to buy a brand
- Jobs to be done are stable over time, even as technology changes
- People seek services to get their jobs done better and more completely
- Making the job the unit of analysis focuses on serving real needs
- JTBD is not limited to one functional discipline: it can be applied across an organization
JTBD Tools and Workflow
The JTBD framework has a number of tools to assist with the discovery process. The first of these involves conducting interviews with stakeholders for the proposed new product or service. The interview is structured around a timeline of key events that lead up to the purchase decision.
One goal during the interview is to get a sense of what forces were at play, both positive and negative, for the customer in reaching a buying decision. These are captured using a second tool from the toolbox – the JTBD Forces Diagram.
By identifying the forces acting towards and against progress we can design solutions which help reduce the forces that push customers away from a solution and increase the forces that pull them towards a solution.
Each interview is then summarized in a chart that captures both the timeline and the forces.
The Jobs-to-be-Done approach transforms our understanding of customer choice because it gets at the causal drivers – both functional and emotional – behind a purchase.
The last step is then to create the Job Statements (or Job Stories) from the interview data. Bob Stories are framed in terms of a triggering event/situation plus a goal and an outcome:
When: <event/situation/context>
I want to: <motivation>
So I can: <outcome>
Once you have identified the customer needs with JTBD, you can use them to craft your value proposition and positioning statement for your product. A value proposition is a succinct and persuasive statement that outlines how your product can help customers achieve their goals better than the alternatives. A positioning statement should define the target customers, their main job, and how your product is different and better than competitors. For those using the SAFe Framework, these statements are captured as ‘Epics’ and added to the Portfolio Backlog. Epics are hypotheses or value statements (elevator-pitch style vision statement) – describing what are we building, who is it for, and why do they need it, how is it better – See Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing The Chasm for details and examples.
Note that this is not intended to represent a linear flow from discovery to delivery, omitted from the diagram are the feedback loops that drive continuous inspection and adaptation throughout the process.
By leveraging JTBD to identify customer needs and then to create your value proposition and positioning statement, you can make sure that your product strategy is aligned with the real problems and goals of your customers, as well as communicate your value proposition in a clear and effective way.
