The problem I tend to see is that companies say they're doing JTBD research, but they're actually just running attribute preference surveys (asking customers to rank features, from a list of things the company would like to build, rather than starting off by assuming you don't know what customers require).
Listening to what people say they want (feature preferences) almost always diverges from what they actually want the product to do (a functional, emotional, or social outcome). That gets more complex when we think about that there's different levels by which you can evaluate what someone wants, which in the JTBD word are thought of as jobs as progress (why they're doing the thing), and jobs as outcomes (how they're doing the thing). There's another famous example, which is from Bosch's circular saw evolution. Professionals said they wanted lighter tools (and that's true), but the constraint they experienced as a result of weight was the impacts that had. So you can solve for weight, or you can solve for improved usability. Symptoms vs causes sort of thing.
This is also why product teams should involve marketers, and why marketers should understand research design. The teams who I've seen do this well at this aren't running quick preference tests and A/B tests on features most of the time. They're generally more focused on running continuous feedback loops, where they conduct broader research, then engage in grounded theory style interpretation to understand what they can do, look at field validation to figure out what they should do, and then iterate.
For B2B especially as a side note, if your value proposition is something like accountability or proof of value, but your product's workflows don't make accountability or proving value effortless, fixing that workflow will do more for brand perception than any campaign, because nothing nukes good comms like a poor experience.
great breakdown. the gap between "what people say they want" and "what job they're actually hiring the product for" is something i keep running into.
one thing that helped me a lot was realizing my product wasn't competing with other products in the same category at all. the actual competition was boredom, doomscrolling, and the default state of not paying attention to your own day. once you frame it that way, the whole feature prioritization changes because you're solving for a completely different job.
the bosch example is perfect for this: you can keep adding features that address the stated preference, or you can go one level deeper and address the actual constraint. most teams optimize for the former because it's easier to A/B test.
This is all very true. I always try to push for customer interviews to be as much about formulating new hypotheses as they are about validating existing hypotheses.
I want to scream [1] every. single. time. a business wants to talk to me. Every second of the conversation is just the same thing, over and over: here are my boxes. Please put yourself in one of my boxes.
There is no room for my feelings or free expression. It is inconvenient to the agenda of whoever created the survey.
If companies are so desperate to know what customers want, how come no one, in the past 25 years of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question?
[1] At least that's how I would feel if I hadn't numbed myself to this decades ago. Now I just escape. I hang up, I click the X, I think of nothing but getting away from this thing that, no matter what its motivation, no matter what product or cause it's selling, has exactly the same agenda: "would you like to dehumanize yourself for five minutes, so that I can make a data table that I was paid to make by someone who doesn't know what they're doing or why?"
Too many layers and competing interests. The person who ends up creating the survey realistically cares much more about going home 1 minute earlier or with 1% less neural energy spent. They've got their kids to manage when they get home.
Do you use any products from a one-person shop? They will be so much more likely to ask you real questions. Not guaranteed, of course, as some people are just clueless. Those usually don't last long as business owners though.
That's precisely what I'm wondering about now.
Is it possible that all real product ideas come from the mind of a single person, understanding and interacting with other people as actual people? And corporations are some sort of Thing that takes humanity and squishes it into a Box, a Box with one very narrow goal: to freeze the product idea from the single person and mass-produce it, "scale it up" so that millions of people are aware of its existence and are able to use it?
I mean, Google didn't even invent Google Docs. Some random little startup did. Google just bought it, then made it discoverable and usable to millions.
Which is not a small thing, I guess. But I don't know what the marketing department is for. Other than putting Google Docs on billboards, maybe, or their digital equivalent.
Doesn't need to be a single person, but yes, all good products come from someone or a (generally) small team, spotting something, and fixing it.
As for the marketing department - depends on definition, but assuming you mean (as it mostly is nowdays) comms, it's two things:
1. Making sure that potential future customers know you exist, so when they enter the market to buy, they know you're relevant and can purchase from you.
2. Making sure that when someone is in the market to buy now, that they're more likely to buy from you, because you have a compelling reason for people to pick you, and not the other brands in the space that they can think of.
Mostly 1, some of 2, if the marketing team is good. Ratios vary as to how much though by more than you'd think, depending on industry, customer lifecycle, brand maturity and so on.
I think it's very often repeated that the hardest thing about growing a business is keeping the culture, and it's simply impossible past a certain size unless you literally develop a cult of personality like Jobs or to a lesser extent Musk. Extremely few manage to do it. And when the culture goes, that's what you get: least effort. And the least effort is to do what you're saying, "just do more of the same, but bigger, or with a hint of chocolate".
At least in most of the modern world. I think this effect is a _little_ weaker in China. It definitely used to be much weaker in the West too, at some point in time. But individualism, cultural capture by big capital, yaddah yaddah.
"how come no one, in the past 25 years of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question"
There's a lot of shit marketers, is my short answer.
Like, a lot.
This echoes my experience. I can't sit down at a computer and start doing a new thing with a browser with 15 tabs open from the day before and expect it to go well- it's like waking up and walking right into a room with 5 stereos playing 5 different songs at once and trying to practice guitar.
The problem with general surveys is that you find out what people who don't buy your product think that they might like. Then they don't buy your improved product either.
A second problem is that we're unaware of what we responded to. That's one of the things that A/B testing reveals.
This example is always cited as different from the "demographics" approach. But it literally started by segmenting the buyers, and then focussing on a previously unrecognised demographic sector (car commuters).
Clay Christensen is smart, and one of the many things he is smart about is marketing Clay Christensen.
How is "car commuters" a demographic segment?
Does the word "demography" mean anything?
Is "people who like to buy milkshakes" a demographic segment too?
Good segmentation is mostly not by demography nowadays. At best, demographics are a correlative element to something more fundamental, usually economic, behavioural or psychographic.
> Clay Christensen is smart
Not anymore. He died in 2020.
It is a bit sad that people have to be taught this;
I am presuming the product people are a kind of humans too.
But when I see their outputs, maybe this Christensen guy is right.
I tried to adjust the background image on microsoft Teams video calls this morning; the UI I had to use or rather figure out, to achieve that, was a major depression.
(1) the settings menus in teams are well hidden, for reasons unclear to me().
(2) but the _actual_ settings you need are hidden unless you START a meeting call.
(3) but, the _actual_ settings are a long chain of ".. but are you sure you REALLY want to see the ACTUAL settings?",
where you must continue to click 'more settings', 'advanced settings', 'full actual settings' (I am paraphrasing.)
() I suspect what they are though..
Something about dumbing the UI down to the level where
the people in charge of teams can understand them,
plus some kind of fear of UI designs where any given screen or view
contains more than 1 or 2 elements (the second element being "show further settings").
We are dumbing down UI to the level of people with no hands, no eyes, no brains,
which I presume is the target audience. I must have mah minimalism.
It's what always happens when there's a disconnect between the product built and the actual thing people want to do. In marketing, we differentiate between Jobs-As-Activities (the task of "changing a background") and Jobs-As-Progress (the user trying to go from something being unsatisfactory to something better).
When UI feels dumbed down to that level, or hidden behind advanced settings, it’s often because the product team ends up treating users as a gestalt persona, rather than thinking about their constraints around time and attention. The most meaningful innovations occur when customer insights influence development before launch; sadly, that frequently doesn't happen. People launch the thing, come up with features they could add, ask what people want from that list (and potentially don't even do that) and then add stuff like barnacles accumulating on a ship.
Though I did not follow the idea of chunkier fruit in those travel milkshakes, isn't that what clogs the straw, which is not ideal for a 1-hand treat.
The article presents the fruit as a way to make the milkshake more "interesting", addressing the fact that existing customers were purchasing milkshakes in part to make their commute less boring.
Weirdly, there's no followup on whether the changes improved sales, margins, or other goals.
The problem I tend to see is that companies say they're doing JTBD research, but they're actually just running attribute preference surveys (asking customers to rank features, from a list of things the company would like to build, rather than starting off by assuming you don't know what customers require).
Listening to what people say they want (feature preferences) almost always diverges from what they actually want the product to do (a functional, emotional, or social outcome). That gets more complex when we think about that there's different levels by which you can evaluate what someone wants, which in the JTBD word are thought of as jobs as progress (why they're doing the thing), and jobs as outcomes (how they're doing the thing). There's another famous example, which is from Bosch's circular saw evolution. Professionals said they wanted lighter tools (and that's true), but the constraint they experienced as a result of weight was the impacts that had. So you can solve for weight, or you can solve for improved usability. Symptoms vs causes sort of thing.
This is also why product teams should involve marketers, and why marketers should understand research design. The teams who I've seen do this well at this aren't running quick preference tests and A/B tests on features most of the time. They're generally more focused on running continuous feedback loops, where they conduct broader research, then engage in grounded theory style interpretation to understand what they can do, look at field validation to figure out what they should do, and then iterate.
For B2B especially as a side note, if your value proposition is something like accountability or proof of value, but your product's workflows don't make accountability or proving value effortless, fixing that workflow will do more for brand perception than any campaign, because nothing nukes good comms like a poor experience.
great breakdown. the gap between "what people say they want" and "what job they're actually hiring the product for" is something i keep running into.
one thing that helped me a lot was realizing my product wasn't competing with other products in the same category at all. the actual competition was boredom, doomscrolling, and the default state of not paying attention to your own day. once you frame it that way, the whole feature prioritization changes because you're solving for a completely different job.
the bosch example is perfect for this: you can keep adding features that address the stated preference, or you can go one level deeper and address the actual constraint. most teams optimize for the former because it's easier to A/B test.
This is all very true. I always try to push for customer interviews to be as much about formulating new hypotheses as they are about validating existing hypotheses.
I want to scream [1] every. single. time. a business wants to talk to me. Every second of the conversation is just the same thing, over and over: here are my boxes. Please put yourself in one of my boxes.
There is no room for my feelings or free expression. It is inconvenient to the agenda of whoever created the survey.
If companies are so desperate to know what customers want, how come no one, in the past 25 years of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question?
[1] At least that's how I would feel if I hadn't numbed myself to this decades ago. Now I just escape. I hang up, I click the X, I think of nothing but getting away from this thing that, no matter what its motivation, no matter what product or cause it's selling, has exactly the same agenda: "would you like to dehumanize yourself for five minutes, so that I can make a data table that I was paid to make by someone who doesn't know what they're doing or why?"
Too many layers and competing interests. The person who ends up creating the survey realistically cares much more about going home 1 minute earlier or with 1% less neural energy spent. They've got their kids to manage when they get home.
Do you use any products from a one-person shop? They will be so much more likely to ask you real questions. Not guaranteed, of course, as some people are just clueless. Those usually don't last long as business owners though.
That's precisely what I'm wondering about now.
Is it possible that all real product ideas come from the mind of a single person, understanding and interacting with other people as actual people? And corporations are some sort of Thing that takes humanity and squishes it into a Box, a Box with one very narrow goal: to freeze the product idea from the single person and mass-produce it, "scale it up" so that millions of people are aware of its existence and are able to use it?
I mean, Google didn't even invent Google Docs. Some random little startup did. Google just bought it, then made it discoverable and usable to millions.
Which is not a small thing, I guess. But I don't know what the marketing department is for. Other than putting Google Docs on billboards, maybe, or their digital equivalent.
Doesn't need to be a single person, but yes, all good products come from someone or a (generally) small team, spotting something, and fixing it.
As for the marketing department - depends on definition, but assuming you mean (as it mostly is nowdays) comms, it's two things:
1. Making sure that potential future customers know you exist, so when they enter the market to buy, they know you're relevant and can purchase from you.
2. Making sure that when someone is in the market to buy now, that they're more likely to buy from you, because you have a compelling reason for people to pick you, and not the other brands in the space that they can think of.
Mostly 1, some of 2, if the marketing team is good. Ratios vary as to how much though by more than you'd think, depending on industry, customer lifecycle, brand maturity and so on.
I think it's very often repeated that the hardest thing about growing a business is keeping the culture, and it's simply impossible past a certain size unless you literally develop a cult of personality like Jobs or to a lesser extent Musk. Extremely few manage to do it. And when the culture goes, that's what you get: least effort. And the least effort is to do what you're saying, "just do more of the same, but bigger, or with a hint of chocolate".
At least in most of the modern world. I think this effect is a _little_ weaker in China. It definitely used to be much weaker in the West too, at some point in time. But individualism, cultural capture by big capital, yaddah yaddah.
"how come no one, in the past 25 years of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question"
There's a lot of shit marketers, is my short answer.
Like, a lot.
This echoes my experience. I can't sit down at a computer and start doing a new thing with a browser with 15 tabs open from the day before and expect it to go well- it's like waking up and walking right into a room with 5 stereos playing 5 different songs at once and trying to practice guitar.
The problem with general surveys is that you find out what people who don't buy your product think that they might like. Then they don't buy your improved product either.
A second problem is that we're unaware of what we responded to. That's one of the things that A/B testing reveals.
This example is always cited as different from the "demographics" approach. But it literally started by segmenting the buyers, and then focussing on a previously unrecognised demographic sector (car commuters).
Clay Christensen is smart, and one of the many things he is smart about is marketing Clay Christensen.
How is "car commuters" a demographic segment?
Does the word "demography" mean anything?
Is "people who like to buy milkshakes" a demographic segment too?
Good segmentation is mostly not by demography nowadays. At best, demographics are a correlative element to something more fundamental, usually economic, behavioural or psychographic.
> Clay Christensen is smart
Not anymore. He died in 2020.
It is a bit sad that people have to be taught this; I am presuming the product people are a kind of humans too. But when I see their outputs, maybe this Christensen guy is right.
I tried to adjust the background image on microsoft Teams video calls this morning; the UI I had to use or rather figure out, to achieve that, was a major depression. (1) the settings menus in teams are well hidden, for reasons unclear to me(). (2) but the _actual_ settings you need are hidden unless you START a meeting call. (3) but, the _actual_ settings are a long chain of ".. but are you sure you REALLY want to see the ACTUAL settings?", where you must continue to click 'more settings', 'advanced settings', 'full actual settings' (I am paraphrasing.)
() I suspect what they are though.. Something about dumbing the UI down to the level where the people in charge of teams can understand them, plus some kind of fear of UI designs where any given screen or view contains more than 1 or 2 elements (the second element being "show further settings").
We are dumbing down UI to the level of people with no hands, no eyes, no brains, which I presume is the target audience. I must have mah minimalism.
It's what always happens when there's a disconnect between the product built and the actual thing people want to do. In marketing, we differentiate between Jobs-As-Activities (the task of "changing a background") and Jobs-As-Progress (the user trying to go from something being unsatisfactory to something better).
When UI feels dumbed down to that level, or hidden behind advanced settings, it’s often because the product team ends up treating users as a gestalt persona, rather than thinking about their constraints around time and attention. The most meaningful innovations occur when customer insights influence development before launch; sadly, that frequently doesn't happen. People launch the thing, come up with features they could add, ask what people want from that list (and potentially don't even do that) and then add stuff like barnacles accumulating on a ship.
Though I did not follow the idea of chunkier fruit in those travel milkshakes, isn't that what clogs the straw, which is not ideal for a 1-hand treat.
The article presents the fruit as a way to make the milkshake more "interesting", addressing the fact that existing customers were purchasing milkshakes in part to make their commute less boring.
Weirdly, there's no followup on whether the changes improved sales, margins, or other goals.