What do you mean customers don’t know what they want?
If I’d asked customers what they want, they’d have said more convenience and relevance. Look familiar? I’ve riffed on that Henry Ford quote about faster horses, yada, yada. It’s not too far off from what customers would theoretically have been seeking in faster horses. I altered that quote to fit a modern day phenomenon: 3D [...]
A Method for Applying Jobs-to-Be-Done to Product and Service Design
Say you’re designing something new for a product or service. Of course, you have your own ideas for what to do. But, how informed are you really about what is needed? This is a question I faced in thinking about game mechanics used in a social platform. A common product approach is to work up [...]
Tweets Offer Little Value in Understanding Customer Needs
Social media. A rich source of insight and opportunity for companies. Why, it’s an article of faith that customers are talking…on their terms…where they want. So get out there and learn from them! See what this IBM executive says:
Jobs-to-be-done’s place in a customer-centric organization
On Twitter, I asked this question: When firms talk about being customer-centric today, what are they actually *doing*? FB page? Reacting to tweets? Sentiment analysis? #scrm — Hutch Carpenter (@bhc3) May 15, 2012 I asked it, as I had a conversation in recent days with a fellow from a large corporate. Customer-centricity was recently adopted [...]
Do big companies need a ‘slow development’ movement?
Read this comment by George Ciardi from a discussion about why products fail in the Market Research Group on LinkedIn: While proper research could certainly be part of the blame for the failure of some new products, I also see the realities of business pressures to launch “no matter what the research says”. Most companies [...]
It’s the Jobs-to-Be-Done, Stupid!
I do product management for Spigit. I’ve done product management for other companies as well. And let me tell you, the easiest thing in the world is to fall into the trap of focusing on how customers are using your product. Product forms your relationship with customers. It’s how you know them. They will tell [...]
On the Utility of Thinking in Terms of Jobs-to-Be-Done
In a recent post examining the future of retail, I used the jobs-to-be-done approach to break down the industry. And I’ve been using it more in other ways. It’s quite useful as a basis for innovation. The premise of the jobs-to-be-done approach is that it provides a much better basis for innovation. The focus is [...]
Four Innovation Insights Customers Provide
Customers, properly, have been having a renaissance of sorts in terms of business thinking. Peter Drucker famously espoused a very customer-centric business philosophy. Nowadays, social CRM represents the return of a customer-first orientation. Last year, Altimeter published the 18 use cases of social CRM. Included in those use cases were several that relate to innovation. [...]
