How to unlock a $300m market with JTBD and customer research.

-The Usersnap case study-

Put customers and their stories first. Listen, learn, improve, evaluate!

Usersnap is a B2B SaaS company that provides customer feedback solutions. It helps companies to quickly get insights and collect actionable user feedback to make confident product decisions.?

Yet, Usersnap didn’t actually begin as a feedback platform. It began competing in the Quality Assurance market, until they realised that their customers used their product in a very different way than expected. They used it to gather customer feedback.?

But how can a SaaS company make such a turnaround successfully??

I had the pleasure to talk with Usersnap’s Co-founder & Head of Growth Klaus Schremsher as well as Will Perlmutter, User Researcher & Digital Marketer. They took me through the research process they followed before developing the thriving customer feedback platform they offer today.

So let’s take a deep dive into how Usersnap started its journey to clarify it’s markets, personas, unidentified needs and right product features, before building their extensive user feedback platform.?

Before the beginning of the research journey?

As Klaus mentions “People in the marketing team were coming with questions about the personas and their needs, the features they should present and what message to bring forward. At that point of time, all these were quite unclear!”?

To come back with solid answers for their marketing team, Usersnap guys decided to dig deeper into the market, the customer needs and pain points. They wanted to uncover the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) for their product.

They began by setting up 6 open topics they needed to solve.?

1. Define the market(s)
2. Analyze competitors within the markets?
3. Identify needs of market(s)/ of the personas acting in the market(s)
4. Find unsatisfied needs/ best product opportunities
5. Connect needs to valuable features (current or new)
6. Validate findings

To go through these topics successfully, they used an outcome-driven innovation plan combining 4 different frameworks:

1. Research & Studies
2. Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) qualitative interviews & quantitative surveys
3. Value Proposition Canvas (VPC)
4. Design Sprint (to create a prototype)

Let’s go step-by-step to each framework and see how it contributed in unlocking the topics they had to solve.

Step 1: Research & Studies?

Defining the markets and analysing competitors

As Klaus describes, “When we first developed the customer feedback solution, we automatically thought we were on the CX (Customer Experience) market, a market of $6.5 bn. It seemed obvious it’s the right fit for our product. However, through market research, we found out that there are lots of segments which our features couldn’t cover. Eventually, we realised we had to dig deeper.”?

They found a smaller part of the CX world, the UX market, which is a fast growing $300m one. It was pretty much to the point of what they were actually offering.?

But in order to define what they can offer and for whom, they had to look deeper into the personas of the UX market. What are their needs, what are they willing to pay for e.t.c.?

So, they identified 4 different personas and started investigating what are their needs, what features were these personas requesting, how often each persona appears in their CRM and product analytics. They searched on Linkedin, found real people that matched their personas, reached them and sent them surveys.?

Eventually they come up with some first assumptions about them.

Wondering why they had to do so much research to even find the personas? As Will says, “You need a hypothesis to use as a starting point, before you start using JTBD.”?

Their next step was to understand their personas in depth by using the Jobs-to-be-done framework. JTBD first requires a qualitative analysis based on user interviews.?

“We assumed that we had to interview 30 real people, to have a clear view of each persona. That meant that if we wanted to proceed with all out 4 personas, we had to interview 120 people (!), which is quite a lot to begin with. At that point we were not that big”, Will said.?

What they did was that they started by focusing on their 1st persona, UX researcher. They did their in depth research and then moved to the next one.?

Step 2: Jobs to be Done?

Identifying the needs of the persona(s) & revealing product opportunities

As Will admits, “We were learning through the entire process, this was the first time we had done something like JTBD. So, we thought that it would be better to make mistakes and learn from them with one persona, rather than with all 4, at once.”

But why even bother doing further research when you have already found the personas??

Will continues, “Even though we had already come up with the persona, we didn’t actually know who we were dealing with. In doing this research we were able to uncover their jobs, as well as their pains, their moments of delight and their context. We wanted to know what it’s like to work embedded within a product team, or having stakeholders and what’s important for them, or even what gives them a sense of success e.t.c.”

A JTBD research includes 2 parts: qualitative and quantitative research. Let’s see what guys in Usersnap found out by following them.?

a. JTBD Qualitative Research

They began their qualitative research by training all their team members in order for everyone to use the same process. That way everyone could contribute to interviews, by working with the same knowledge, knowing how to fill out pages and document things properly.?

Keeping the information within one or two people, is really not the way to go. It is important to use all the manpower you have. After training, everyone in their team could ask the right questions as an actual interviewer, take notes, be an observer, or synthesise those notes.

Here is a table they created for their interviews, based on the JTBD framework.

As they underlined, they made sure to focus on the right things at the right time. For every single interview they did, they narrowed down into certain focus points.?

In qualitative interviews they focused on 2 important things: jobs steps and their desired outcomes. This meant that they would first go from top to bottom on their table, and then left to right, over time.?

Klaus and Will shared some useful tips to keep in mind if attempting your first qualitative research.?

• Create the atmosphere, make the person feel comfortable before the actual interview begins.
• Ask open-ended questions. Binary questions or questions with 3 or 4 options, might force the respondent to answer something that might not be what they truly want to answer.?
• Don’t lead them. (e.g. Assume that…, Isn;t it true that…?) If you do that, you will basically just get the answers you want to hear.
• Rephrase, confirm and drill down if it isn’t clear. There might be a tendency to go around and issue and not necessarily pinpoint it.
• Stick to the interview objectives. If for example you want to get desired outcomes, or tools evolved, stick to it! Interview time is limited, so you have to get down to the business that is most important to you.?

As they describe “We started noticing that at various phases of the project, people were doing pretty much the same things. There might be some slight variations and different descriptions, but more or less there were a lot of the same pattern. After 3 interviews, we started seeing patterns. After 6, we understood where we had missing pieces. We did 30 interviews, but after 9, we should have moved to the next stage.”

b. JTBD Quantitative Research

Quantitative research comes to validate the interview learnings. In order to have a solid ground to rely on when deciding to develop something new, it’s important to back up qualitative insights with quantitative data.

So how did they do this validation??

To investigate users’ tools involved they just asked open-ended questions. When asking a very large segment of people, you are going to get a lot of patterns and trends, not only about what tools people use, but also on what stage of their project.?

When it came to the importance and satisfaction, they run a gap analysis. A gap analysis lets you measure the importance of a particular job step and the satisfaction when achieving it, on some kind of a scale. In order to create a gap analysis statement, first you need to create outcome statements.

Below you’ll find a quick example on how to do so.?

After synthesising all outcome statements, it’s important to make your research survey human.?

As Will admits, “We stuck to the theory in order to make things work, but when it actually came to practice, it became a little bit more challenging. The big bet here for us was how to actually take the theory and move it into practice in a way that will be truly effective with us”.

When they first tested internally, they realised that the questions were too damn hard! The 0-1o scale was confusing and the 10-minute survey was high bandwidth.

They came back to iterate it. So, they replaced the 0-10 scale with a 0-5 one. They also decreased the number of questions based on whether they really can/ should solve every particular pain point.?

After those tweakings they tested again with their teams and then shipped it out.?

But what is the “right” number of survey participants in order to get valid data??

As Will says, “In JTBD books we had read that 180 people is somehow the minimum. Yet, we had deadlines, other priorities and it was really hard to achieve this number. We were only able to get 130 responses, which is still not bad. Obviously if one can get more, they should go right ahead!”

The final research results: the UX Researcher Persona!?

Klaus and Will smile even thinking about it. “It was very exciting! We knew many things about their goals, their motivations, their challenges. We created a full UX researcher story, like “A day in the life of a UX Researcher”. We even had some empathy quotes and created empathy clips to show to our teammates.”

“After all, we learned quite a bit by the JTBD framework, it really helped us uncover the persona and build a full UX researcher story. When we presented all these to our colleagues, they had a much better idea of what was actually going on. A few steps after, when it came to development or customer experience issues, we were still referring to all these findings and our teams could easily get it!”

Step 3: Value Proposition Canvas (VPC)

Connecting jobs and features with value.?

So, VPC is a framework to find more certainty about product-market fit. It is very useful when you already know about the jobs and the pains of your persona. It’s the perfect tool to find the connection with your current and future offering.?

This is what a VPC looks like.?

Below there are some basic steps to fill in a VPC.?

• First start with persona’s JTBD’s?
• Then fill in the pains or gains
• Focus on pain relievers. What can your business hypothetically do to relieve these pains?
• Turn pain relievers into gain creators
• Eventually you connect gain creators with products, features and functionalities.

Here is a quick example on what a VPC actually does in practice.?

Let’s say that our persona is a gym coach.?

• JTBD: getting students ready for gym class
• Pain: not having punctual students
• Pain Reliever: Setting up a scoring sheet for your students
• Gain Creator: Reward punctuality
• Product: Incentive game for students

Step 4: Design Sprint

Create a prototype

The final goal was to create a prototype which solves the needs of the persona. The prototype is a time restrained 5 step process which uses design thinking. Even the prototype step comes to validate the research findings. Design sprint is a very creative tool to use when building new products, or features.

“At that point we wanted to create a paper and scissors prototype, not to build an actual product. We just needed to create a product that we could show to our persona and find out if we had built (at least on paper) the right things that eases their pains or satisfy their needs.”??

After all the research, Usersnap guys already had a clear view of the jobs they needed to fulfill. They were already on the right track.

“The prototype was great! This was a huge success for us. The users we asked and validated our prototype, were all blown away. They admitted that our product looks like something they were actually looking for! Next, we only had to bring it to the product development team and start rollin’!”

Usersnap’s team key learnings: No risk it, no biscuit

As Klaus underlined, after the whole successful research and build journey, “You can only learn if you jump in head-first. There is no real other way about it. In the beginning of the process, we weren’t sure exactly what we were doing. We had to figure out a lot of things, and by the way, we are still trying to get feedback on how to do things better.”

Klaus and Will shared with us the key-learnings they gained from their research and built journey:?

• JTBD rocks: It really helped uncover the jobs and the pains of a new persona.
• Build a new use case: Validating a prototype based on persona’s pains.
• Put it all together: Combining many different methods brought clarity.
• Shared empathy: Conveying JTBD insights to the whole team.

As they remind us, “Put customers and their stories first. Listen, learn, improve, evaluate!”

I hope this case study motivates you to set up a new game-changing goal for the next quarter. If you plan so, here is a quick overview of Usersnap’s timeline and process, in case you want to keep a screenshot. If you have any thoughts or questions, I’ll be happy to share some best practices with you.