Never ever fall in love with your product !!!

Yes, it is true. Sounds counter intuitive ? Well, let's see.

And by the way, this DOES NOT mean you start hating your product rather it asks us to shift our focus from 'adding new features to our product' towards 'how well' are we solving our customers problems.

We all know this by now :

Customers are not buying your product. They are hiring it to get their job done.

As Clay Christen says : Customers don't want a quarter inch drill , they want a quarter inch hole. 

In other words , customers want to get their job done. This is true for any customer including yours. 

We know products change and go obsolete but Customer Jobs remain stable. Think about it for a moment :: 20 years ago we use video cassettes, 10 years ago we use CD's and today we use real time video streaming(like Netflix). Customer job is the same ==> to watch our favorite video. How this needs gets met have changed.

So, if we would have fallen in love with Cassettes or CD's , we might have gone bankrupt long ago.

On a side note : focusing on customers jobs to be done and thinking about how can we get that done better (compared to 6 months ago) is a way to be innovative. 

Example : No one has asked for live video streaming OR asked jeff bezos about AWS. It is all about we try , we fail, we learn and we try again.
 

Now one very important aspect of Jobs to be done theory is : Today customers are buying or using your product to get their job done but who know tomorrow there might be a cheaper, better and faster alternative to get the same job done. Let us look at an example :

SMS vs WhatsApp : Here 'Job to be done' is chatting with your friends and family on mobile. Product is SMS pack or WhatsApp (app). Customers are the same. their JTBD is the same but what has changed is 'someone helping customers to get their jobs done much better , faster, cheaper etc'.

Another example is : Skype vs Zoom. Why Zoom became so popular while Skype did not. Well , think about it.

If you are in product , marketing or sales your job is to satisfy customer needs better than competitors in your market. Now, this brings up an fundamental question : What is a customer need ?

A customer need is also known as customer jobs to be done

A customer's JTBD is a goal they want to achieve independent of your product or service

Without understanding the customer need, we tend to use Customer requests, sales requests, feature ideas etc for product development. These are OK strategies but not very competitive.

Example : Let us look at navigation apps(Product). Customers don't want navigation apps (which are products) , they want to get to destination on time.

If your customers struggle to get their job done , this is a problem you need to solve. Now, how well and how quickly you can solve it , is dependent on many factors (like ur team structure , skills, org structure, budgeting model etc) and there you have a choice. The choice is if we want to change some of those factors and get job done as quickly as possible.

Because if you do not solve your customers problems quickly and accurately, rest assured somebody else will definitely. It is just a matter of time. Also, it is very much important to understand if you are solving customers JTBD better than you were doing 6 months ago , because otherwise somebody else will. Believe me. :))

Another example is Segway transporter. Most of people thought it was a brilliant idea. However it failed in the market. Why ? because we have an idea to build a product and we fell in love with that idea. We executed it brilliantly and then when launched , it was not successful. Because it does not a solve a customer problem which is high enough in their list. And this is also important for us to understand. Every customer has a set of problems he wishes to get solved, however it is a matter of where this problem (which we are planning to solve) sits in the list. Is it in top 2 problems or is it at number 8 or 9 ?

To test the idea (which you have in mind) in market , what we normally do is build it (as an MVP or phase I) and then try to sell it. And if it does not sell, we go back and fix the product etc. This process however takes a lot of time.

There is a more economical way to test your idea. Don't build anything. Rather create clickable prototypes / make a landing page / try to sell ur demo / kickstarter page etc. If they are not going to buy your pitch they definitely will not buy your product. So why waste money on this idea. This is essentially problem solution fit.

Life is too short to build something which nobody wants.

You can earn more money , but you cannot earn more time.

Now, if we use Surveys and NPS score to find out what customers feel about our product, think again.

Surveys and NPS have limitations : It tells you if customers are willing to recommend ur product to others or not BUT it does not tell you anything useful about why they are not willing (in case they are). It also does not tell you who is serving your customers better than you. So, beware while using surveys and NPS.