Upgrading Personas: Improving Customer Experience

Personas without understanding the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) are a waste of time. JTBD theory is a more powerful and meaningful approach and should be used every time. Applying a JTBD canvas identifies the varied jobs, approaches and thought processes activated by each customer type. 

JTBD unlocks a “Power-Persona” and with it greater craftsmanship from a design thinking workshop, leading to customised solutions for each job, and with it, a better customer experience (CX). 

 What’s a Persona?

Personas are the established and go-to tool behind a user-centred design process. The persona is a generalised caricature which adds personality to segments or clusters, themselves ideally created from big data analysis. 

 Personas make it easier for designers to visualise and “walk a mile in the customer’s shoes”. 

Hyper-Saver Helena is a persona used by a bank to identify with 25-45YO female professionals who are rapid savers. The bank can see these customers have high incomes and disproportionately low monthly expenses. 

Data Hungry Dharma typifies a persona used by a telco to identify with predominantly female millennials who are heavy users of social, video and music data but resist traditional text and voice data services. 

Personas are powerful when used correctly but more often than not they are poorly executed. This happens when experience designers lack data to create make each persona meaningful. They fall into the trap of using only demographic attributes rather than the truly valuable needs, behavioural and motivation data.

Most significantly, personas are static, rather than evolving to account for context. Extending the examples above, the needs of Hyper Saver Helena will change markedly once she’s saved enough for a deposit on her first home. Similarly, Data Hungry Dharma’s requirements change the moment she loses her phone or runs out of data.

What the customer is doing at a moment in time trumps everything. We need to understand context and for that we need to examine the JTBD. 

What’s a Job To Be Done?

JTBD is a technique that is rising in prominence and with good reason. Conceived and popularised by Clayton Christensen, JTBD offers a new approach to design thinking through analysing the basis of why a user “hires” a product to fulfil a specific “job”.

JTBD encourages focused thinking around the key human need (the job a product fulfils). A focus around the job allows service designers to identify and create an experience perfectly suited for that job. It encourages increased open thinking and innovation across the customer experience.

The art of JTBD planning is in fact not starting with the product but rather what is the problem or need the customer needs to solve. This reframes the marketing conversation. Customers care about their needs, not your product.

 The bank says, “have our mortgage”. The customer says, “I want a home, not a mortgage.”

The JTBD Persona Relationship

Thinking about the job a customer is doing is especially useful when customers identify several jobs. It’s quite common to discover vastly different jobs that can be solved by a simple variation of a single product. This lends to defining Power-Personas or variations for each unique JTBD. 

 For instance, thinking about:

LOCAL TRANSPORT: There are a number of jobs which apply to the consumer. Get me to work on time, get the kids to school, collect my groceries, get me to my meetings, let me move heavy items, and more. 

BANKING: Again there are a number of jobs the customer is trying to get done. Transact day-to-day with ease, save for a holiday, save for a home, pay my mortgage off faster, plan for my retirement etc.

Identifying the primary need and mix of jobs your audience requires helps you focus and define meaningful Power-Personas. For each need, there will be an associated Power-Persona, then a system designed to fulfil each job. 

In the context of transport, it might be a specific car, rideshare or transport system. For banking, identifying a customer that’s saving for a home deposit may lead to a home-buyer program offering high-interest saver accounts and alerts with pre-approval for properties the customer can afford based on their up-to-the minute deposit balance.

Power-Personas identified from JTBD analysis will often logically match back to variables in an existing audience. However, matching a traditional persona to a JTBD is difficult, since each persona may further segment into a range of jobs to be done. Put another way, a traditionally defined persona may represent a “sleeping” JTBD because that persona alone lacks the behavioural data essential to guide product strategy and customer experience design.

Starting with a traditional persona is in fact, a very bad idea and encourages generalist thinking. The JTBD should be used to define a Power-Persona, not the other way around.

Causality is the JTBD Advantage

Causality, or identifying what spurs a customer to act, is at the heart of JTBD theory.

Using JTBD to define Power-Personas helps the most important and meaningful variable of causality to be considered. Causality is the moment of struggle that triggers a customer to act. Because causal data is time-sensitive, it's unlikely to be captured in a meaningful way amongst an existing data set. To help develop superior CX, marketers must put in place ecosystems that identify causal data and immediately act on behavioural triggers.

Understanding why Helena is saving allows her bank to tailor a service that fits the job. Let’s say she’s saving for a home deposit, that variable is far more important than any traditional persona defining variables (education, income, age). A product like a “home buyers term deposit” which offers a special condition that the term can be broken to buy a home is likely to appeal. Customers signing on to that product have their motivations unearthed. The bank can also work by stealth, observing Helena using their online calculators or searching property online. These indicators confirm Helena is saving for a home and may also signal the transition form saving to buying. 

Without causality, a persona is in fact rather meaningless. A potential customer is truly only identified once causality is identified. Of course, the problem here is causality doesn’t magically exist in data-sets and itself is dynamic. Building for causality forces designers to identify and act on customer behaviours so they in turn act with relevance. The persona becomes dynamic, so a single customer can transition from one Power-Persona type to another.

Causality is the key attribute that defines the Power-Persona. Identifying and responding with relevance to causality is what separates JTBD from traditional, persona led design thinking.

What Does This Mean?

The success of JTBD thinking has prompted calls from some corners to completely abandon personas.

In fact, JTBD enhances the persona thinking. By identifying varied customer needs and using this to form Power-Personas, design thinking can be enhanced. This is especially true for CX design, where with the aid of JTBD thinking, a single customer will transition between multiple persona types.

Persona theory is not flawed but is often misguided when each persona is defined solely by demographic representations. This style of persona encourages a narrow focus on who the person is and that restricts solutions benefitting multiple personas from emerging. Behavioural data is key and JTBD provides a stronger framework for identifying variables to inform interaction design and product strategy. 

The magic of personas comes through having a mental picture and understanding of the state of mind for the customer. That picture is more complete following a JTBD analysis which understands the customer’s needs, motivations and behaviours and how they evolve throughout a purchase decision and service experience.  

The Emerging Power-Persona

Understanding causality and marrying this with a persona is what is truly important in design thinking. This combination creates a Power-Persona.

Power-Personas are dynamic JTBD-led persona definitions which account for causality.

Power-Personas are created by understanding both the context that a decision is made (JTBD) and who is purchasing them (persona). Each Power-Persona is led by the JTBD which informs smarter, more variable product, customer experience and service design. 

Upgrading CX

JTBD theory is vital to establishing well thought through and in-in depth Power-Personas. In turn, those Power-Personas increase the knowledge and empathy for the customer, enabling service designers to imagine more innovative, customer-centric products and customer journeys.

 In short, JTBD theory enriches personas for improved design thinking.

Acknowledgements and further reading

Clayton Chistensen: The “Jobs to be Done” Theory of Innovation 

Jeff Gothelf: Reconciling Jobs To Be Done & Personas

Alan Klement: Replacing The User Story With The Job Story

Page Laubheimer: Personas vs. Jobs-to-Be-Done