When strategy tools eat culture for breakfast

I wanted to write this article for a long time. Finally, after 4 month I found the time to document what I perceived to be a key-moment in my consulting practice. This experience was so profound that it made me ponder about Peter Drucker's famous quote "Culture eats strategy for breakfast".

Peter Drucker, the management consultant, educator, and author, coined this phrase that in a nutshell means that no matter how great your business strategy is, your plan will fail without a company culture that encourages people to implement it.

Let's take a look step by step.

How it unfolded

On February 14, 2023, I had scheduled a workshop with my client, a household appliance OEM. You wouldn't recognize their name, but I am sure you all know some of the their client's products. In Germany we call companies who are market leaders but not commonly known "Hidden Champions".

They were great at building appliances that just work. They had deep subject matter expertise about the "how to". But they weren't experts in customer research. Their clients always told them what to build.

This time, the situation was different, and they wanted to find out themselves what customer wanted. Perhaps they would want to build their own brand. They had already developed a fully specified product on paper. So they recruited me to run a customer research project. The Jobs-to-be-done framework was their approach of choice.

In that above mentioned workshop, the plan was to prioritize a list of 18 pre-selected so called customer jobs (jobs-to-be-done) by the team, discovered during the research project. The diverse team consisted of eight members coming from engineering, sales/business development, strategy leadership, and product management. It represented the entire value stream of my client.

Will the workshop work?

To be honest, I was a bit nervous before the workshop. How would it work out with such a diverse team? A team that likely consisted of members with different, perhaps contrary interests and expectations.

Our method leverages the model proposed by Strategyzer to evaluate customer jobs. Their model uses four different criteria to determine the overall value.

After an introduction to the method we split the team into two groups. Florian Hameister , who helped me with this project, and I evaluated each customer job with our group, job by job, criteria by criteria. After we were finished, we looked for discrepancies in both teams' evaluations.

When we discovered a difference, e. g. one team assigned one point (low) and the other one 3 points (med-high), we discussed the cause. Sometimes it was a just a misunderstanding that led to a different evaluation. Sometimes there was a difference in the understanding of the customer job or in the way the criteria was supposed to be applied. At the end of the process we were able to reconcile all differences and ended up with a list of prioritized customer jobs. A list that was created and agreed to by each participant.

The magic moment

What amazed me was that when the team of 8 individuals from different disciplines with different interests looked that the final list of ranked customer jobs, there was almost no discussion. Nobody raised doubts about the validity of the result. The entire process up to this point was about customer jobs, not about products or features.

Even when one individual made a remark like "but this customer job is already taken by product xyz", the discussion focused back on the customer job. Several team member immediately replied that although there is a predominant technology to serve this customer job, there would be still lots of opportunities to do it better.

Everybody got involved and had the opportunity to contribute to the outcome. I realized that with this technique solution discussions could be easily deferred to a later point in time: to a time when it makes much more sense to talk about the "how to solve" - after the customer job to apply for is clear.

Tool for a customer-centric transformation

In a debrief with my client's key-stakeholder, he told me that he also was charged to help transform the company from a engineering-driven into a customer-centric organization. He was happy that the first step into this direction was successfully done. There is for sure still a long way to go but it seemed like he started on the right foot.

Jobs-to-be-done gave the organization a specific framework to interpret and evaluate customer needs in a much more meaningful way than in the past.

There was no effort necessary to change the culture by preaching the importance of customer-centricity. It happened as easy as applying a process and tools that intrinsically focused on customer needs.

Conclusion

Before you discuss new solutions, clarify the jobs-to-be-done of your audience and evaluate them. Do this in a (diverse) team setting. Make sure everybody gets a voice.

No question, the right culture is crucial when it comes to executing on a customer-centric strategy. In a product company that means building a product to satisfy a real unmet need. On the other hand culture without clear guidance what customer-centricity means is destined to fail. In addition, changing a culture is a hard and long process. Applying a process and tools that are inherently customer-centric however is relatively easy.

Is it time to reverse the famous Peter Drucker quote "culture eats strategy for breakfast"? I'd say in specific situations definitely. At least in the field of product strategy it worked.

If you can make the customer job the north star of your organization, employees know automatically what they need to do, said Clayton M. Christensen, former HBS professor and protagonist of the Jobs to Be Done theory.

My three take-aways of a Jobs-to-be-done-based evaluation:

• It levels the playing field for all members. What customer "needs" to address becomes a democratic process. It gives everybody an equal voice and a chance to participate in the decision process.
• It defers discussions about the solution, technology, product, and features to a later point in time, a time after the evaluation of customer jobs.
• It helps to apply objective criteria for evaluating what customer need(s) to address.

Contact me, if

• you have trouble with the level of customer-centricity of your organization,
• you are in need of process and tools to apply the Jobs-to-be-done framework,
• or want to be educated on the process, so you can apply it.

or visit: https://unipro-solutions.com