Which Pillars of JTBD are Most Challenging?

I recently published a playbook in my newsletter that talked about the 5 pillars of JTBD and I’ve gotten questions on which one is the most challenging for organizations to implement. As a refresher, here they are:

• Choose and Prioritize Customer Jobs?- not what they do, what they are trying to accomplish
• Develop value models for the priority jobs?- these are stable depictions of the problem?space?which means you no longer have to field teams of?super-excited?employees to redo them twice a year.
• Ask the market to prioritize your model(s)?- and make sure you’re asking the side of the market that is actually spending the money. Yes, I know social media platforms get money from advertisers, but the advertisers are targeting people that spend money on products. So make sure you satisfy the product … er … the users.
• Analyze the results and develop?actionable?insights?- based on data, not guesses
• Formulate a portfolio of strategic options based on the insights?- you should be getting multiple possible strategies from this kind of research. You may not be able to implement all of them, but you should?consider?all of them.

To be honest, I’ve found that all of them are challenging, and here’s why. Too many solution-space professionals have hopped on the JTBD Express and adapted their solution-space tools for a problem-space problem. ????

There is another camp - at least one - in the JTBD space that has attempted to co-opt the term and they can’t even define a customer job properly. If you can’t get the first step right … well, garbage in, garbage out. The worst part of this is that it appears to be the end of their process. So, I’m not sure what kind of insight that is. Are you?

If you’re an executive who needs to know the answers to important questions with a high level of confidence, you might want to consider exploring a different group of JTBD practitioners … those who actually created this space before it was called JTBD.

The reason you haven’t, most likely, is that you won’t get answers in two weeks like you do with the other camp. How many $$$ are you willing to invest in a strategic initiative with the goal of fundamentally transforming your business based on a handful of interviews and/or a whiteboard full of sticky notes?

Possibly a better approach follows 10 principles that the 2-week version doesn’t. And there’s a good reason they don’t. They’re wired for a different kind of problem.

But back to the original question…the competencies that are required after defining the job are not addressed by the other camp at all. So, you’re left with a bunch of improperly developed job stories conflated with made up pain points.

Hey, we’re working on ways to accelerate this process and make it scale better for you so you don’t have to take this all on by yourself. If you’d like to learn more, check out my website at https://www/pjtbd.com and feel free to contact me. If not, that’s Okay too. I’m not here to convince anyone, you need to convince yourself.

So, allow me to restate what the research shows:

• 5% of companies are to sustain a real, inflation-adjusted growth rate of more than 6%
• The other 95% reach a point where growth (CAGR, not revenue) simply stalls to rates at or below the GNP growth rate.
• Of the companies whose growth stalls, only 5 % are able to successfully reignite their growth rate to even 1% above the growth rate of GNP.

That doesn’t concern you? If it does I recommend you follow me on https://zeropivot.substack.com to learn exactly how to lead on the innovation front. This problem-solving approach will work on the front-end of innovation (FEI) and customer experience/journeys (CX). The method is losing importance as new tools emerge (you’re welcome) but the outcomes achieved (precise knowledge) are priceless.