When employers hire for a job, they typically start by crafting a clear description for the role that outlines exactly what they are looking for. Similarly, when customers look to “hire” a product or service to solve an important job they have, they mentally create their own, albeit less formal, “job spec” that takes into account their needs, wants and circumstances. Usually, the products people love the most are those that match the requirements of their job specs down to the smallest details. Ignoring these details is a good way to lose customers.
A job spec provides a road map for any customer interaction.
It is useful regardless of the method used for gathering customer information, whether through interviews, surveys, focus groups, observation or even reinterpreting past research. Customer interactions can be designed to elicit the information required for a complete job spec and the resulting insights used to solve a wide variety of market mysteries.
The Job Spec
“If you want to understand customers,
start by thinking like a detective.”
Fostering Organizational Resilience
by Building Market Detective Skills
The rapid pace of change today requires companies to
continually stay on top of how the needs of their customers
are changing. The art of understanding what customers
want and why they behave as they do has much in common with how a detective goes about solving a mystery.
Customers are endlessly surprising, often acting in ways that don’t seem to
make sense and presenting, for a time at least, a mystery to be solved. When
this happens, the best response is to look around for clues about what’s going
on — by talking to people, observing them, gathering data, identifying patterns
and drawing out insights that suggest the right next steps — just like a detective.
To enable organizational resilience, organizations must build their market
detective skills in order to be agile in their approach to understanding their
customers — meeting today’s demands while also looking ahead to the future.
— The Secret Lives of Customers
To solve the mystery of customer behavior, and thus enable organizational resilience, business leaders
should seek the answers to four overarching questions:
The mystery
Four Questions We Must Ask
What are customers’ circumstances?
What jobs are customers
trying to get done?
What opportunities
exist to provide a new
or improved solution?
What solutions are customers currently deploying to get
these jobs done?
Circumstances
01
02
Jobs
03
Solutions
04
Opportunities
Understanding Customers’ Circumstances
step 1
Myriad factors could define a customer’s circumstances. Look for insights into both the situational “zoom in” (e.g., time of day, location) and the more fixed “zoom out” variables (e.g., financial status, belief systems). Some
of these elements will be directly observable, while others will require more probing. One method for extracting critical data from customers is to ask
them to tell stories about different areas of their lives. These can be narrowly focused (e.g., asking them to narrate how they spend a typical day or even part of a day) or broader in scope (e.g., “Describe a life experience that had a major impact on your life”). Stories like this are a rich source of insight and context.
OBJECTIVE
Build a foundational understanding of what’s going on in customers’ lives — today and in the future.
• How do you spend a typical day (week, month, year, etc.)?
• Tell me about a time when you went on vacation, sold your house,
purchased a computer, etc.
• When did you arrive, make this decision, etc.?
• How long have you been coming to this store, working in this career, etc.?
Customer Conversation Prompts
What drives customer behavior is the existence of important, unsatisfied “jobs” they want to get done. A job can be a problem to solve (e.g., fixing a car or soothing a sore throat) or a goal to accomplish (e.g., running a marathon or getting into college). When jobs arise, people are motivated to “hire” products, services or experiences to perform those. A job is the “why” that motivates someone to seek, embrace or reject a new solution. Companies that seek to deeply understand customer jobs are better positioned to drive growth by creating products and services that meet their expectations. As customers
tell their stories, detectives will discover indications about their motivations, problems and goals. As these clues emerge, it is critical to probe deeper
to understand the “why,” or the deepest level of underlying motivation.
Learn more about a customer’s motivations, problems and goals
in this specific circumstance.
Discovering Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”
step 2
OBJECTIVE
• What are some of the problems/goals you want to solve/achieve?
• Why was an event, a person, an obstacle, etc., frustrating?
• Why do you think that?
• Why do you feel that way?
Customer Conversation Prompts
• How have you tried to solve that problem or achieve that goal?
• Why did you choose those solutions?
• What do you like or not like about them?
• What might you have chosen instead? Why?
Customer Conversation Prompts
The next step toward understanding customers is to thoroughly explore existing solutions and their efficacy. If there is a current solution to a customer’s job, detectives should try to ascertain why they choose it, what they like or dislike about it, and how it could be improved. Probing deeply on these topics — and asking the customer to be very precise — will lead to insights about how they define quality, how they measure it and what trade-offs they are willing to make to get their most pressing jobs done. This line of questioning also often uncovers unexpected competitors for solving these jobs.
Gain insight into how customers get jobs done today, how they define “value” and where there
is competition in the space.
OBJECTIVE
Identifying Existing Solutions
step 3
• For which problems/goals are there no good solutions today?
• What solution do you wish existed?
• What makes it hard to accomplish your goals?
• What are your nonnegotiables? What trade-offs would you consider?
• Thirty years from now, what new solutions might exist?
Customer Conversation Prompts
At the final stage of this exercise, detectives should look for indicators that, whatever solutions may be currently available, there are still opportunities to create and provide better ones. These opportunities — or “help wanted signs” — can manifest in four scenarios:
Find opportunities for innovating better solutions by understanding barriers to adoption, suboptimal trade-offs and instances of customer tunnel vision.
OBJECTIVE
Recognizing Opportunities
step 4
- Solutions do not exist that adequately solve customers’ job to be done.
- Solutions exist for the job, but there are barriers to customer adoption.
- Solutions exist for the job, but they do not meet customers’
expectations for quality.
- High-quality solutions exist, but customers may have “tunnel vision”
that inhibits their ability to imagine how things could be better.
To avoid catastrophic disruptions and remain competitive in an ever-changing environment, business leaders must thoroughly understand their customers’ behavior. This knowledge positions them to provide in-demand solutions today and identify attractive growth opportunities for the future that align to shifting trends and consumer predilections.
Want to do your own detective work? Download the job spec worksheet to create your own road map for customer investigation.
Next Steps
Download Now
Download Now
Learn more about David
S. Duncan’s market investigation method
in his book The Secret
Lives of Customers.
Start the Investigation
