Product Discovery

How to identify and define all your customer's needs using JTBD (Job-to-be-Done).

Watch Jay Haynes the founder and CEO of thrv give a lesson on ''How to identify customer needs'' using the Job-To-Be-Done (JTBD) innovation method. He explains that customer needs are the variables required by your customers to get their job done and satisfying them is the key to attaining competitive advantage and successful innovation. Join the video lesson to learn why JTBD effectively delivers valuable customer products and the steps to follow when solving customers' problems.

Learn how to effectively use 'why' during customer problem research.

Not understanding the customer problem is one of the top reasons projects fail. The reality is that there are multiple customer problems to be resolved, and each must be understood. Harsh Vardhan shares a technique called the "Y-Map", which helps to raise awareness of lesser known reasons to build the product while uncovering gaps not identified during customer interviews.

Is innovation inherently a hit-or-miss endeavor? Not if you understand why customers make the choices they do.

Christensen and his coauthors give a deep analytical report on why most businesses are staggering with innovation and the importance of knowing your customers. They state that firms focus more on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data than trying to understand the jobs that the customers are trying to get done. Read the article to know more about why the key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers’ lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs.

Form follows function. Therefore, the organizational structure follows the Jobs-to-Be-Done.

New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable. Customer Experience (CX) is more holistic than just product management. It should be our aim to eradicate all unhappiness with our business. Happiness is the gap between your expectation of a product and the current situation. The author suggests that closing the happiness gap either by lowering your expectation or improving the situation is a good contender for the definition of Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD). In fact, product owners worldwide describe Jobs-to-Be-Done as helping people close their many happiness gaps. The article generally helps you figure out why we have to prioritize some things over others with JTBD.

Why you should focus on Riskiest Assumption Tests and forget about MVPs.

Does replacing your MVP with a RAT save you a lot of pain?

A Riskiest Assumption Test (RAT) puts the focus on learning. It is a candle in the darkness that allows us to move forward one step at a time. Once you’ve validated the riskiest assumption you can move on to the next largest one. Gradually building confidence in the viability of your idea. The key to this is rapid, small tests.

On the contrary, the MVP is losing its originality due to over-reliance as It's noted in the article. An MVP seduces with false reassurances of a clear, linear path to an optimized solution.

Customer interviews are the foundation of good product discovery - learn how to gain valuable insights in each interaction.

The Discovery track is all about quickly generating validated product backlog items, and the Delivery track is all about generating releasable software.

You should talk to your customers with the goal of learning who you are building for, not what to build.

It’s not about what your competition is doing. It’s about about what your customers are doing.

The research seems to indicate that we aren’t very good at making decisions. So what are we to do?

Identify your customers’ hidden needs.

Me and My Shadow is a powerful way of understanding your customer, but it comes with a catch: it is hard to observe your customer in such a way that your observations don’t change how they work. The observers should emphasize thinking of themselves as a shadow, so that any negative interactions caused by your observations are minimized. It works best when you can observe your customers in their native habitat (with native guides in tow).

This activity consists of observers carefully recording a participant using a product or service. You may want to segment your customers based on perceived motivation: those who want to use your product, those who are indifferent about using your product, and those who don’t want to use your product but cannot find or justify an alternative, and in rare cases, those who may be forced to use your product. The observer(s) sit next to the participant to watch for and listen to actions, expressions, comments, and suggestions. Observer(s) ask questions of the participant, such as "Why are you doing that," or "what are you thinking at this moment".

Capture many kinds of observations, such as: 1) People who interact with your customer; 2) Your products and services that they use; 3) Products and services that they use at the same time they are using your products or services; 4) Utterances, body language, or facial expressions that give insight into their emotions as they use your products or services; 5) The physical environment and larger context of their workspace; 6) Your own feelings and reactions to what is going on.

Then Assess each observation along the following dimensions: 1) Novelty: The degree to which the observation indicates a novel or unintended use of the product; 2) Performance gap: The degree to which the observation indicates a performance gap between desired and actual performance. Large gaps mean large problems; 3) New opportunity: The degree to which the observation indicates a new opportunity for solving a customer problem.

Identify the most exciting product features.

The aisles of supermarkets around the world are filled with colorful product boxes from all over the world. They tell us of products that are new and improved. They tell us how these products will make us thinner, smarter, sleeker, happier. In the process, the best boxes help move that box from the shelf and into our home. Product Box lets you leverage your customers’ collective retail consumer experiences by asking them to design a box for your product. Not just any box, but a box that represents the product that they want to buy. In the process, you’ll learn what your customers think are the most important, exciting features of a given product or service.

Overview: Ask your customers to imagine that they’re selling your product at a tradeshow, retail outlet, or public market. Give them a few cardboard boxes and ask them to literally design a product box that they would buy. The box should have the key marketing slogans that they find interesting. When finished, pretend that you’re a skeptical prospect and ask your customer to use their box to sell your product to you.

Covering the ins and outs of product discovery - the work that we do to make decisions about what to build.

Clarify the operating context for your products and services.

Although you may think you have a solid understanding of how your product or service relates to other products and services, chances are your customers have a different point of view. By helping you understand these relationships from their perspective, Spider Web helps you capture more revenue by showing you webs of potentially unknown relationships.

Spider Web is partially inspired by a requirements analysis technique called context diagramming. Context diagramming was originally created to show the data that flows between a given software system and other entities with which this system communicates. These entities can be people, other software systems, physical devices, electro-mechanical devices, other sensors, and so forth. Context diagrams are a useful tool, usually created by business analysts trained to interpret the perceptions of a customer and who usually manage to make their context diagrams look very neat and tidy.

Spider Web encourages customers to directly draw their view of the relationships. And because the real world isn’t a neat and tidy place, customer generated diagrams tend to get messy. Wonderfully messy. Realistically messy. Messy in a way that helps you understand the real opportunities for genuine innovation.

Overview: Put the name of your product or service in the center of a circle. Ask your customers to draw other products and services, ask them to tell you when, how, and why these are used. Ask them to draw lines between the different products and services. As your customers reviews when and where they user your offering, you can capture the various inter-relationships that exist between the different products and service that they use throughout the day.

Teams who invest in research are quickly finding that their experiments are only as good as their hypotheses and experiment design.

This approach to JTBD puts the process in the proper order - providing the targeting necessary to create the right products, with the right features.

A framework for continuous product discovery, where we first discover opportunities and then discover solutions.