Know Your Customers' "Jobs to Be Done"

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by Steve MacLellan

On paper, this makes no sense. Never have businesses known more about their customers. Thanks to the big data revolution, companies now can collect an enormous variety and volume of customer information, at unprecedented speed, and perform sophisticated analyses of it. Many firms have established structured, disciplined innovation processes and brought in highly skilled talent to run them. Most firms carefully calculate and mitigate innovations’ risks. From the outside, it looks as if companies have mastered a precise, scientific process. But for most of them, innovation is still painfully hit-or-miss.

What has gone so wrong?

https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-cu...obs-to-be-done

Regards,
Steve

Thanks Steve,

That's a really good article - I thought it was quite enlightening!

The article points out that so-called big data is just showing correlations. However, correlations do not necessarily show causes.

For example, a person may sweat a lot and also miss work. However, it doesn't mean that missing work caused that person to sweat, or even that sweating caused that person to miss work. Digging deeper, you could find out that both these effects are caused by an underlying fever, which is the real cause of both.

The article says to know your customer's "jobs to be done" - and by this they mean to know what your customer actually wants to accomplish. Them's wise words! For this you don't need so-called big data... Instead, you need to talk to your customers!

Thanks Steve for this dose of wisdom...

- Dien