Celia entered the room where their customer discovery workshop was being held. She hadn’t been able to sleep last night. She was filled with excitement for the innovation journey ahead but she also was worried – was this approach going to work? Would building empathy for their customers lead to new innovative ideas? Or would they just end up with an endless list of complaints? She knew the secret was finding out what motivated customers, and ways that a solution could contribute to their success. How the innovation team would figure that out, she wasn’t sure.
Celia looked around the room. Jack and Kim were there of course, as was the core operations team. She spotted Joseph and walked over to where he sat. Joseph was a new hire, just a year out of college. She wanted his beginner’s mind to provide a different perspective and knew he would need encouragement to speak up.
“Hi Joseph,” she said as she reached his table. “We’re so glad you could join us. Are you excited to begin?”
“Am I ever!” he said enthusiastically. “I read the article Kim sent around about the customer’s job-to-be-done. It seems like we need to find our customer’s functional and emotional measures of success. And we need to find the outcomes they want to avoid. How are we going to find that out just by interviewing them?”
“I guess that’s what we’re going to learn,” replied Celia as she took her seat. The workshop was just beginning and she had the same questions as Joseph.
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What is our Customer Hiring our Solution to do?
The team spent the morning learning how … and why they needed to develop empathy for their customer. Celia could see how their interviews could reveal insights that were not evident in their current view of their customers. The job-to-be-done framework put them in the shoes of their customer, and looked at their product offering as something the customer “hired” to get the job done. The interviews would delve into pain points or work arounds the customer encountered as they completed the job. They would ask why their customer was doing things the way they were doing it.
As the workshop closed in on the lunch hour, they set the team up to try their hand at interviewing customers. Their facilitator instructed them to find a customer to talk to and ask them about their job – what task were they working to complete? Then they would ask what success meant to the customer, what was a job well done. This would reveal the emotional measures of success. “Be sure to allow for empty space. Your customer will enjoy talking about what makes them feel good at the end of the day,” said Kim.
The meeting broke for lunch and Celia went over to Joseph. “Do you want to pair up to do our customer interviews?” she asked. She knew Joseph would hear different things than she and the rest of the experts on the team. He did not have preconceived notions about what their solution was supposed to do. They could stay away from defending the product, instead focusing on listening for how they could help the customer succeed. “Let’s go see what our customers are hiring our solution to do for them!”