Why asking your customers what they want doesn't work
And how can you figure it out what they really need
Does this sound familiar?
Your sales, marketing, and R&D teams are all in the same room with the business unit head, discussing what to put in the roadmap.
The sales team is sure it knows what customers want because it’s constantly talking to its customers about their most pressing needs.
The marketing team has reams of ideas for leveraging the existing brand, perhaps by offering new versions, new flavors, new colors, or special offers.
The R&D team is excited about the new features and benefits it’s working on, driven by cool new technologies or applications.
And the head of the business is relentlessly focused on getting things into the market that have a shot at helping the P&L by the end of the year.
Our suggestion for the weekend is “Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice” (2016, Taddy Hall, David S. Duncan, Clayton Christensen, Karen Dillon).
It introduces “Jobs to be done” - an original concept for thinking about your product.
What’s the problem with the above scenario?
All the teams are working with a kind of confirmation bias—seeing only the information that tends to support their point of view. None of these perspectives is wrong, but the point is that none is truly objective. And more important, not one of the models reflects the customers’ job.
Here’s a classic example of trying to give the customers what they want, from Intuit (the $170B financial giant):
With the well-intended effort of giving customers what they ask for, Cook [Intuit’s CEO] recalls, Intuit’s development teams would extensively survey customers about what new features they’d like to see in Intuit products. And customers had a lot to say. They’d rattle off an expansive wish list.
“They’d ask for 150 features,” Cook says. So the team jumped on that feedback. Development teams would spend weeks arguing and debating which of the list of potential new features were most important to provide. Everybody, Cook says, was guided by what he or she thought was right for the customer.
But in reality, it offered no guidance at all. “We got into feature chase,” Cook says. “Too often we’d go look at what customers were asking for and build it.” But absent a clear understanding of the job the customers were hiring that product to do, “there was simply no way to differentiate which features were the right ones. It’s like navigating without a compass.”
Selling more milkshakes
A great example from the book, that demonstrates how companies usually work, and what’s the problem with that:
Let’s take a look at a project for a fast-food chain: how to sell more milkshakes.
The chain had spent months studying the problem in incredible detail. It had brought in customers that fit the profile of the ideal milkshake consumer and peppered them with questions: “Can you tell us how we can improve our milkshakes so you’d buy more of them? Do you want it cheaper? Chunkier? Chewier? Chocolatier?”
Even when customers explained what they thought they would like, it was hard to know exactly what to do. The chain tried many things in response to the customer feedback, innovations specifically intended to satisfy the highest number of potential milkshake buyers. Within months, something notable happened: Nothing.
After all the marketers’ efforts, there was no change in sales of the chain’s milkshake category. So we thought of approaching the question in a totally different way: I wonder what job arises in people’s lives that causes them to come to this restaurant to “hire” a milkshake?
Armed with that perspective, the team stood in a restaurant for eighteen hours one day, watching people:
What time did people buy these milkshakes?
What were they wearing?
Were they alone?
Did they buy other food with it?
Did they drink it in the restaurant or drive off with it?
It turned out that a surprising number of milkshakes were sold before 9: 00 a.m. to people who came into the fast-food restaurant alone. It was almost always the only thing they bought. They didn’t stop to drink it there; they got into their cars and drove off with it. So we asked them: “Excuse me, please, but I have to sort out this puzzle. What job were you trying to do for yourself that caused you to come here and hire that milkshake?”
It soon became clear that the early-morning customers all had the same job to do: they had a long and boring ride to work. They needed something to keep the commute interesting. They weren’t really hungry yet, but they knew that in a couple of hours, they’d face a midmorning stomach rumbling. It turned out that there were a lot of competitors for this job, but none of them did the job perfectly.
“I hire bananas sometimes. But take my word for it: don’t do bananas. They are gone too quickly—and you’ll be hungry again by midmorning,” one told us.
Doughnuts were too crumbly and left the customers’ fingers sticky, making a mess on their clothes and the steering wheel as they tried to eat and drive.
Bagels were often dry and tasteless—forcing people to drive their cars with their knees while they spread cream cheese and jam on the bagels.
But a milkshake? It was the best of the lot. It took a long time to finish a thick milkshake with that thin straw. And it was substantial enough to ward off the looming midmorning hunger attack. One commuter effused, “This milkshake. It is so thick! It easily takes me twenty minutes to suck it up through that thin straw. Who cares what the ingredients are—I don’t. All I know is that I’m full all morning. And it fits right here in my cup holder”—as he held up his empty hand.
People hired milkshakes for two very different jobs during the day, in two very different circumstances. Each job has a very different set of competitors—in the morning it was bagels and protein bars and bottles of fresh juice, for example; in the afternoon, milkshakes are competing with a stop at the toy store or rushing home early to shoot a few hoops [the second job to be done that I omitted here, is taking the kids out for a less-guilty treat] - and therefore was being evaluated as the best solution according to very different criteria.
Since reading the book, I started to apply the ‘jobs to be done’ lenses to different questions around me. What jobs do I hire each app for? For which job will the customer hire this feature?
The book has great techniques for applying the lessons to your organization, check it out!
The next section is dedicated to the entrepreneurship-oriented among you. Who knows, maybe this will help you think of the next big Google :)
So how do you find a job to be done?
1. Finding a Job Close to Home
In the context of a data-obsessed world, it might be a surprise that some of the world’s greatest innovators have succeeded with little more than their intuition about a Job to Be Done to guide their efforts.
Khan Academy was started because of Sal Khan’s desire to help his cousin learn Math, stress-free. Turns out there were lots of people who felt the same pain as his cousin.
2. Competing with Nothing
When consumers can't find any solution that actually satisfies their job and decide to not do anything instead. Often companies consider only how they can grab shares away from competitors, but not where they can find unseen demand.
Chip Conley, Airbnb's head of global hospitality and strategy, says that 40% of its "guests" say they would not have made a trip at all - or stayed with family - if Airbnb didn't exist.
3. Workarounds and Compensating Behaviors
OpenTable, which is an online, real-time restaurant reservation service, was born out of a common workaround. I’ve always hated having to figure out how to make dinner reservations at a restaurant. When you have two friends in town, you decide you want to go out. You want to show them your favorite restaurant. Everybody checks their schedule and agrees, so you call the restaurant and find out they don’t have capacity at the time you agreed with your friends. Can you come at 9: 00 instead? So now you have to call your friends back to see if that works. And it turns out, one of them has a babysitting problem. OK, back to the drawing board. What other restaurant should we go to? We’ve all been doing this workaround to get restaurant reservations for ages, but OpenTable solved this job.
4. Look for What People Don’t Want to Do
Clayton calls them “negative jobs.” In my experience, negative jobs are often the best innovation opportunities.
Harvard Business School alum Rick Krieger and some partners decided to start QuickMedx, the forerunner of CVS MinuteClinics, after Krieger spent a frustrating few hours waiting in an emergency room for his son to get a strep-throat test. CVS MinuteClinic can see walk-in patients instantly and nurse practitioners can prescribe medicines for routine ailments, such as conjunctivitis, ear infections, and strep throat. Because most people don’t want to go to the doctor if they don’t have to, there are now more than a thousand MinuteClinic locations inside CVS pharmacy stores in thirty-three states.
5. Unusual use
If you observe people employing a workaround or “compensating behavior” to get a job done, pay close attention. It’s usually a clue that you have stumbled on to a high-potential innovation opportunity, because the job is so important and they are so frustrated that they are literally inventing their own solution.
Final quote
As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” After decades of watching great companies fail repeatedly, I’ve concluded that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?
Love this story... adding the book to my list. 😄 I feel like there are some great lessons in here for engineers and how we can relate to our customers, too. Thanks for posting!
Most of our actions are not conscious decisions; it's akin to attempting to extract a meaningful response from me to the question, "Why did you have pasta for dinner?" I'd likely respond with, "Yeah, pasta is filling and quick and easy to make," but my actual reason might be that it's "the first thing I saw when opening my cupboard" or "last time I made something else, I burnt the rice" or even "it reminds me of my mother's cooking."
You'll gain no actionable insights from my answer. However, as you mentioned, if you observed for a week (creepy of you but ok), you'd probably learn my habits. Consequently, you'd understand why I "hire" pasta! That's perhaps why the data collected from various websites is so valuable; they understand our behavior better than we do!
Great article !