Company Opportunity vs. Customer Success in Jobs-to-be-Done Research

Practical Jobs-to-be-Done Series

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For those of you who are followers of Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI), what I'm about to suggest may seem like pure heresy. What I’m going to propose is a response to the realities of certain corporate cultures. So, what am I talking about?

As many of you know, ODI is a method that follows a structured and consistent pattern in order to uncover Opportunities in the market. In other words, it looks for gaps that can be exploited for new value creation. If the lens used to search for gaps is focused on something that is constantly in flux, then spotting those gaps becomes a game of guessing, and luck.

I haven't met a strategist or innovator that wants to compete against luck

ODI begins by constructing a value model of the market. To do this in a way that is stable, it focuses on the problem-space (non-volatile) and not on the solution-space (highly volatile). This model essentially describes what needs to be true for a customer get the job done with zero struggles. It doesn't point to pain because the metric-set is stateless, as well as mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE). The market can now be described as a group of people with a common objective (or that are trying to get the same job done).

As we move into the quantitative phase, we're able to prioritize customer success metrics (labeled desired outcomes in ODI-speak). We measure each metric on importance and satisfaction and then run it through an Opportunity Algorithm. In that view of the world, anything that scores 10 or above is considered to be an opportunity for the innovator (the company). This then also allows us to run segmentation experiments based on metrics, and not on things like demographics. We all know that people 55+ don't all share the same needs, so why do we segment that way? Especially when what we're segmenting is an industry, more than it is a market.

When is this a problem?

What I've found is that you really can't shove the language, or the perspective, down the throats of people that are carrying decades of career and experience baggage that describes the world differently. Nor can you overwhelm a corporate culture with your intellect alone.

For example, I was presenting a bar chart to a group recently that was depicting our opportunities vs. competitors opportunities. In the language of ODI, there were bar charts showing Opportunity Scores across a series of market players. The higher our bars were, the better for us. Sounds logical on the surface.

What I learned was that the people looking at the chart were actually thinking about customer struggles, not corporate opportunities. So, when they saw a bar related to their brand that was higher than competitors, they were thinking the customer is doing better (struggling less) because the bar is taller. Bigger is better. But better depends on your perspective.

So the dilemma set in, how should I address this? Should I retrain the way (what is essentially) a Fortune 500 company thinks about the world? Well, I fully intend to at some point but now is not the right time!

So what is a lowly iconoclast to do? Reinvent ODI?

Sort of...

The Opportunity Algorithm used in ODI is a very simple calculation…

Opportunity (OPP) = Importance + Max(Importance - Satisfaction, 0) 

Where...

Importance equals = the proportion of the same of people rating a metric very or extremely important (top-two box)

Satisfaction equals = the proportion of the sample of people rating a metric very or extremely satisfied (top-two box)

This isn't going to be lesson on ODI but I will point out that the resulting score from this formula will range between 0 and 20. When a particular metric scores 10 or above (almost always after needs-based segmentation) it indicates an underserved need for that segment. Therefore, if the score is 13.2, the bar is going to be taller on a bar chart. This represents a larger opportunity for a company to innovate and it means the customers is doing worse.

I've already explained that certain minds don't process these visualizations like the ODI methods wants them to. As a result, I've decided to make some dramatic changes to accommodate this silly and selfish customer-centric thinking. I'm going to call this new metric the Customer Success Score (CSS). It gets pretty complicated from here on out, so try to bear with me.

CSS = 20 - OPP 

Try not to get caught up in all of the complex math here. The resulting score for this metric will essentially be an inverted opportunity score. This means that the customer success is low when the value is 10 or below. This translates into a lower bar on a bar chart. So if you're comparing your customers to competitors, the higher the bar means the better the customers are performing.

For the customer-centric organization that wants to understand how their customers are doing instead of the inside-out view of “how are we doing?” or “what are our opportunities?” this seems to make more sense. Your mileage may vary since not all cultures are the same. It' just an option.

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