Customer Experience Innovation Can Look Like a Rocky Road Without Integration
A quick peek at business model disruption
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The road less traveled
Many speculate how it could be that a company like Amazon can place so many big bets and hit the jackpot so often. Some focus their attention on Amazon’s little bets and suggest they are no better at innovation than other companies, and are just getting lucky occasionally. Is that really the case? Can no one see a larger pattern here?
People and businesses have both had to cobble together solutions to get jobs done. In my last post, I highlighted how music enthusiasts in the 70s were cobbling together component stereo systems in order to get the best listening experience in a single location. Even with standardized interfaces this was quite an undertaking. Not only did we have to learn how to connect them, we had to configure each component to work properly in conjunction with the configuration of other components, and this wasn't a one-and-done deal, either. We were always fiddling to achieve perfection...that perfect sound.
Dare I say it, it almost became an experience (as opposed to the music itself) because it consumed so much of our free time, and since the alternative was low quality sound, we thought we had it made. People loved showing off their unique variations - different or more components, different and mixed brands, etc. Little did we know that we really didn't want to do all of these things just to listen to music. We just wanted to listen to music!
I've looked at the Martech landscape (series starts here) through a similar lens and realized that not only are we cobbling together incompatible technologies (and even agencies and consulting firms), most - if not all - of these technologies fail to address critical parts of the job that we are still tasked with doing. You can find these things anywhere, in an industry, any category.
While Clay Christensen described it differently, this is really the innovator’s dilemma. (No, I didn’t invent this concept.
Wait, there are boulders on that road!
Enterprises invest a lot of money into their vision of what a solution should be. They and their advocates spend a lot of time and money pushing the narrative in order to maximize short term revenues and their own compensation. This is a trap that often prevents otherwise intelligent people from seeing where the world (or market) must go, as opposed to where there world is seemingly going. And it always goes where it must go. They just can't see it, or don't want to see it.
Amazon does not appear to be one of those companies. I pick on them because of their scary success, not because I have some special love for the company. It became clear to me a number of years ago that not only have they seemingly put a Jobs-to-be-Done lens on their product/portfolio/business planning, they have also added a critical element to their analysis mix that I feel has been completely ignored by the Jobs-to-be-Done community.
That element is integration. For me, this is the key to finding horizontal business model opportunities that are disruptive to industries that only get part of a consumption job done and/or do not offer the consumption job as a service (CJaaS) - I'm trademarking that LOL!
The Amazon marketplace solved shopping pain for consumers by providing a one-stop market place for an increasingly large portion of their daily needs. This didn't initially eliminate the need for brands to set up their own inventory and Ecommerce systems, but when Amazon provided them a place to sell their wares without the hassle and costs related to internal systems...that did, or drastically simplified it. This has been especially true for smaller businesses where the dollar and time investments could be debilitating.
As Amazon systemized and integrated their entire technology stack as a cloud service to support their own efforts and ongoing need to scale, they had found the key to disrupting many of the players who owned only a part of the technology stack. It was both scary, and beautiful. There were many companies that needed this same capability, and most of them are now partners with - or customers of - Amazon.
Integration is not a single job, it is woven into each of the other consumption jobs, and stitched across solutions.
Lock your diffs and disconnect your sway bar
As we look at markets where enterprises are still cobbling solutions together on their own - and this is where systems integrators and large consultancies make a lot of their money - we could, and should, put a Jobs-to-be-Done lens to this struggle of cobbling (otherwise known as integration).
Disruptive business models often - if not always - emerge from the consumption chain, as services that address common needs are designed to be operationalized and/or productized across many industries instead of just one enterprise.
I've said this before, if someone could invent an appliance that took $1 as an input and output $5 dollars, executives would open their corporate wallets to buy or subscribe to this solution. Think about it, this is exactly what a business is trying to do when it hires employees, invests in a variety of technologies, engages with consultants, fills in gaps with contractors and spends ungodly amounts of money on their marketing and branding efforts - often to no avail.
So I ask, why is imagining a completely integrated and automated solution for this job - achieving profitable growth - any different than other jobs, such as getting access to computing power and data storage? It's not. Yet the latter has gone through a massive disruption cycle over the past 20 years and we're till clinging to the current state of the former.
The key to solving this problem is not simply studying methods for product innovation, and it certainly won’t come from looking at cold data (historical). We need to evolve those methods to become much better at business model innovation around horizontal challenges that exist to support core functional jobs. And this is not a canvas exercise - as much as the canvas people will have you believe.
Disclaimer: I’ve created a Jobs-to-be-Done Canvas and it’s often confused as a singular tool for investigation innovation. It’s not.
All innovation a data exercise, unless you like to guess - and you’re very lucky. Those horizontal challenges are shared across industries, and therefore make for delicious opportunities for disruptors - if they can spot them, and measure them. If only they knew what to look for. Well, they need forward-looking data, not workshops and focus groups, ideas or pictures.
I've spent many years integrating systems. I’m not sure why this hadn't occurred to me until the last few years because it seems so obvious to me now; especially given the research method I use to seek out innovation opportunities. Expect to see more on this Jobs-to-be-Done + CRM + Martech integration discussion as I develop my thinking and develop universal models for the new consumption job(s) of integration.
Jobs-to-be-Done Chat - https://t.me/jobs_to_be_done_chat
P.S. I’ll be launching an updated and complete series on the market associated with “Developing a Qualified Lead”. I’m not trying to turn you all into CRM gurus, but I want the process of doing the qualitative research to become as streamlined as possible. A Universal Model is a great sanity check for those developing models for their own market. New updates to building these models will be included. Stay tuned. It’s coming soon.