How to Dive Deeper into Certain Parts of a JTBD Map

A Challenging One for AI? Repairing a Broken Hip Joint

Professional survey questionnaire developers will tell you that you should limit the amount of time you ask respondents to take on your survey. This is to reduce fatigue, which results in low quality. The challenge is that in Jobs-to-be-Done research we are trying to prioritize a value model, not simply ask a bunch questions that sound interesting. There is a method to the madness.

So how do we find that balance?

Here’s a related post on LinkedIn. Go click Like 👍🏻for me

Well, we’re paying these respondents a premium to take a longer survey. These are targeting tools for the front-end of innovation, not consumer preference studies or net promoter surveys. These models are powerful! They require more time and thought than a typical customer satisfaction survey. Period.

However, we still need to find that optimal balance, and 120 customer success metrics plus all of the other information we need to collect just doesn’t fly. I don’t need to listen to experts, I’ve seen it first hand!

How do I Create a Survey Friendly Set of Metrics?

I’ve developed Generative AI (GenAI) prompts that eliminate the need for job performer (not customer) interviews. One of the early challenges was figuring out how many I needed to generate. Did they cover every possibility (MECE)? If so, what process would we need to follow to reduce the set, if necessary. I developed an automated approach for that as well.

GenAI was a challenge because at the time, you couldn’t treat it like a programming language. It had no structures that allowed you to store things in memory, so I had to develop tricks. However, I did finally come up with a solution to that problem which now allows me to generate a set of success metrics where n=anything I want.

Let’s look at an example for an Orthopedic Surgeon Repairing a Broken Hip Joint. Here’s the job map I generated (with medium length/fidelity).

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1. Assess Patient's Condition - The ability to evaluate the patient's overall health status, medical history, and the specific nature of the hip joint injury to determine the most appropriate surgical approach.

2. Review Diagnostic Imaging - The ability to analyze X-rays, CT scans, or MRI results to precisely locate the fracture, assess its severity, and plan the surgical procedure accordingly.

3. Determine Surgical Approach - The ability to decide on the most suitable surgical technique based on the patient's age, bone quality, fracture pattern, and overall health status.

4. Obtain Informed Consent - The ability to explain the procedure, its risks, benefits, and alternatives to the patient or their legal representative, ensuring they understand and agree to the proposed treatment.

5. Assemble Surgical Team - The ability to gather the necessary medical professionals, including anesthesiologists, surgical nurses, and assistants, to ensure a smooth and efficient procedure.

6. Prepare Operating Room - The ability to set up the operating room with all required equipment, implants, and instruments specific to hip joint repair surgery.

7. Administer Anesthesia - The ability to work with the anesthesiologist to ensure the patient is properly sedated and monitored throughout the procedure.

8. Create Surgical Access - The ability to make precise incisions and navigate through soft tissues to expose the damaged hip joint while minimizing trauma to surrounding structures.

9. Repair Hip Joint - The ability to realign fractured bone fragments, stabilize the joint using appropriate fixation devices such as screws, plates, or prosthetic components, and ensure proper positioning for optimal function.

10. Verify Repair Integrity - The ability to conduct intraoperative imaging and physical tests to confirm the hip joint's stability, alignment, and range of motion before closing the surgical site.

11. Close Surgical Site - The ability to carefully suture the incision layers, ensuring proper tissue approximation and minimizing the risk of infection or complications.

12. Monitor Post-Operative Recovery - The ability to oversee the patient's immediate post-surgical status, managing pain, preventing complications, and initiating early mobilization protocols.

13. Develop Rehabilitation Plan - The ability to create a comprehensive recovery strategy, including physical therapy regimens and follow-up care, to optimize the patient's long-term functional outcomes.

14. Conduct Follow-Up Evaluations - The ability to assess the patient's progress over time, adjusting treatment plans as necessary and addressing any emerging issues to ensure successful hip joint repair and restoration of mobility.

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Note: for anyone who doesn’t agree with this map, are you an orthopedic surgeon? Also, you have ultimate control over the map you use. There are also input parameters and contexts you can use to shape your scope. You’re in control, this is simply an accelerator, and this map is using a universal context. However, you don’t need 6 weeks of interviews to build it anymore!

In order to demonstrate how I generate a limited set of customer success statements for a step, I’ll use the Repair Hip Joint step as an example by asking for seven (7) success statements instead of the twenty (20) I used to ask for. Here’s what I got:

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Themes:

• Fracture Reduction and Alignment

• Fixation and Stability

• Joint Functionality

• Tissue Preservation

• Complication Prevention

1. Achieve optimal fracture reduction, e.g., anatomical alignment, rotational correction, length restoration, etc. [Fracture Reduction and Alignment]

2. Ensure stable fixation of the hip joint, e.g., secure implant placement, appropriate screw positioning, bone-implant interface integrity, etc. [Fixation and Stability]

3. Restore hip joint functionality, e.g., range of motion, weight-bearing capacity, biomechanical balance, etc. [Joint Functionality]

4. Preserve surrounding soft tissues, e.g., minimal muscle damage, blood supply maintenance, nerve protection, etc. [Tissue Preservation]

5. Minimize intraoperative complications, e.g., blood loss control, infection prevention, implant-related issues, etc. [Complication Prevention]

6. Optimize bone healing potential, e.g., proper fracture gap reduction, bone graft application, biological fixation techniques, etc. [Fracture Reduction and Alignment, Fixation and Stability]

7. Avoid compromising future surgical options, e.g., preserving bone stock, maintaining acetabular integrity, allowing for potential revision surgeries, etc. [Joint Functionality, Tissue Preservation, Complication Prevention]

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If you’re new to Jobs-to-be-Done, these statements directly related to a specific job step (some call them mini-jobs). The job step is a sub-objective of the overall job (repairing a broken hip joint) and the metrics are measures of success for the job step.

Think of the overall map as a minimum viable product. We’re looking for gaps - sometimes after delivery🤦🏻 - so we can add the value that’s missing, or design the value in from the get-go (if practical).

The way I was able to reduce the set to a specific number was by introducing themes. That’s mind-numbing detail that we don’t need to get into. But, they are confidence inspiring because you can spot overall coverage (especially the experts) quickly and then ensure that every theme is covered by at least one metric.

So, now we have the leverage we need to develop job maps of short, medium, and longer lengths as well as success statements in whatever volume we want. For example, if you want to limit your survey to having 50 overall metrics across the steps, simply create a low fidelity job map (10 steps) and ask the metric prompt to generate 5 metrics like the ones above.

Boom! your done.

What if I Need to Dive Deeper into a Particular Step?

If you need to dive deeper into areas of the job - for whatever reason - you can simply expand the metrics within that step. You have two options:

1. Run a new prompt that generates more “n” - this may not get you want though. It’s going to start from scratch

2. Select one or two of the metrics that inspired this decision and expand them. Here’s how…

Let’s say you want to expand on the theme of Fixation and Stability. Take the metric associated with that theme…

Ensure stable fixation of the hip joint, e.g., secure implant placement, appropriate screw positioning, bone-implant interface integrity, etc.

…and expand it so you can collect more detailed responses on the them when you run your survey. Since we have 3 examples on the end of that metric, we can utilize them like this:

1. Ensure secure implant placement [Fixation and Stability]

2. Ensure appropriate screw positioning [Fixation and Stability]

3. Ensure bone-implant interface integrity [Fixation and Stability]

This way, you’ve expanded one of the seven (7) original metrics into three (3) which will now give you a total of nine (9).

A Word on Lead-ins

For those of you accustomed to the desired outcome statement format of customer success metrics, I prefer not to use them. Most of the clients or stakeholders I’ve interacted with hated them and tried to force us to change them in presentations - and even in the survey. The problem with that, according to the justification for using the specified structure in the first place, is that they potentially have a different meaning (through interpretation). Therefore, I simply opt not to use the highly engineered version and instead use normal people-speak one that makes everyone comfortable.

As a result, the lead-in and follow up needs to change. Actually, you might want to add a follow up!

Assumption: We don’t need to know the metric portion or direction (e.g., Minimize the time it takes) unless the success statement is ranked poorly by a respondent. That takes a lot of the cognitive load off of the respondent. It’s just easier to read and something they have probably heard before.

The lead-in can be something like…

When you are repairing the hip how important is it that you can … Ensure secure implant placement AND how difficult is it for you to Ensure secure implant placement

If this is answered with high importance, and high difficulty, then you can follow up with a question like…

With regard to Ensuring secure implant placement what was the most frustrating factor?

a) The amount of time it takes

b) The quality of the result

c) The amount of effort it takes

Otherwise, you’d need 3 metrics.

If you’ve wandered into the world of pre-generating potential root causes (with GenAI), you can also ask your respondents what they think the primary root cause of their frustration was/is. Let’s assume for a minute that most people will only have a handful of metrics of which they are underserved. This is not an overburdensome ask, and in fact it’s likely to be more engaging because they can actually see how they’re helping you instead of having this embedded in a strange phrase.

This holds to true for stakeholders as well.

Summary

GenAI is a great a tool when used properly. However, you’re still in control. The whole point of this is to make sure you have a tool that gives you a qualitative research super power - at least for JTBD modeling. At the end of the day (at this point in time) I would never release anything into the wild that hadn’t been reviewed by your stakeholders (and you).

For example, should you include a metric that your stakeholder doesn’t know how to address if it should be underserved? No, kick it out. This isn’t something GenAI can do because it doesn’t know what your capabilities are. I’ve seen too many of these studies where the success statements were confusing and simply not actionable. I’ll leave that rant for another post, at a later time. 🤣

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If you'd like to learn more...

1. I do offer end-to-end consulting if you’re just not ready to do it all your own. I’m faster and with less overhead than your alternatives. Big Brands: This means you can get many more problems solved with your existing budget (I work with a global team of experienced practitioners)

2. I also offer coaching, if you’d like to know someone’s got your back and you want to do the heavy lifting and get some knowledge transfer, I'm there!

3. I’ve also offer the Ultimate JTDB Playbook and Masterclass where you can find an evolving set of GenAI prompts intertwined with an expanding and much deeper look at executing these projects from end to end yourself.

4. Finally, I've recently opened up a JTBD community that is completely FREE! It's still early days and it's where I work with clients - in private spaces - and where I hang out to answer questions or just blather on. I hope you'll join us! There will be more and more free stuff, and there will also be some premium stuff eventually. I wonder what that will be?