A Systematic Approach to FinServ Innovation: Leveraging JTBD & Modern Insights
Uncover High-Priority Unmet Needs Using Jobs-to-be-Done Methods (Including AI-Powered Analysis)
The Stagnant State of Financial Services
Let's be honest. For many consumers, interacting with financial services feels… frustrating. Confusing fees, complex products, impersonal advice, and services that don't quite seem to fit their lives are common complaints. Despite technological advancements, many financial institutions struggle to connect meaningfully with the people they aim to serve.
Why the disconnect? A major reason is that traditional approaches, often relying heavily on demographic segmentation (age, income, location), simply fail to capture the real reasons why people make financial decisions. They describe who the customer is, but not why they act.
This is where Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory offers a powerful alternative. By shifting focus from customer attributes to the underlying "Job" a customer is trying to accomplish, JTBD provides a more precise lens for understanding needs and uncovering innovation opportunities. This post will explore the basics of JTBD, how to systematically uncover customer needs using this framework, and how you can apply it to develop winning strategies in the competitive consumer financial services landscape.
Understanding the Customer's "Job": What Goal Are Consumers Really Trying to Achieve with Their Money?
Jobs-to-be-Done isn't just another business buzzword; it's a fundamental shift in perspective. It posits that customers don't simply buy products or services; they "hire" them to achieve a specific goal or objective within the situations specific to their lives. JTBD focuses on understanding this underlying goal, the struggles customers encounter while trying to achieve it, and the desired outcomes they use to measure success.
Consider these examples in finance:
Instead of "selling a retirement plan" (product focus), understand the customer's Job: "Ensure long-term financial security."
Instead of "offering a credit card" (product focus), understand the customer's Job: "Mitigate the financial impact of unexpected expenses."
Thinking in terms of "Jobs" requires delving deeper than surface-level features. It involves understanding the core functional job (the tangible task), but also the crucial emotional and social jobs (how the customer wants to feel or be perceived). Why does this matter for strategy? Because it anchors innovation and product development in the stable, underlying motivations of customers, rather than volatile competitor features or fleeting market trends.
From Job to Strategy: Systematically Uncovering Needs with JTBD
Understanding the Job is the first step. The next is to apply this understanding systematically to identify unmet needs and innovation opportunities. A rigorous application of JTBD allows you to pinpoint precisely where customers are struggling and what successful outcomes look like from their perspective.
Here’s a simplified overview of key steps involved:
Define the Core Job Clearly: Articulate the fundamental objective the customer is trying to accomplish, independent of any current solution. (e.g., "Achieve stability in household cash flow," not "Use our budgeting app").
Uncover Desired Outcomes: Identify the specific, measurable metrics customers use to evaluate success when getting the Job done. These are technology-agnostic and framed from the customer's viewpoint (e.g., "Minimize the time required to resolve a billing error," "Maximize the confidence in investment decisions," "Reduce the effort needed to track spending against goals"). Use JTBD interviews or other insight methods to capture these in the customer's language.
Quantify the Opportunity: Determine which desired outcomes are most important to customers and least satisfied with current solutions. This reveals the biggest innovation opportunities – the areas where customers are struggling most significantly.
Segment by Unmet Needs: Identify distinct groups of customers who prioritize different sets of unmet needs. This allows for targeted solutions rather than one-size-fits-all approaches.
The benefit of this systematic approach? It transforms innovation from a guessing game into a more predictable process. By focusing development efforts on specific, important, and underserved customer goals, you significantly increase the odds of creating solutions customers will actually value and adopt.
Putting JTBD into Practice: Developing a New FinServ Strategy
Let's translate theory into action. How can you use JTBD to shape your financial services strategy?
Step 1: Choose a Core Job to Focus On. Don't try to boil the ocean. Select a specific, high-value customer Job relevant to your market (e.g., "Execute a major purchase like a home or car," "Accumulate sufficient funds for retirement," "Finance higher education").
Step 2: Gather Customer Insights via JTBD Approaches.
Traditional Method: Conduct qualitative customer interviews specifically designed to uncover the Job, the context, the struggles, and the desired outcomes. Go beyond surface-level questions to understand the 'why' behind their actions and decisions.
Emerging Alternatives: It's important to recognize that the landscape of insight gathering is evolving. AI-powered tools (where I am a pioneer) are increasingly being utilized to analyze vast amounts of customer data – like support tickets, online reviews, forum discussions, and survey responses – at scale. These technologies can potentially surface JTBD-related insights (struggles, desired outcomes) more rapidly and cost-effectively, acting as powerful complements, and in some cases, alternatives, to traditional interview methods. The key is using the right tool(s) to get the richest understanding of the customer's objective and related struggles.
Step 3: Capture Desired Outcomes. Translate interview insights or AI analysis into a comprehensive list of specific, measurable, customer-centric outcome statements related to the chosen Job.
Step 4: Prioritize Opportunities. Use quantitative surveys or other methods to score the importance and current satisfaction levels for each desired outcome across your target market. Identify the top unmet needs where Importance is high, and Satisfaction is low. (Example: Analysis might reveal customers highly value accurately predicting the long-term impact of financial decisions but are poorly satisfied with current tools).
Step 5: Ideate Solutions. Brainstorm new product features, service enhancements, or entirely new offerings specifically designed to address the prioritized unmet needs significantly better than existing alternatives.
Case Snippet (Hypothetical)
Consider 'FinFlow,' a hypothetical FinTech startup targeting freelancers. Instead of just offering a basic business account, they used JTBD interviews and analysis of online freelancer forums. They uncovered a critical, underserved Job: "Stabilize income flow to enable career focus." Key desired outcomes included "Minimize the anxiety associated with unpredictable income" and "Maximize the accuracy of future income projections." Based on these prioritized needs, FinFlow developed its core 'Predictive Income Stability' feature, which used payment history and projections to offer tailored insights and smoothing options. This directly addressed the Job, differentiating them from generic banking solutions and leading to strong market adoption among freelancers.
Conclusion: Building the Future of Finance
The financial services industry is ripe for customer-centric disruption. Jobs-to-be-Done provides a robust framework for moving beyond incremental improvements and feature wars. By focusing relentlessly on the underlying objective the customer is trying to achieve, understanding their struggles, and systematically identifying their unmet needs, you can build strategies and solutions that deliver genuine value.
This approach requires a shift in mindset – from selling products to helping customers accomplish their Jobs. But the payoff is significant: more predictable innovation, stronger customer loyalty, and a sustainable competitive advantage.
What do you think? What 'Job' are your customers hiring your financial service to accomplish? Share your experiences or challenges applying JTBD concepts in the comments below – let's discuss!
If you’d like to take action, I would love to help. Here’s are some steps you can take to make that a reality for us:
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Why Me?
I’ve been trained by the best in Outcome-Driven Innovation. Part of that training involved how to understand what the future should look like. As a result, I’ve taken what I’ve learned and begun innovating so I can get you to the outcomes you’re seeking faster, better, and even more predictably. Anyone preaching innovation should be doing the same; regardless of how disruptive it’ll be.
How am I doing this?
I’ve developed a complete toolset that accelerates qualitative research to mere hours instead of the weeks or months it used to take. It’s been fine-tuned over the past 2+ years and it’s second-to-none (including to humans). That means we can have far more certainty that we’ve properly framed your research before you invest in a basket of road apples. They don’t taste good, even with whipped cream on top.
I’m also working on a completely new concept for prioritizing market dynamics that predict customer needs (and success) without requiring time-consuming and costly surveys with low quality participants. This is far more powerful and cost effective than the point-in-time surveys that I know you don’t want to do!
I believe that an innovation consultant should eat their own dog food. Therefore, we must always strive to:
Get more of the job done for our clients
Get the job done better for our clients
Get the job done faster for our clients
Get the job done with with fewer features for our clients
Get the job done in a completely different and novel way for our clients
Get the job done in a less costly manner for our clients
You could be an early tester of the latest developments, but at a minimum take advantage of an approach that is light years ahead of incumbent firms that are still pitching a 30 year old growth strategy process but haven’t grown themselves. 👈🏻 It's worth thinking about.
All the links you need are a few paragraphs up. Or set up some time to talk … that link is down below. 👇🏻
Mike Boysen - www.pjtbd.com
Why fail fast when you can succeed the first time?
📆 Book an appointment: https://pjtbd.com/book-mike