JTBD Helps You Learn About Your Customers and Org

@October 19, 2021

First, JTBD helps you learn about your customers. Then it helps you learn about your org.

When teams seek out JTBD, they're often aiming to improve a metric.

A common one is this: "We need to increase free-to-paid conversion, and we know we need to understand our customers so we know what to build."

Running a JTBD study will help you understand your customers and discover what to build. But that's not all you'll discover as you move from deciding by customer folklore to deciding by customer consensus.

A JTBD study helps your team discover how to improve a metric. And then it shows you that maybe you need some new metrics - plus a new way to hit them and a new strategy to execute on the opportunities you've uncovered.

Leaders that run a JTBD research project to understand their customers soon ask these 3 questions:

1. Are we working toward the right metrics? JTBD will teach you what milestones customers use to measure their progress - are they the same metrics that determine success at you org? You may find that the metrics that you've been aiming at won't drive long-term success for you or your customers.

2. Are our teams organized to build experiences that help our customers make progress? Few humans describe experiences with companies by what "product" built and what "marketing" built. Can your team build experiences to help customers make progress if they're still operating with an arbitrary departmental separation?

3. Are we ignoring the *really* valuable opportunities? JTBD will disavow you of the notion that your customers come to you because they "need analytics" and replace it with a full understanding of when, where, why, and how they need analytics - and all the other barriers stopping them from getting what they really want. You'll see the experiences your team can build to help customers along their journey, but they'll fall outside the scope of your current roadmap. Should you rethink it?

Run a JTBD study to understand your customers' world. Along the way, you'll start to wonder if your world is structured to help customers make progress, and what metrics, team structures, and strategic decisions you need to make to get it there.