Developing an Innovation Strategy Through a Jobs-to-be-Done Lens
The world is constantly changing. New technologies are being created, markets are evolving, and consumer needs are shifting. To stay ahead of the competition, you need to be innovative. The jobs-to-be-done framework is a tool for innovation. Companies use it to better understand their customers’ needs and wants, which helps them discover new solutions or product features relevant to people. This blog post will provide an overview of what you must consider when developing your company’s strategy.
What do your customers need to accomplish?
When developing an innovation strategy, it’s important to start by understanding your customers’ needs. What are they trying to accomplish? What are their goals? What pain points do they experience that you could potentially solve? By understanding your customers’ jobs to be done, you can better identify areas where you could create new solutions or improve your current offerings.
Rather than defining your market around demographics or competitors’ customers, define it around the problems people are trying to solve. Prospective customers rarely conform to one specific demographic when looking for an outcome.
What are your customers’ current solutions, and what are they missing?
Once you understand your customers’ needs, you must assess their current solutions. What products or services do they currently use to address these needs? What are the pros and cons of these solutions? How well do they meet the needs that were identified earlier? By understanding your customers’ current solutions, you can identify unmet needs that your product could solve.
How frequently are these needs left unmet?
As you gather insights from your customers, it’s important to quantify the job outcomes that are missed. Suppose you can say with statistical certainty that a certain need is often left unmet. In that case, it’s a good indicator that there may be an opportunity for innovation in an underserved market.
How can we further segment the markets based on different needs?
Not all needs are created equal. Some needs might be more important to your customers than others. It’s important to determine which needs you should focus on when developing your strategy. It is also important to understand that your target customers will have to be segmented again based on unique sets of these unmet outcomes.
How do we develop our innovation strategy?
Developing an innovation strategy involves many steps. First, you must identify the areas you want to focus on, develop creative solutions to address customer needs, and then execute your plan. If you want to be successful, you must have a clear goal and a well-defined strategy.
By reaching this step, you should understand which unmet customer needs need to be addressed, whether a new product or an improvement to an existing one is necessary, and where to invest in research and development.
The jobs-to-be-done framework is a great way to think about innovation in your business. It’s a tool that helps you better understand your customers’ needs and wants, which will help you discover new product features or solutions.
For more information about innovation strategy, check out more from Strategyn, jobs-to-be-done’s first major thought leader here: https://strategyn.com/innovation-strategy/
