Summary: Once you understand the jobs people are trying to do, you need to look at the outcomes. Outcomes are what people are trying to minimise or maximise to achieve the job. They are measured through metrics and there are usually qualifiers – things that go without saying!
Outcomes
Every job has outcomes related to it. These are things people want to minimise or maximise in order to achieve the job. They are the smallest detail of analysis we go into, and can be thought of as mini targets – small accomplishments. When you ask “Why do you want to do that?” the outcome is the lowest possible denominator of value. For example, the Ultimate Goal of long distance transportation can be met by flying. To do this you’ll perhaps want to do the jobs of minimise cost and travel time, but maximise potential destinations, ease of booking, comfort, good service and entertainment. But exactly what needs to be minimised and maximised to achieve these jobs? For example what needs to me maximised and minimised to do the job of “maximise entertainment?” Consumers might state these features as important -
- Maximise choice of films
- Maximise screen size
- Maximise radio station choice
- Maximise Internet speed
- Maximise Internet availability
- Maximise staff friendliness
But these are not outcomes – they are features or products – for each you can ask “Why do you want to do that?” The answers, you can eventually dog down to are the outcomes – what people want to achieve – exactly why they want something – these are what you are left with –
- Maximise time doing activities I like
- Minimise idle time
- Maximise enjoyment of interactions
These are outcomes – you know when you have outcomes. They have been around for hundreds of years and will continue to be around for hundreds of years to come.
Once you have these you can add features and solutions that help meet these outcomes – for example TV, phone access and MP3 on demand, if you feel these will meet the outcomes better and consumers agree, you’ve created better value.
Remember our example of video on demand? Despite the oversight there, using a little jobs and outcomes analysis would have set them straight, because the outcome – “minimise the time take to show the film” would have come up and transferring data from the PC to the TV as a solution would not have been the best way to meet this outcome.
Metrics – Value becomes measurable
This is very exciting because you can measure exactly how well any solution meets these Ultimate Goals, jobs and outcomes. Make no mistake, great ideas are measurable and identifiable – they are not guesswork.
What is quick? What is stylish – compared to what? Define durable? What makes you comfortable? Exactly by how much…? All these give you actionable data with which you can measure how well features and solutions satisfy them.
If you can, when you conduct market research, you’ll try and get a unit of measurement for all outcomes – for example, 100mph, less than 10 minutes, or if that’s impossible, compared to the current best out there – for example looks better than an Ipod. (Although you need to dig down into a lot more detail there!)
Don’t expect consumers to come with up your ideas for you though, market research is just that, it’s there to find out what jobs people are doing, thinking and feeling about what you offer and what’s else is on offer. It’s not there to come up with solutions and often won’t – that’s your job. If customers could come up with solutions they’d do what you do. In the words of Steve Jobs “It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”
Customers always use a set of metrics (performance measures) to judge how well a job is getting done and how a product performs. These are the desired job and the outcomes for the job. For any Ultimate Goal there are often 50 – 150 outcomes split amongst several jobs. When all these outcomes are satisfied the job is completed well. E.g. for a saw and the job of “Cutting a straight line” some outcomes might be, minimise losing sight of cut line, minimise time taken to adjust the depth of the blade, and minimise the frequency of kickbacks are three.
These metrics make possible the systematic and predictable creation of breakthrough products and services. You find which jobs and outcomes are important and are underserved because people are unsatisfied, and then figure out ideas to better satisfy them – that is your job as a company.
Only with the right data inputs, can your product succeed. Data can get lost if you just collect the voice of the customer without focusing on the jobs and outcomes they seek.
Let’s look at some possible jobs and outcomes for car drivers.
- Protect the environment
- Minimise emissions
- Maximise miles per gallon
- Minimise exhaust smoke
- Minimise car smells
- Look successful
- Maximise styling
- Maximise size
- Maximise paint shine
- Maximise brand image
- Maximise sticker price
- Minimise price paid
- Maximise comfort
- Maximise showroom style
- Low cost
- Maximise miles per gallon
- Minimise base price
- Maximise warranty time
- Minimise repair costs
- Minimise repair time
- Minimise vehicle substitution cost
- Look like you care about the environment
- Maximise green brand image
- Minimise miles per gallon
- Minimise reliance on petrol
- Reliability
- Minimise break down rate
- Maximise durable feel of the car
- Attract opposite sex
- Maximise styling
- Maximise sexiness of brand
- Maximise cost
- Go quick
- Maximise top speed
- Maximise acceleration
- Maximise control of handling
You can now ask “maximise to minimise to what specific level?”, for example, “exactly how quick, how long, to what level or number?”, “compared to what other solutions?”
Some products may contradict the jobs people want to do, by forcing them to make compromises. It’s as if sometimes, jobs are sacrificed, and consumers made to choose, to trade off. For example, Ferrari and Lamborghini make people suffer low quality, an environmentally poor image, and high ownership costs in order to look successful, go quick, and attract members of the opposite sex. As always with Value, it’s Love vs. Hate, Benefits vs. Detriments. So a great solution, should the market require it, would be an electric Ferrari thereby lowering costs of fuel and environmental harm, with a 5 year warranty, with the same looks and performance capabilities as the current models.
Qualifiers
These features and outcomes are taken for granted so much that they may not even be mentioned. For example, the fact that the car has 4 wheels. The fact a razor is sterile, straight lined, and rust free. The fact that the car will go in the direction steered and has brakes. The fact an item of clothing doesn’t cause skin discolouration. The fact items are not just on offer on a website but in stock.
The funny thing about all of these qualifiers is that they can be very hard to achieve, but because they are expected your customer won’t even notice them. For example, I have just copied and pasted some old information into this MS Word document from another MS Word document, and it’s copied in a list of random bullet points. I have never seen this before! I just took it for granted that it wouldn’t happen. Only now might I mention it if I had a market researcher with me, but otherwise I would be entitled to accept this does not happen in any world processing software. It would hardly be something I would mention as a must have because I would never have considered it, I would always have taken it for granted that it wouldn’t happen.
These qualifiers get you a seat at the table of consideration of any buyer, without them, you’re offer won’t even be considered! As value is always rising, the qualifiers be considered are always rising too.
In 10 years time, it might be a qualifier outcome to “minimise the time taken before I have to pay for repairs to at least 5 years” so all cars come with a 5 year warranty for example. These are also called Qualifier Value Factors.
Look across jobs, markets, segments, consumers
All the people trying to fulfil the job of long distance transport can be said to make up a market. However, within that market, people will prioritise the jobs they have to perform differently. These are called segments. These segments differ because they will place higher importance on some jobs and outcomes than others. Therefore what is value must also be different. They may even have different Ultimate Goals. A new solution is requires when solutions either underserve these outcomes or overserve them for a significantly large enough group of people. For example, the budget airline came about because a large group of people prized the job of to minimising the cost of air travel and were willing to sacrifice doing other jobs such as in flight dining, comfort, and entertainment in order to get this job done. Contrast that with the business flyer, who is more bothered about the jobs of maximising comfort and privacy, maximising comfort of sleeping, maximising great service, maximising enjoyment of great food and drink and maximising entertainment, and you can see two very different markets – or what marketing people commonly call market segments.
You don’t just need to look within users of a certain product or your customers. Indeed you must look at non users of a product too, because these non users are often trying to do the same jobs, they are just trying to do them with different products.
Southwest Airlines looked at non users with air transport. They looked at the car user, and competed against the car as a form of long distance travel, because they knew people were still using their car instead of flying. They found that it was the cost of flying that put people off. Southwest knew that they had to compete with the cost of the car for travel in order to get non users to choose them.
Again, it’s very easy to ignore what people can’t do and just to take it for granted as the way it is. When you look at the problems, frustrations, upset, anger, even hate that people feel, you’ve often got the beginnings of an idea. If people can’t do a job well, and they really care about it, they are definitely going to care when you come along and allow them to do it. Ask any person if they enjoyed their 15 hours in a car journey across the US to save $300 on an airline ticket and I think you get the idea! Now what if you could do it for the same cost, by air in 2 hours?
The makers of Yellow Tail Wine did the same for non drinkers of wine. All the wine producing companies had really done their homework. They knew what jobs wine drinkers were trying to do. They wanted to know about the vintage and vineyard, they trusted wines that had received prestigious awards, they wanted deep complex flavours, some wanted to pay a premium others were on a budget. The entire industry competed across a small number of prized outcomes.
Yellow Tail looked at non users – in other words – drinkers of other drinks and found why they avoided wine. Yellow Tail became the biggest selling wine in US history in 2 years all without an advertising budget – all in a mature market! All they did was look at the job of drinking, and go and find out why non –users of the product were staying away from wine. Once they found out what was putting them off, they were able to minimise these outcomes. Things that turned wine drinkers on, turned non wine drinkers off. They found wine was too complex to allow non users to do the job of having a drink satisfactorily. They wanted simple choices; good but simple flavours, high drinkability, and they didn’t care about awards, the grapes, or the vineyards. So Yellow Tail was launched, just two varieties, one red and one white, in the same type of bottle (an industry first!) with a simple and distinct black and yellow kangaroo label. No awards, no vineyard information, just a great tasting, accessible and simple wine.
In both instances the companies analysed why people were avoiding the solutions the industry had to offer and were choosing other industries over the airline and wine industries. Once these reasons were found, they could tailor a new solution to help those people do the jobs of long distance transportation and drinking alcohol better but within the industries they worked in.
Take a look at what users are saying about Ebay right now, and you’re know you have users ready to jump ship as soon as they can.
So focusing on your competitors will only get you so far. Focus on the consumer – both the user and non user and their jobs - and you can get a lot further.
Do we have to focus on jobs and outcomes?
No, not by name, because what you call them is just semantics, but yes, in terms of what they stand for you do have to focus on them.
You could call them goals and objectives, achievements and targets. Whatever you like. You need one master unit – e.g. the job, and then one sub unit to make the jobs happen – e.g. outcomes. All these make up the end goal – what I call the Ultimate Goal.
What’s important is that you get away from the “needs” or “wants” paradigm. It’s just not precise enough. People only need things because they want to do jobs and want to achieve specific outcomes to fulfil those jobs. Working on this concrete and very detailed measurement scale really helps you to cut past any fuzz. Better still is stop you focusing long term on feature sets or competitors products attributes. You need to get behind the reasons why people use these features – in other words, what jobs and outcomes they help people perform. Only then can you think of the best way to meet them!
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