Back in 2015 a large scale project began at ii.co.uk to do a "digital re-boot". This was a replatforming programme within which the team wanted to design and build a new web and app experience based on the principles of user-centred design.
Given the scope of the programme we knew that research into our customers and target market was going to be critical. Although we learnt a lot during our research, one of the key research artefacts - the target customer personas, caused a number of problems in our design and build phase.
A couple of years later and with the benefit of hindsight it was clear that customer personas and the school of activity centred design were not well suited to our business or product. We needed a different set of principles, which we found in jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) theory.
The trouble with personas
Most reading this are likely to be familiar with personas, or customer archetypes as a method to humanise and build empathy with the "users" of your product.
The persona involves establishing a set of common demographics as well as activity centric behaviours and frustrations. Then packaging these insights with a name and profile photo.
The outcome of which might look something like these:
Two of our target personas
The above personas, which were put together in conjunction with our research agency partner, Seren, did help us to think more about our customers. However they also made us too focused on physical characteristics and what customer needs we should cater for in our product.
This ultimately led to a convoluted and often conflicting set of criteria for judging product scope and our feature roadmap. We needed a simpler way to frame our strategic thinking.
JTBD - the importance of progress
It was the chance sighting of the illustration below which led me to JTBD and the work of Alan Klement, among others.
Source: When Coffee & Kale Compete - Alan Klement
Alan in his book, When Coffee & Kale Compete, puts forward that consumer products should focus on helping the consumer make progress in his/her life. The potential hiring of a product or solution is as such judged on it's ability to deliver progress against the "job" that the consumer has to "get done".
In his own words he puts JTBD as:
" A JTBD is the process a consumer goes through when she aims to transform her existing life situation into a preferred one, but cannot as there are constraints in the way".
Source: When Coffee & Kale Compete - Alan Klement
Framing research activity with a JTBD lens allows for a very different set of insights to be uncovered. Simply discovering the jobs that your customers are trying to get done with your product is a big step.
There is also the realisation that if you define a target market in terms of the jobs we can help with, then you realise that the demographic based segmentation that previously held sway is less valid for the simple fact that very different people can have the same job.
The third important revelation of JTBD comes from the challenge it gives in how you define competitors. The team had previously only considered very close competitors. However if you think in terms of solutions that give progress...then your field of vision becomes much wider.
A new research project
For these reasons the team wanted to do some more research to find out what the jobs were among our customers and prospects...we wanted to find out what progress they were seeking from using our product...
Credit: Samual Hulick, Source: When Kale & Coffee Compete - Alan Klement
Our research method was to conduct a set of guided face-to-face interviews with the primary goal of discovering what the main JTBD where when it comes to self-directed investing.
As a secondary goal we wanted to discover the push/pull factors which create demand for a new solution as we as any potential habits or anxieties that reduce demand for a new solution. The so-called forces of progress:
Forces of Progress, Source: When Coffee & Kale Compete - Alan Klement
Working with our research agency partner, Relish, we put a basic interview script together and set up our interview lab so that we could interview and record findings in adjacent rooms.
We carried out 12 interviews with 6 being customers, 3 being previous customers who left and 3 were customers of a competitor. As you might imagine we discovered a lot of actionable intelligence.
Notes from 3 of the interviews
Following the interviews our first task was to tease out the jobs which we felt were the most compelling and critically were the jobs that we felt we could really help the customer achieve progress.
We came up with 5 jobs that were fairly distinct:
1. Help me protect the value of my money while getting a better return than I could with the bank.
2. Enable me to build an additional income stream so I am less reliant on my salary/pension.
3. Give me a way to maximise my investment return without the need for paid financial advice.
4. Take away the anxiety I have around leaving a financial legacy for my children/dependents.
5. Make me a more knowledgeable investor so I can advise and lead others in my circles.
2. Enable me to build an additional income stream so I am less reliant on my salary/pension.
3. Give me a way to maximise my investment return without the need for paid financial advice.
4. Take away the anxiety I have around leaving a financial legacy for my children/dependents.
5. Make me a more knowledgeable investor so I can advise and lead others in my circles.
The 4th job around leaving a legacy was an unexpected discovery and one which is certainly unserved in the self-directed market. We also uncovered fresh insight to the conflicting forces of progress.
For example we saw much anxiety about quality of data and the accuracy of transactional reporting, in particular around the handling of dividends.
In the same arena we saw many examples of compensatory behaviour such as using virtual portfolio tools as a manually curated transaction history as well as a common behaviour of running offline spreadsheets to enable better performance tracking.
Based on our findings we felt we needed to take a fresh look at our product roadmap and strategy.
Job mapping workshop
The team got together for a full day workshop with the goal of visualising our entire product roadmap under the lens of JTBD. This was a game changing session for the team and I felt more than ever before a real sense of empathy for the progress struggle among our customers.
Job story mapping workshop
A change of track
The team agreed that we needed to switch-up our approach to feature prioritisation. We should instead focus of what features are most likely to enable customer progress. We also agreed that delivering process is very likely to be in a linear relationship with business value.
We were also encouraged to see that when presenting our findings to stakeholders there was broad consensus around the progress/business value relationship.
Beyond a mindset change within the team there were two important impacts this project had on the wider business:
1. Our marketing team were keen to take the jobs on as a basis for core marketing messaging to both customers and prospects.
2. A wide reaching pricing project began soon after, which is based on the premise of combining feature sets into product packages at varied price points with loose alignment to our JTBD - This should lead to a step change in our proposition in late 2018/early 2019.
