Episode 69: Difficult Outcome statements in Jobs-to-be-done, part 1

Today, we have an extra special episode as we welcome two superheroes of Jobs-to-be-done and we plan to get into the weeds. 

First, Dr. Lance Bettencourt. Lance is widely published, and all practitioners should know his work,  most notably with MIT Sloan Review and Harvard Business Review. All should know his HBR article “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map,” where Lance and Tony Ulwick first described the job map… He also has extensive experience as a consultant, doing JTBD projects across many industries, and today is a Professor of Professional Practice at TCU.  

Next, Eric Eskey. If you look at the most experienced JTBD practitioners worldwide, Eric is among the top few. You cannot name an industry that he hasn’t worked within. He’s not only a pro at framing and executing qualitative projects, but Eric is a data analysis wizard in the most practical sense, meaning that he can make data come alive in pictures, he helps others to see the story. 

I’ve personally worked with both Lance and Eric as well, both with Tony Ulwick’s firm Strategyn as well as afterwards. But more important than all that, they’re both great dudes who I’m proud to call friends. 

Lance and Eric,  Welcome to the Product Quest Podcast! 

Today, we’re talking shop, as in JTBD-practitioner shop. 

We’re going to be talking about challenges when converting customer needs into an “outcome statement.” When we say “outcome,” we’re referring to a customer-need as defined by Tony Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven innovation. 

An outcome is a metric that a customer uses to define how well a job is done. For example, if mowing the lawn, we’ll work with customers to get a list of outcomes such as:

• Minimize the frequency of grass clumps
• Minimize the time to mow the lawn
• Minimize the amount of uncut grass next to obstacles

Etc. 

In practice, a moderator interviews customers to uncover outcomes… and we run across some situations that are a bit tricky. Today, we have a list of six challenges in which our experts are going to help us out. 

I will lay out the challenges, but then we’ll all participate as we figure these out together.