Technique 1 - Jobs to be Done | The Innovator's Toolkit
Highlight the human need you're trying to fulfill. A job to be done (JTBD) is a revolutionary concept that guides you toward innovation and helps you move beyond the norm of only improving current solutions. A JTBD is not a product, service, or a specific solution; it's the higher purpose for which customers buy products, services, and solutions. For instance, most people would say they buy a lawnmower to "cut the grass," and this is true. But if a lawnmower company examines the higher purpose of cutting the grass, say, "keep the grass low and beautiful at all times," then it might forgo some efforts to make better lawnmowers in lieu of developing a genetically engineered grass seed that never needs to be cut. This is the power of the JTBD concept and technique: It helps the innovator understand that customers don't buy products and services; they hire various solutions at various times to get a wide array of jobs done. Background Jobs to be Done Breakdown Let’s develop an example. Steps
Test Your Value Proposition: Supercharge Lean Startup and CustDev Principles
In my last post I described a new business tool, the Value Proposition Designer Canvas. In this post I outline how you can use the tool to not only design Value Propositions, but also to test them. You’ll learn how you can supercharge the already powerful Lean Startup and Customer Development principles to design, test, and build stuff that customers really want. The Value Proposition Designer Canvas (VP Designer Canvas) allows you to zoom into the details of your Value Proposition and the Customer Segments you target. You can use it as a poster (cf image below) to design better Value Propositions with sticky notes. However, to make sure your customers really want what you design, you'll need to test all the assumptions you make with the VP Designer Canvas. We already now know how to do this kind of designing and testing for business models: by combining the Business Model Canvas with the Customer Development process. Supercharge the Lean Startup Process 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Blog « Categories « Lean Startup Machine
What is Lean Startup? “Lean Startup” is a term coined by Eric Ries while an Advisor to the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. It’s based on the new management processes he employed while Chief Technology Officer at IMVU, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups. What is Customer Development? “Customer Development” is a process pioneered by Steve Blank and written about extensively in Four Steps to the Epiphany. What is Lean Startup Machine’s relationship with Eric Ries? Eric Ries is heavily involved as an advisor to Lean Startup Machine. Is Lean Startup Machine a hackathon? Lean Startup Machine is a workshop & educational series. What is your relationship with Startup Weekend? We love Startup Weekend but unfortunately do not have any official relationship. Can I participate if I don’t already have a team? Yes. Can I participate if I don’t already have an idea? Yes. Can I participate without previous startup or technology experience? Yes. How much does Lean Startup Machine cost?
How to apply the Jobs-to-be-done methodology to web design
An common methodology in user-centered web design is the a combination of Personas and user stories. A Persona is basically a fictional user archetype. A model that is created from data. Data that should have been gathered by talking to real people. A Persona typically tries to represent the characteristics you need to know about the “typical” user of a web design. Personas works well in a situation where the user-base can easily be segmented into different types of users with different needs. Knowing the exact details about a user is somewhat useless if you don’t know what they actually want to do. Many web design solutions are better defined by the job they do rather than the customers they serve. In this article we will show an alternative to Personas and user stories. The Jobs-to-be-done methodology helps you focus on the job that the user wants done rather than who and how. Find out why the job is needed in the first place. Let’s analyse this format a bit more;
Seth Godin
Seth Godin (born July 10, 1960) is an American author, entrepreneur, marketer, and public speaker. Background[edit] Born in Mount Vernon, New York, Godin received his high school diploma from Williamsville East High School in 1978 before graduating from Tufts University with a degree in computer science and philosophy. Godin attended Camp Arowhon, where he was a valued canoe instructor. He still frequents the camp to tell ghost stories. Godin often refers to his camp days in his writings. After leaving Spinnaker Software in 1986, Godin used $20,000 in savings to found Seth Godin Productions, primarily a book packaging business, out of a studio apartment in New York City.[2] It was in the same offices that Godin met Mark Hurst and founded Yoyodyne. Viewpoints[edit] Advertisements on television and radio are classified by Godin as "interruption marketing" that interrupt the customer while they are doing something of their preference. Business ventures[edit] Yoyodyne[edit] Squidoo[edit]
crowdSPRING Blog
What people really want – Nikkel Blaase – Medium
Jobs, not users Creating remarkable products does not come from understanding typical customers. Products must serve core needs, not what people say they want. We should think less about archetypal customers and more about the jobs people want to get done. »Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers« — Seth Godin Creating Personas is a misleading concept. »Focus on the job, not the customer« — Des Traynor The core job of a product is to help customers achieve progress.
Three reasons not to build a Minimum Viable Product
By Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits On February 4, 2013 f you are like most entrepreneurs, you should build a “minimum viable product.” Let’s get the definition out of the way first; Eric Ries defines MVP as “…that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” As we detail in “The Lean Entrepreneur,” famed entrepreneur Bill Gross created an MVP in 1999 that validated that car buyers would be willing to by autos online sight unseen. That MVP grew into CarsDirect.com. Nick Woodman noticed surfers strapping disposable cameras to their arms to take pictures of themselves surfing. In both cases, Bill and Nick had to learn about the needs of their early adopters before scaling their startups, hence the MVP approach. If you don’t need validated learning however, you should not build MVPs. 1. The problem and solution are knowable. Why? Your customers are smart. 2. 3. The trap is in “knowing.”
People Don't Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves
There is the famous story about Steve Jobs when he invented the iPod and everyone in the news and the rest of the tech industry scratched their head a little. MP3 players had been around for quite a while, what was so different about the iPod? Of course, people argued many things were different, but one of the key aspects was how Jobs marketed and presented it: “1,000 songs in your pocket” When everyone else was saying “1GB storage on your MP3 player”, telling people about the product, Apple went ahead and made you a better person, that has 1000 songs in your pocket. Our friends over at User Onboarding wrote an incredible post and graphic, showcasing how this framework looks on a higher level: Note: Try sharing the above image by right-clicking it and the choosing “add to Buffer” with the Buffer browser extension, it’s one of our most shared updates, ever In particular, the image itself proved to be popular—understandably. Features vs. benefits – how to grasp the difference P.S.
