Minimalist Innovation

Technology solutions designed for today, built for tomorrow.

Tag: Jobs-To-Be-Done

Customer progress is your growth catalyst

In a world driven by rapid innovation and shifting market demands, staying connected to your customers’ evolving needs is not optional—it’s essential. Understanding consumer progress requires delving into the forces that drive and resist change. The Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework, particularly the Four Forces of Progress, provides a powerful lens for analyzing why people adopt new solutions and abandon old ones. As described in the Jobs to Be Done Radio podcast, these forces include:

  1. Push of the Current Situation: The dissatisfaction with the current state.
  2. Pull of a New Solution: The allure and promise of a better future.
  3. Habit of the Present: The comfort and familiarity of existing solutions.
  4. Anxiety of the New Solution: The fear and uncertainty of making a change.

By unpacking these forces, businesses can align their solutions with consumer needs more effectively. At Minimalist Innovation LLC, we integrate this understanding into our Change Engineering approach to create strategies that enable customer progress for sustainable business growth. This is the foundation of Change Engineering, a practice that embeds adaptability and alignment into every solution we design.

This blog explores how businesses can stay in sync with their customers’ changing needs, ensuring they deliver value that evolves with the market.

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”

– Buckminster Fuller

Aligning your solutions with customer progress

Progress isn’t just about solving a problem; it’s about helping customers achieve their goals and aspirations. Whether it’s simplifying daily tasks, improving efficiency, or achieving long-term ambitions, progress is the driving force behind customer behavior. By identifying and addressing customer progress, businesses can create solutions that truly resonate.

Change Engineering is the practice of embedding adaptability and progress-focused thinking into business solutions. It moves beyond traditional change management by focusing not just on internal transitions but also on how products and services enable customer progress.

Change Engineering emphasizes designing tools and systems that naturally align with consumer behavior.

When I worked with a major coffee retail company, their finance team faced a critical challenge: their reporting processes weren’t aligned with the progress they needed to achieve. The team relied on a daily financial report generated at 4 AM to guide operations. This process was not only time-consuming but also lacked reliability, which eroded trust in the data and created inefficiencies in their decision-making process.

Through Change Engineering, we reframed the challenge to focus on the progress the team was striving for—timely, reliable insights that supported agile decision-making. By introducing real-time reporting, we enabled the team to access up-to-date financial data throughout the day, removing the dependency on the early morning report. This shift allowed the finance team to focus on what truly mattered: collaboration, planning, and adapting to changes in real time.

The results were transformative. The finance team no longer needed to wake up at 4 AM, instead holding planning sessions at a more practical time. Trust in the system grew, stress levels decreased, and decision-making processes became more dynamic and aligned with business needs. 

This is the essence of Change Engineering—solving operational inefficiencies while improving the human experience. By aligning technology with the true needs of the business and its people, we didn’t just fix a problem; we engineered progress.

Here are some tips to keep in touch with the customer progress:

  1. Leverage Data-Driven Insights:
    Use customer data to identify patterns, preferences, and unmet needs. AI and analytics tools can help uncover trends that signal evolving customer expectations.
  2. Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) Framework:
    Focus on the “job” your customer is trying to get done, not just the product they’re buying. By understanding their goals, you can design solutions that meet their real needs.
  3. Continuous Feedback Loops:
    Regularly engage with customers through surveys, interviews, or feedback platforms to stay updated on their challenges and aspirations.
  4. Appreciative Inquiry for Momentum:
    Focus on what’s working well and amplify those strengths to build momentum for continuous improvement and alignment.

“What gets measured gets managed.”

– Peter Drucker

Measuring the impact of progress driven solutions

1. Increased Customer Retention:
When solutions align with customer progress, loyalty grows. Businesses often see retention rates improve by 20-30%.

2. Higher Adoption Rates:
Products designed with progress in mind are more likely to be embraced, with adoption rates increasing by 15-25%.

3. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction Scores:
Solutions that address functional, emotional, and social progress lead to higher satisfaction levels, reflected in metrics like NPS.

4. Improved Market Share:
By staying aligned with customer progress, businesses can outperform competitors and capture a larger market share.

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Businesses can engineer change to evolve their services with customer needs, ensuring relevance and sustained success.

Ready to engineer change that drives progress? Visit our Beyond Digital Transformation offering to learn more.

The bigger picture of jobs

When using the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework to innovate, startups can unlock significant opportunities by understanding not just the core job customers are trying to accomplish but also the broader landscape of related and emotional jobs that surround it. This holistic approach helps avoid common pitfalls and creates pathways to scalable, impactful solutions.

A functional job represents the core task customers are trying to complete—such as verifying the authenticity of documents. But this job doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s part of a broader journey, often mapped through a job map, that includes related tasks and emotional outcomes.

“When you understand the full job map, you begin to see that what looks like a product feature might actually be the foundation of an entirely new business model.” – Anthony Ulwick, Founder of Strategyn

When related jobs are overlooked…

Consider a compliance officer who must verify documents (functional job). Their goal extends beyond accuracy—they want to feel assured in their compliance with regulations (emotional job) and ensure the verification process integrates smoothly with other workflows like Know Your Customer (KYC) or Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance (related jobs).

Startups often focus on excelling at the functional job, which is essential. However, failing to address related jobs can limit growth and leave untapped potential on the table. Let’s explore why related jobs matter and how startups can leverage them to achieve greater success.

For startups, focusing too narrowly on a single functional job can lead to several challenges:

  1. Market Size Limitations: Concentrating exclusively on one highly specialized use case may restrict the total addressable market (TAM), limiting the startup’s ability to scale.
  2. Constrained Resources: Building features for a narrow job often ties up valuable engineering resources, making it harder to expand or adapt to other markets.
  3. Missed Strategic Opportunities: Startups that overlook related jobs risk missing broader opportunities for vertical integration or partnerships, leaving value on the table.
  4. Innovation Bottlenecks: A lack of flexibility due to technical debt or hyper-specialized development can hinder the ability to pivot or respond to new market demands.

The JTBD framework reveals that related jobs can serve as stepping stones to broader innovation and market impact. Consider how addressing related jobs can unlock new possibilities:

  1. Expanding Market Reach: Understanding related jobs positions your product as part of a larger solution. For example, a tool that verifies documents can evolve into a key component of end-to-end KYC or AML workflows, appealing to larger customer bases.
  2. Strategic Partnerships: By aligning with related jobs, startups can collaborate with complementary platforms or solutions, creating mutually beneficial ecosystems that enhance value for end users.
  3. Stronger Customer Resonance: A product designed to integrate seamlessly into broader workflows resonates more strongly with customers solving complex challenges, leading to better retention and satisfaction.
  4. Enhanced Valuation Potential: Broadening the scope beyond a single functional job can improve the company’s perceived value by investors, demonstrating scalability and diverse market potential.

job-map

To visualize this, consider this universal job map template developed by Tony Ulwick.

A strategic job to unlock related jobs

Startups can uncover related jobs by asking critical questions:

  • What workflows or processes does your product connect to? Look at the customer’s end-to-end journey. How does your solution fit into their bigger picture?
  • What happens before and after your product is used?  Consider adjacent tasks that customers must complete before or after engaging with your product.
  • What larger goals are your customers pursuing? Think beyond the immediate task. How does solving the functional job contribute to a broader mission or outcome?

By addressing these questions, startups can create comprehensive job maps, revealing opportunities to innovate not just on the core job but across the entire workflow.

Use related jobs to integrate into a larger ecosystem of customer goals and workflows

Ready to uncover the related jobs driving growth for your startup? Visit our Beyond Digital Transformation offering to learn more.