Happenings
- Snapchat is rolling out its own ad manager instead of relying on third-party brokers (still demographics-base targeting, but their snap-to-store might indicate they’ll move away from that model).
- Apple had its 2017 earnings call: they’re doing fine with strong MacBook Pro/Services (source, source)/AirPods/Apple Watch (source, source) sales, they’ve become the world’s Nº1 wearable vendor with the Apple Watch which will soon support snow sports, and added referral info to App Store Analytics;
- Apple has also hired a NASA AR expert (here’s how NASA uses HTV Vive to train astronauts);
Design
Basecamp adopts JTBD for their Marketing website.
The idea is to show how competitors prevent the customer from achieving their outcome, next to how this product can better serve them.
twitter.com
Netflix: Geography, Age, and Gender are “Garbage” for Predicting Taste
Making predictions about individuals based on their demographics group is a type of Ecological Fallacy. That is to say: your age, gender, location, or any other characteristic does not explain why you’ve watched House of Cards ♞ or whether you’re likely to buy Coke ❄️.
Don’t get me wrong, Demographics do work, but their efficiency is limited by the lack of specificity. By lack of specificity I mean that a set of demographic characteristics can be associated with both House of Cards and The Crown – two completely different series.
This is why JTBD focuses on what exactly causes customers to use your product (their context and outcome). It’s interesting to see Netflix, a company heavy on testing their assumptions (*1), adopting and validating this focus on causation.
*1: Unlike advertising for e.g. where demographics/psychographics are still (intentionally) popular.
fortune.com
JTBD and Copyrighting 👩💼✒️
Efficient copyrighting is clear and relatable: not only you need to share your customer’s language, you also need to send them the right message.
Shared Language
User interviews are a good way to discover how your customers may describe the situation they’re in and the outcome they want to achieve, and their understanding of your own jargon and processes (more on JTBD interviews).
This “JTBD Camera (purchase) Interview" has a good example: we hear the customer describing the photography term “ISO” simply as something that “made the picture brighter” (an outcome!).
And in “The Magic Formula to Describe a Product in one Sentence” a “You do X and Y happens” formula is used by funders to describe how things work: Facebook - “Something where you can type someone’s name and find out a bunch of information about them.”; Uber - “You push a button and in five minutes a Mercedes picks you up and takes you where you want to go.”. In user interviews, I usually ask “How would you describe it to a friend” for learning how people perceive the process/feature to work.
The Right Message
So given we’ve got the customer’s language, we can use what we learn about the user’s context and desired outcome to craft an efficient copyright e.g. assuming Intercom has captured the right context (difficult to use tools) and outcome (personalized customer communication): “Communicating with customers shouldn’t be this hard, with Intercom it’s simple, personal, and fun for everyone”; compare this to: “Service Cloud Einstein gives you faster, smarter customer service.” – which says nothing about simplicity, or personalization, and includes product name jargon.
Aside: In “People Who Speak the Right Language Win”, Rafal also mentions how the jargon-free customer language brings clarity to your team as an added bonus.
JTBD and Metrics 👩💼📊
Good 30min video on metrics, my full annotations and summary:
- A Customer Job is about making Progress: people want to be the Fireball Mario (Progress/Outcome), not the Fire Flower (Feature/Product);
- Customer Jobs redefine competition: competitors are not defined by type but by what outcome they provide (e.g. Basecamp is a communication tool which has not only Trello as competitor, but also Email and even Meetings);
- Customer Jobs are designed, they describe what ought to be (Progress stages/Outcome), opposed to describing what it is (Feature/Product): defining the stages of progress towards an outcome allows you to define metrics to measure efficiency over time (the transition between stages).
Research
Designing from the Car: Why Context Matters
They learned not only about how environment impacts the contrast on the phone’s screen, but also validated ergonomics by being forced to use the phone at arm’s length instead of comfortably sitting at a table. There are a few other learnings and is probably worth the 8 min read, overall it boils down to: prototype test not a screen but the flow, with real users, in context.
medium.com
Stats
- 🍎 Apple’s iMessage has 24bn messages/day (WhatsApp had a 63bn peak in NYE);
- 💬 WhatsApp’s ‘Status’ Snapchat clone hits 175M DAUs in 10 weeks (Snapchat has 160M DAUs);
- 📷Instagram has 700M MAUs total (2x Twitter, 80% non-U.S.):
- 100M new MAUs in 4 months (accelerating);
- Fueled by international growth (e.g. offline mode for low-income, bandwidth-restricted users);
- 1M active advertisers and native booking/purchasing (without leaving the app).
Strategy
Uber business tool lets you order multiple cars from central app
Uber diversifying by solving more Jobs (e.g. enterprise, hotels, etc).
WHEN someone else needs to travel and I'm responsible for arranging their transportation I WANT TO know their location and destination, schedule, and be able to pay for them if needed SO I CAN ensure they'll get where they need to, within their constraints.
techcrunch.com
DHL To Double Electric Delivery Van Production
DHL monetized part of their supply chain where they’ve invested enough to be a product of its own: 🚐 their vans. It’s interesting as it suggests some ability to respond to market changes, adding resilience to the company. You typically see Google/Facebook/Amazon doing this with Hardware/Software, or full-service Agencies/Freelancers splitting into Advisory/Production/Training.
This relates to JTBD in the sense that focusing on an outcome is core – getting from A to B in this case, being flexible on product (and revenue) you sell.
cleantechnica.com
And Finally…
🚁🎥🤖 Augmented Reality on High Speed Police Chase 🚗🚓
Overlaying street names and speed onto helicopter footage.
Given we’ve got the fugitive’s location, speed, and Street View gives us access to ground-level 360 photography, add a basic car cockpit 3d model and we could see the action first-person in VR, crazy but perfectly feasible. Reminds me of that guy who cycled from north to south of England in VR.
youtube.com
The JTBD Special 👩💼🚀
We’ve progressed more in the last 200 years than in all of History.
Progress is the value we derive from the audacity and methods for questioning ourselves, as well as the theories that allow you to replicate and build upon that value.
Shannon’s Information Theory is an example of how much value you can derive from a single theory. Initially aimed at ensuring the reproducibility of digital information, ended up helping us progress in space exploration, internet, ecology, and much more.
This relates to JTBD in the sense that it too has tremendous potential for Product Design as a whole, not just in digital – e.g. retail, food, travel, more. Additionally, awareness and adoption of JTBD theory doesn’t yet reach the level of User Stories or Personas, or which JTBD methods apply to Metrics, Copyrighting, Marketing, or even Product Management.
The slow uptake in JTBD adoption might be due to what I’ve mention above. Additionally, strategy isn't as crucial when paid apps survive on novelty alone. Free apps provide enough ad reach to compensate for poor value and ad targeting. A failed app isn’t as consequential as a failed medical treatment, and thus cultural inertia lives on.
So this is the reasoning for this week’s focus on JTBD, having used it for 3 years for Product Management, User Research, as well as Ideation, I truly believe in its value and making it understandable for others.
In this issue I’ve included comment on JTBD methods for Copyrighting and Metrics, enjoy and I welcome our feedback! 🙌