Understand the Customers' Needs
All jobs that customers are trying to get done can be analyzed as you would analyze a business process. This means that jobs, just like business processes, can be broken down into process steps And each process step can be analyzed to determine how customers judge its successful execution. Customers are looking for certain outcomes from each step. These outcomes are best stated as "metrics" – they are the metrics used by customers to judge the successful completion of each step in a job. These metrics can also be called customer needs. If all the needs are satisfied, the job will be executed perfectly.
The job map – another Strategyn discovery – makes it possible for companies to know when all customer needs are captured for a given job. A job map is a visual depiction of a job, deconstructed into its process steps, which explains in detail exactly what the customer is trying to get done. A job map does not show what the customer is doing; rather, it describes what the customer is trying to do. Analysis of hundreds of jobs has revealed that all jobs consist of some or all of the eight fundamental process steps: define, locate, prepare, confirm, execute, monitor, modify, and conclude. This insight is essential for creating a framework around which to gather customer needs (desired outcomes).
Once you have created a job map for a particular job, you can capture customer needs for each step in the job map. These need statements describe metrics related to the speed, stability, and output of each process step. Next, customers will rate the needs for importance and degree of satisfaction, but for those ratings to be valid, the need statements must conform to a standardized pattern that eliminates variations in structure, terminology, and syntax. This was an important Strategyn discovery: variation in wording can alter how customers rate importance and satisfaction, which, in turn, can affect how companies prioritize innovation projects So it is crucial that need statements follow Strategyn’s standardized pattern.
When the job is the unit of analysis, there is no such thing as an unarticulated or latent customer need – customers clearly know what jobs they are trying to get done and how they measure success.
