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Review in Design Thinking - Q&A with the Client ​

Review and Retrospective in Digital Transformation ​

Tips for the assessment​

Feedback ​

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AI Chatbot Generator for Conversational Experiences | Landbot

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Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service teams save time and cut operating costs by automating conversations with Landbot's AI Chatbot Generator.

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The tools and the knowledge to grow your business faster.

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We have some basic guidelines to facilitate constructive conversations for everyone here. We have a straight-forward Code of Conduct for the community and ask you to respect these few, simple rules:

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Made with Glide from a Google Sheet, without writing any code.

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v1.1 Create private one-on-one and/or group chats! Invite new or existing members, add users to existing chats, and opt to leave existing chats. Now includes chat row owners and anonymized emails for added privacy and security!

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Problem To Market Fit - Presentation by Cristian

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How to make Integrations and Automations using No-Code

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Build your own CRM in less than 20 minutes - Airtable

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1. Use Process Architecture to break down and analyse your product/service. Here is a reminder of the elements you need to take into account:

- Goal: What's the main objective of your business process?
- Performance metrics: How will you measure those objectives?
- Activities: List all the actions that are required to achieve results.
- Functions: List all the roles required to execute and control the activities
- Controls: Analyse and define the potential risks of your process, and what controls are you going to put in place to reduce its impact and probability.

2. Use Airtable to structure your process and organise the data, activities and roles.

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The third component of any product (digital or analog): the process. Along with the Customer Journey and Tech Architecture, Process Architecture will provide you the right tools to understand the most optimal way to produce and manage your product or service.

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Process Architecture: Automation & Optimisation - Presentation by Cristian

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To apply soft system methodology in your thinking and designing a prototype

To develop your knowledge of tech architecture.

To make use of NoCode and AirTable for designing a prototype (a desired human activity system)

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1. Let's focus on the stakeholders that will be directly involved in the process. Whom would they be?

2. What goals and objectives will each one have in the solution we are designing?

3. What type of data or information will the solution require? think about it from two angles:

a. Information you need from each Stakeholder

b. information required for the process to work

4. Draw your first sketch of the solution, by drawing the steps of the process and creating a simple database in Airtable or Google Sheets.

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4.2 Ideation with HCD + No-Code: Thinking Digital

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4.2 Ideation with HCD + No-Code: Thinking Digital

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We already know that to create a great solution, we first need to think about people and their problems. But after we have done our reseach, how do we start to create the best potential solution?
One of the best ways to do it, is to combine the Design Mindset + Tech Architecture = Think about the human in the centre, being supported by technology!

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Check out this presentation designed by Cristian.

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3.6 Put everything together: Integrations and Automations

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3.6 Put everything together: Integrations and Automations

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It's just like playing LEGO. You pick the pieces you want to use, but now you need to put them together.

We will go through some examples of integrations you can build using No-Code, and even better: ways to automate your work and everyday life.

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How to make Integrations and Automations using No-Code

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3.5 It's a whole new world... The No-Code Landscape!

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3.5 It's a whole new world... The No-Code Landscape!

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No-Code is an amazing solution, but it can be daunting to get started with it, seeing the hundreds of tools out there.

But there are ways to get you started! Once you have clarity on the problem you want to solve, you can easily navigate the No-Code Landscape.

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3.4 But how does it work? Let's take a look

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3.4 But how does it work? Let's take a look

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In the previous videos, you've learned how to apply No-Code. Now you understand its impact... but it's important to also understand how does it work.

We will go through a couple of exercises, where we will learn more about Front-end, and see in a simple way why we don't have to write code to create these type of solutions.

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How No-Code works? Let's learn while building a webpage in 15 minutes!

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Learn how to create your own CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) in just 20 minutes.

In this video, we go through the concept of database relationships, and we help you understand the critical importance of data for any digital solution.

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Build your own CRM in less than 20 minutes - Airtable

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3.2 How to create a mobile app in 20 minutes

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3.2 How to create a mobile app in 20 minutes

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Learn the basics of No-Code while you create your own mobile app!
Wheter you have an idea you'd like to test, or just want to have some fun, we'll go through some of the concepts of Tech Architecture, with the end result of your very own app!

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3.1 Digital Ideation: No-Code Introduction

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3.1 Digital Ideation: No-Code Introduction

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You don't need to know how to code to create your own digital solutions

We will discover the world of No-code in the coming weeks, to learn how to navigate it.

As an introduction, here is a series of short videos that will help you get started, where you're going to learn how to create your own software, automation and applications. All without writing a single line of code!

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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2.4 Week Asessment: Customer Decision Journey

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2.4 Week Asessment: Customer Decision Journey

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Taking all the information from previous weeks and from the interviews, create the JTBD Customer Decision Journey for your Module Assessment.

You'll need to create two different journeys:

1. Main: from the University's staff point of view

2. Support: from the marketing audience point of view

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2.3 Resource: Stakeholders + JTBD + Customer Decision Journey Board

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2.3 Resource: Stakeholders + JTBD + Customer Decision Journey Board

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Learn with a few an examples and practice your JTBD skills in the Miro Canvas!

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Analyse how your customer makes their decisions... and make it a no-brainer for them to choose your product

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Customer Decision Journey - Presentation (16:9) by Cristian

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2.1 Lecture Session: Define the Problem and make sense of the customer/user journey​

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2.1 Lecture Session: Define the Problem and make sense of the customer/user journey​

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To apply 5W & H technique & In-depth interview to the Q&A session with the client.​

To be able to define the problem and come to a shared understanding.​

To make sense of customer decision journey. ​

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1.1 Lecture session: Design Thinking Process

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1.1 Lecture session: Design Thinking Process

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The aim of this week is to learn how to investigate the problem in digital innovation and use design thinking as a method.
Appreciation of the roadmap in Design Thinking
Identification of a problem and how to express it
To focus on the problem and develop empathy with the human-in-the-loop

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1.4 Week Assessment: QTBD (Questions To Be Done)

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1.4 Week Assessment: QTBD (Questions To Be Done)

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What are the main problems your users/customers need to solve?

How do your users/customers choose their current solution?

How do your customers buy the solution?

If haven't bought any solution yet... how are they solving it now?... or do they live with the 'problem'?

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Dorsey (Twitter's CEO) and his team were grappling with one of the most profound questions every leader must answer: What business are we really in?

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At the outset of a conference call with securities analysts in July to discuss Twitter's second-quarter earnings, CEO Jack Dorsey laid out his company's strategy: "We intend to build an ecosystem of connected features and services focused on serving three core jobs: news, which is what's happening; discussion, conversation; and helping people get paid," he said.

The language Dorsey used - "three core jobs" - refers to a concept called " jobs to be done," which is an approach to defining a business from the perspective of what really matters to its customers.

Such strategic focus is essential for a company such as Twitter - which competes against a varied set of players ranging from Facebook and TikTok to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. And Twitter's results have been impressive. Its daily active user count has grown above 200 million, up from 126 million at year-end 2018. It is on pace to cross $4 billion in annual revenue in 2021, up from a little more than $3 billion in 2018. And as of September 20, Twitter shares had appreciated over the past five years by 170%, which compares to 185% for Facebook.

It wasn't always this way for Twitter. As it turns out, jobs to be done has been a key tool in Twitter's turnaround, which began in earnest after Jack Dorsey reassumed the CEO role in October 2015. At the time, the company was still evolving and its focus was unclear. Facebook was growing users at an astounding scale and pace, and Snapchat was the shiny, new social network set to take it on. In 2015, Twitter posted a net loss of $521 million on revenue of $2.2 billion, and its shares were trading below its IPO price of $26. As Dorsey described it later, at the Innosight CEO Summit in August 2019, "We got overly reactive to everything our peers were doing. We didn't have a clear sense of what our purpose was, and that really hurt us a lot." (Disclosure: Twitter has not been a client of our firm, Innosight, and he was an unpaid speaker at the 2019 CEO Summit.)

Dorsey and his team were grappling with one of the most profound questions every leader must answer: What business are we really in?

How an organization defines its business impacts nearly everything it does: what customers it serves, how it serves them, whom it competes against, what external forces it regards as relevant, how it interprets those forces, what strategies it contemplates and pursues, and how it innovates.

Yet too often this question is answered in ways that are overly constraining, myopic, and obscure what's really happening in the world around them. Even worse, the wrong frame of reference can result in completely missing emerging threats and opportunities. This often happens when an organization defines itself by the products it sells ("we are in the insurance business" or "we are in the car business") or by some other inward-looking characteristic such as its business model ("we are an online marketplace" or "we are in the rental business") or a capability ("we are a software development business").

What's needed is a way to define a business from the perspective of what's at the heart of any company's success: its ability to create value for customers. The "jobs to be done" approach provides such a solution.

A job can be a problem to solve (e.g., "repair my car," "soothe my sore throat") or a goal (e.g., "run a marathon," "get into college"). When jobs arise, people are motivated to seek products, services, or experiences to "hire" to perform those jobs, just like they might hire a person to do a job such as fixing a leaky pipe or babysitting the kids.

The idea can also be used to define strategic direction - and has particular value as a way of framing an organization's identity.

How Twitter Applied the Approach

For Dorsey, jobs to be done provided a tool for strategic clarity at a critical time. "It cleared something up that was missing for me, which was how do we plan and build around a customer-centric framework that would focus the organization on why our customers are coming to us in the first place," he said. Upon his 2015 return to Twitter, Dorsey launched an effort to identify the jobs that people hired Twitter for and, importantly, which jobs it would focus on going forward. It involved three steps.

1. Understand the full set of jobs for which Twitter was already being "hired."

The company obtained this information by gathering insights from customer interviews, observations of how people engaged with Twitter, and data gathered from website usage.

This generated a long list of quite specific jobs, which could then be aggregated into higher-level jobs to consider for strategic prioritization. For example, jobs such as "get real-time updates about a live sporting event," "learn more about a longstanding interest or hobby," or "be alerted to breaking news events" could all be grouped into the higher-level of job of "inform me."

2. Prioritize the jobs Twitter wanted to focus on.

This was done via workshops in which company leaders evaluated the list of jobs by criteria such as how widely they were shared by customers, the expected value of solving them, and where Twitter had a compelling and differentiated solution. The result was alignment around three priority jobs for Twitter consumers: "inform me," "have a conversation," and "inform others." Similar work was done to identify the priority jobs of other Twitter stakeholders such as advertisers and the developer community.

3. Communicate the results and use them to allocate resources.

Ultimately, priority jobs were communicated throughout the company. They also provided a powerful mechanism for focusing how resources were allocated. For example, once the strategic jobs were identified, all product groups and teams reviewed their existing product roadmaps and assessed, for each project, how it connected to one of the priority jobs. If it couldn't be connected, the product was taken off the roadmap. The jobs framework also helped move the organization from describing its strategy in terms of features to developing longer-term plans aimed at solving priority jobs to be done.

The framework was also applied at Dorsey's other company, Square, to help the financial services and mobile payments company redefine its business and figure out where it might look for growth. The initial approach it took was similar to that of Twitter: The company gleaned insights into the jobs to be done from customer interviews and observations of how business owners used Square solutions. For instance, Square's managers realized that its technology, which enabled small businesses to process credit cards, was a means to solving the broader job of "grow my business."

That realization opened up the team's eyes to other opportunities. For example, growth requires access to capital, and many small businesses have difficulty obtaining bank loans. Square responded by launching Square Capital (now called Square Loans), which leverages its deep understanding of its customers' financial health (derived from their transaction history) to provide them with direct access to capital.

The Value of a Jobs Perspective

Defining an organization from the perspective of the customer jobs it exists to solve often leads to valuable new insights about the competitive environment, risks, and opportunities, while expanding the possibilities for growth and innovation. To illustrate this, consider the contrasting implications of a car company defining its business from a product perspective ("we are in the car business") versus a jobs perspective ("we are in the personal mobility business").

Viewing a market through the "jobs to be done" lens produces a much broader picture of the competitive landscape.

"We are in the car business" "We are in the personal mobility business"

Automakers

Automakers, ride-hailing (e.g., Uber, Lyft), rental cars, walking, biking, videoconferencing, home delivery services

By making higher-performing cars with more features

By serving consumers' jobs to be done in novel and unexpected ways - through innovation in the core business (e.g., electrification, new-purchase experiences) or in new business lines (e.g., fleet services, micromobility)

Measured in total vehicle sales (cars, trucks, SUVs)

Measured in vehicle sales plus other mobility-related markets (e.g., ride-hailing, e-bikes, in-vehicle entertainment) ― any intersection of jobs to be done and circumstances in which people or things need to be moved from A to B

Advancing technology to create better-performing, more richly featured cars

Product innovation plus business model innovation such as new products and services, new user experiences, new financial models

Increased preferences for SUVs, advances in electric propulsion systems, rise of driver-assist features, autonomous car technology, consumer focus on connectivity, new distribution channels

All of the product-related trends plus increased demand for personal mobility services (e.g., scooters), increased use of videoconferencing or telecommuting, advances in drone delivery technology, activities of nontraditional competitors (e.g., Google)

Clearly, these two perspectives lead to very different conclusions about what's happening in the world, what developments merit attention, and what the strategic options are.

Beyond the clarity it provides, we've observed three primary benefits of the jobs-to-be-done approach:

Expanding options for strategy and innovation.

Jobs provides a customer-centric lens for strategy development, clarifies who the real competition is, and opens up a range of new avenues for growth and innovation.

Investing in what matters most.

When everyone in the organization understands and is oriented towards the jobs it exists to solve, employees at all levels are empowered to make better decisions in their day-to-day tasks.

Aligning and inspiring the organization.

Clarifying the priority jobs your firm exists to solve helps all employees understand how the organization creates value in the world and realizes its purpose. It also plays an important alignment role by communicating strategic focus and ensuring this is a shared language and methodology for innovation, product development, and developing customer insights.

All organizations should reflect on the customer jobs they've solved up to the current moment and determine how this focus might need to change in the future. By doing so, they can can chart a clear path forward.

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How Twitter Applied the "Jobs to Be Done" Approach to Strategy

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At the outset of a conference call with securities analysts in July to discuss Twitter's second-quarter earnings, CEO Jack Dorsey laid out his company's strategy: "We intend to build an ecosystem of connected features and services focused on serving three core jobs: news, which is what's happening; discussion, conversation; and helping people get paid," he said.

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Understand and obssess with the problem. That's the key to get the best solution possible!

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Empathise with the Problem - Presentation (16:9) by Cristian

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Learn with a few examples and practice your JTBD skills in the Miro Canvas!

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Jobs to be Done is a theory of consumer action, which describes the mechanisms that cause a consumer to adopt an innovation.

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The designers at intercom (intercom.com) use this illustration to show what is, and isn't, important to customers.

Upgrade your user, not your product. Don't build better cameras - build better photographers.

- Kathy Sierra

Ten thousand years ago, we were hunter gatherers and used our feet to roam the earth. Today, we have fast food restaurants and autonomous cars. Why did we change? Because we have an intrinsic desire to evolve ourselves. We do this by remaking and adapting to the world around us.

The desire to evolve is in our DNA. It's what makes us human. Moreover, we do this evolution with purpose. We purposefully use the arts to evolve ourselves emotionally; the sciences to evolve ourselves intellectually; and engineering to evolve how we interact with the world. Purposeful evolution is why we are different from animals:

A bear trying to catch food by the river may think, I wish fishing could be made better, faster, or easier.

But only a human will think, Fishing is no good. If I could transform that lagoon over there into a place where I can breed fish, then I'd never have to go fishing again.

The bear thinks only about what is. Today, it may come up with a better, faster, or easier way to fish. But tomorrow, it is still a bear that fishes. The human, on the other hand, thinks about what ought to be. Today, she fishes, but tomorrow that can change. If she could figure out a way to no longer fish, then she can focus on improving herself in other ways - like building a hut so she could move out of that dank cave.

The bear does not think about evolving itself and its world. It never has a Job to be Done. The human, on the other hand, does think about evolving herself. And every time she begins the process of evolving herself, she has a Job to be Done.

Improve your life-situation; become more than you are

Charles Revson, founder of Revlon, perfectly encapsulates a JTBD when he said:

In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope.

With these words, Revson marks the difference between what customers buy, and why they buy it. This thinking was also carried over into Revlon's advertising. In 1952, Revlon's breakout advertising campaign was Fire and Ice (figure 4). The advertising campaign makes it clear: Revlon isn't selling a product, it's selling a "new me." In fact, there's barely any mention of any product. One whole page is a check list of provocative questions; the other features a picture of model Dorian Leigh. Only on further investigation do you notice the lipstick and nail polish at the bottom of the page.

A Job to be Done is neither found nor spontaneously created. Rather, it is designed. The checklist of provocative questions such as, "Have you ever wanted to wear an ankle bracelet?" exists to help customers imagine (i.e., design) what new me will be created when they buy Revlon's products. Then there's the picture of Dorian Leigh. Upon seeing that, consumers continue to design a new version of myself in my mind. For some, the new me looks like her. For others, the new me is with her. Whatever the case, if this new me is something I want, I begin desiring it. In other words, I have a Job to be Done.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

- Herbert A. Simon

A Job to be Done defined

Jobs to be Done is a theory of consumer action. It describes the mechanisms that cause a consumer to adopt an innovation.

The theory states that markets grow, evolve, and renew whenever customers have a Job to be Done, and then buy a product to complete it (get the Job Done). This makes a Job to be Done a process: it starts, it runs, and it ends. The key difference, however, is that a JTBD describes how a customer changes or wishes to change. With this in mind, we define a JTBD as follows:

A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to change her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her.

Products enable customers to get a Job Done

Humans are limited in our abilities. We can't create a new me by ourselves. A snap of our fingers cannot create a world where a morning commute is an enjoyable experience. Realizing such a change requires innovation on the part of oneself or someone else. Progress can only happen when we attach and integrate new ideas and new products into our lives.

An example of constructing (i.e., designing) a Job to be Done comes from a research project I led to understand what Job or Jobs customers were hoping to get Done (i.e., what new me customers were hoping to create) with a project management software. Here is a synopsis of one interview. Notice how the hero of our story comes to realize a new me is possible, and how he must attach a product to himself to attain that new me.

Andreas began a business around medical tourism. Over time, he grew his business to include five employees. One day, he was out with a friend of his, Jamie, at a coffee shop. During their conversation, Jamie mentioned a product called Basecamp to Andreas. Andreas had never heard of it. He was curious to learn more.

Jamie explained to Andreas that Basecamp was a project management tool that helped small businesses become better at organizing themselves. Andreas was surprised by this. He knew about complicated project management products like Microsoft Project, but those were for big companies only, not smaller ones like his. Currently, Andreas was using Google Sheets, Google Docs, and e-mail to run his company. He just assumed that, well, that's how companies his size operated.

Jamie further explained that Basecamp was made specifically to help companies his size. As Jamie spoke, Andreas's mind began racing: Basecamp could help my company stay organized as it adds more customers and employees. Up until this point, he had just assumed that his company had hit its growth limit.

Andreas and Jamie enjoyed their coffee and parted ways. During his train ride home, Andreas looked up Basecamp on his mobile device. He also learned about and investigated similar products to Basecamp. In the end, he decided to go with Basecamp. He signed up for it, began using it, and grew his company beyond five employees for the first time.

This is what a Job to be Done looks like. A consumer goes along his life as he's come to know it. Then things change. He is presented with an opportunity for self-betterment - that is, make changes so he can grow. When or if he finds a product that helps him realize that growth opportunity, he can evolve to that better version of himself he had imagined.

Besides demonstrating a JTBD well, Andreas's story also demonstrates that creating a new me (i.e., having a JTBD) is a process. It's not something that consumers have; it's something consumers participate in. That's why it's called a Job to be Done. A comparable example is falling in love. Falling in love isn't something you have; it's something you participate in.

And just as you can't complete the fall-in-love process by yourself, a customer can't complete a JTBD by himself. He needs a product to help him design, construct, and complete it.

What isn't a Job to be Done

Figure 6. Don Norman's 1988 Book, The Design Of Everyday Things, features Activity-Centered-Design and the Seven stages of Actions seen here. This theory formed the basis of methods such as Task Analysis and Human-computer Interaction.

While many of us have been applying Customer Jobs for a while - Rick Pedi and John Palmer have been developing Customer Jobs since the 1990s - it has gained popularity only recently. And like so many things that spread quickly, many people have distorted and misinterpreted it.

The biggest mistake I see is thinking of a Job to be Done as an activity or task. Examples include store and retrieve music or listen to music. These are not Jobs; rather, they are tasks and activities - which means they describe how you use a product or what you do with it. For example, music streaming products such as Pandora and Spotify were designed specifically so customers didn't have to store and retrieve music like when they used CDs or MP3s. As far as listen to music, that is a broad activity that varies wildly depending on the context. Someone listening to music so he can maintain his motivation during a workout is engaging in a very different activity than someone going to the opera to listen to music.

I gave a business partner a watch to show my appreciation for his hard work. What was my Job to be Done? How can my JTBD be functional if I never directly use it?

Besides, there are already brilliant design methods out there to help you design for tasks and activities. Examples include activity theory, Don Norman's activity-centered design (figure 6), and human-computer interaction (HCI). If you want to learn more about how to design for activities, go there.

There are not different types of Jobs. Another common mistake is to think that there are types of Jobs. In particular, some may think there are emotional, function, and social Jobs. I'll describe why it's a bad idea from both a practical and theoretical perspective.

Practically, you'll be more successful when you think of every Customer Job as unique. We've learned that while many Jobs share the same core emotional desires (e.g., belonging, self-expression, control, etc.), each Job is a unique combination of these desires. That is why each product should deliver on these core emotional desires in its own way. A good example is Facebook. A lot of people use Facebook because it taps into desires such as control, self-expression, and belonging - but it does so in its own unique way. So instead of saying that there are types of Jobs, you'll be much better off thinking that each Job is unique.

Theoretically - that is, from an ontological and epistemological perspective - Customer Jobs are design (artificial) problems, not natural problems. Natural problems are falsifiable. This means they can be objectively measured and determined as either true or false:

Q: Is argon (Ar) a noble gas?

A: If under conditions X it reacts, then yes; otherwise, no.

Design problems, on the other hand, are not falsifiable and cannot be objectively measured:

Q: Is this painting any good?

Person 1: "Yes."

Person 2: "No."

With respect to Jobs, then, no objective test can be created to say, "This is a social Job. That is not a social Job." If I buy a Ferrari to impress other people, is it a "social" Job because I reference other people? Or should we rephrase it as an insecurity, making it a "personal" or "emotional" Job?

And because there's no way to objectively define each type of Job, every person on the team will have his or her own opinion of what type of Job it should be. Moreover, even if/when you do get consensus, so what? Isn't knowing that I bought a Ferrari because I want to "fit in" good enough? What do you gain by labeling it a social or personal Job? I'll tell you: absolutely nothing.

Take it from me, don't waste your time trying to dissect Jobs into different types. It's about as productive as trying to answer, "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

Is it a Customer Job? Does it describe a "new" me or something else? When presented with a possible description of a Customer Job, the best framework of thinking I can offer you is the decision tree in figure 7.

Keep in mind that a Job to be Done describe the "better me." It answers the question, "How are you better since you started using [product]?"

Renowned psychologist Albert Bandura described humans as "proactive, aspiring organisms". Customer Jobs carries this idea into markets, making the claim that we buy and use things to improve ourselves, to make progress. If you're not describing a Customer Job in terms of progress, you're probably describing something else.

Where does JTBD theory come from?

The greatest - and most helpful - theories are not created by one person but are the result of many people over a long period (figure 8). This is certainly the case with JTBD. Its principles have emerged from the work of a long lineage of researchers and innovators. Here are the most notable.

Joseph Schumpeter and creative destruction. The roots of JTBD go back at least seventy-five years to Joseph Schumpeter and his introduction of creative destruction. Schumpeter observed that new innovations steal customers from incumbent offerings and then eventually go on to replace them. At one time, horses and ships were our primary methods of personal transportation. Eventually, trains replaced horses, but then cars and airplanes replaced those trains and ships.

Customer Jobs incorporates Schumpeter's insights as it seeks to understand why customers pick one way of doing things over another. Yes, innovators create new solutions, but the wheels of creative destruction turn only through the interaction between customers and innovators.

Customer Jobs also incorporates another one of Schumpeter's brilliant insights that is almost always overlooked. Schumpeter argued that competition should not be measured only among products of the same "type." He insisted that competition can come from anywhere. You might think you're alone in a market or have market superiority, but some competitor unknown to you could be stealing away your customers. Your only sign that something is wrong is decreasing sales. In chapter 8, we take a close look at Customer Jobs, creative destruction, and competition.

W. Edwards Deming and systems thinking. Schumpeter's influence on Customer Jobs is restricted mostly to factors of market dynamics and competition; however, W. Edwards Deming has influenced Customer Jobs the most. Those who are familiar with his nearly sixty years of contribution to theories of management and innovation will recognize his fingerprints throughout this book.

Deming's most notable influence comes from his development of systems thinking, which I discuss in chapter 13. Throughout Deming's career, he frequently reminded businesses that producers and customers are connected by systems:

The customer and producer must work together as a system.

The consumer is the most important part of the production line.

Deming often challenged companies to remember creative destruction. He impressed on business leadership that simply making a product better and better - improving what already exists - wasn't enough. Sooner or later, someone will invent something new. He would tell businesses the following:

Makers of vacuum tubes improved year by year the power of vacuum tubes. Customers were happy. But then transistor radios came along. Happy customers of vacuum tubes deserted vacuum tubes and ran for the pocket radio.

A dissatisfied customer does not complain; he just switches.

Deming understood that improving products of today continually isn't enough: "We must keep asking, what new product or service would help our customers more? What will we be making five years from now? Ten years from now?" For Deming, the process of innovation should never stop.11

Psychology. On the psychology front, you'll run into influences from Gary Klein, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, George Loewenstein, and Ann Graybiel. These are psychologists and scientists whose work forms the foundations of behavioral economics and naturalistic decision making (NDM). Their work helps us understand how and why customers don't make rational decisions when buying and using products, are inconsistent in their opinions of products, and don't always act in their best interest. Customer Jobs understands that if you want to make a great product and to develop a message that connects with customers, you have to understand the emotional forces that shape their motivation.

Bringing it all together. Then, you arrive at John B. Palmer, Rick Pedi, and Bob Moesta. In the 1990s, they began working together to combine their respective experiences into the first Customer Jobs principles. They are the ones who came up with the idea and language that customers have "Jobs" that they are trying to get "Done."

Then, you get to me and this book. John, Rick, and Bob have personally influenced me more than I could ever express. Last but certainly not least, the entire JTBD community has had a tremendous influence on me. Without their application of and experience with JTBD, this book would not have been possible.

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Upgrade your user, not your product. Don't build better cameras - build better photographers. - Kathy Sierra Ten thousand years ago, we were hunter gatherers and used our feet to roam the earth. Today, we have fast food restaurants and autonomous cars. Why did we change?