What are people trying to do with data? JTBD and DMCA

Why do people want data? What do people use it for? What are they trying to do, really?

Put simply, four verbs: Decide, Monitor, Create, and Automate.

Let’s first look at something called the JTBD framework. JB.. what? Jobs-to-be-done.

Here’s a good description: https://www.productplan.com/glossary/jobs-to-be-done-framework/

The jobs-to-be-done framework is an approach to developing products based on understanding 1) the customer’s specific goal, or “job,” and 2) the thought processes that would lead that customer to “hire” a product to complete the job.

The customer doesn’t need a drill. The customer needs a well-drilled hole.

If we apply this lens to web data acquisition and usage, we will have three goal states that data can help accommodate:

1. Reduce uncertainty, increase comfort, increase credibility
2. Reduce hassle, reduces cost, saves time, effort, and resources
3. Create new revenue stream / increase existing revenue

We can now map the four previous verbs onto each of the different goals.

Reduce uncertainty, increase comfort, increase credibility

Decide

• Support (and often justify) decision making
• Validate assumptions and hypotheses, answer questions
• Sample use cases / application: Price intelligence, Market research, Alt data for finance
  

  Monitor

• Brand performance / reputation, market share, compliance enforcement

Reduce hassle, reduces cost, saves time, effort, resources

Automate (and streamline)

• Sample use cases / application: BPA / RPA, dead generation, recruitment

Create new revenue stream / increase existing revenue

Create (and build)

• Get data to build / seed / feed into / beef up a product / service.
• Training data to create AI model, surface pattern
• Build asset (content generation, populate and enrich catalogue)

Next week we will look at the different common use cases that businesses use data for. What exactly do they decide, monitor, automate, and create?

Bonus: Four fundamentals of the jobs-to-be-done framework: https://productcollective.com/what-is-jobs-to-be-done-framework/

1. People buy products and services to get a “job” done. The job describes what the customer is trying to accomplish, not the solution that they use to accomplish it.
2. Jobs are functional with emotional and social components. When you dig into these emotional and social components, you’ll pick up the language customers use to describe their unmet needs. When you can describe your value proposition using your customer’s words that improves your go to market message.
3. A Job-to-be-Done is stable over time. What someone trys to accomplish stays pretty consistent over time. How they try to accomplish that job changes as they become aware of new and different products.
4. The Job is the unit of analysis. When you focus on customer jobs, you fall in love with the problem rather than the solution. That improves the chances that your product design addresses customer’s needs rather than blindly delivering functionality that adds limited value.