Finding the “right” unmet need to address is a numbers game. Given you have a good decision framework and enough of them, you’ll be in the best position to identify and tackle a truly unmet need.

The challenge is that finding these requires some degree of brute force. You need to talk to a lot of experts, empathize, understand context and corroborate their “unmetness” by engaging a diverse stakeholder group. This is one way but difficult to scale, lots of people time.

Jobs-to-be-done Framework

I did a deep dive last week into the so-called Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) book and framework (Ulwick and Osterwalder (2016)). It’s become synonymous with this quote:

More and more my mindset is adapting to thinking about filling up my toolbox. Every framework is imperfect. Having many in hand, and knowing where they’re best used—this is the way (I know, cuteness overload amite?).

Our approach has been historically focused on needs driven innovation – what is the salient unmet need, and how might we address it? One weakness of needs driven innovation is the assumption of the need.

JTBD assumes a given job has a collection of unmet needs and desired outcomes. It shifts from “What do people want that they aren’t getting” to “What job will they pay to get done.”

The beauty of this approach is defining a job is simple, and even more important, easily defined for stakeholders (it’s clunky to ask stakeholders to use specific syntax for need statements). Take the example job, “make sure wound doesn’t get worse.” Everyone in the room gets it.

Scaling Up

Once you’ve defined your job, the next step is to landscape desired outcome statements like “Reduce wait time for drive-thru breakfast during morning rush hour” or “Minimize the likelihood that music sound distorted when played at high volume.” This still requires some brute force stakeholder work but enables the scale up.

With these in hand and a survey cohort (100’s-1000’s), you can assess how each is viewed on two simple criteria: satisfaction and importance. I love these as their simple and not specific to JTBD—how satisfied are you with the desired outcome and how important is it?

I’ve been calling these SI (/sEE/) charts. It’s a superb, simple visual to convey areas of opportunity for a given job.

The underserved outcomes are what one should focus on. Given you have a sufficient number of survey responses, it makes for an easier decision. It’s built in validation—wisdom of the crowd.

Ulwick provides a simple algorithm called an opportunity score (a function of satisfaction and importance responses), as well as benchmarks about what scores are worth prioritizing (i.e., >= 10 is promising).

“Unmetness” of Competition

So above gave us a sense of general satisfaction and importance, but what about competitor products or services? In his example (see below), one can go back to survey pool and identify competitive solutions/products and ask how satisfied they are with the outcomes we generated earlier. With this is hand, now you have an even better sense of where you can differentiate.

Differentiation is the goal, and this approach can get you there (as can others).

Challenges with JTDB

Some challenges as I see them in healthcare:

1. For some jobs, clinical specialization represents a significant challenge to identifying and building a survey cohort. How do you get 100 invterventional radiologists engaged? Not easily, or cheaply, is my guess.
2. Understanding clearly those who do the Job versus those who know the Job is done. Awareness of the problem by a physician isn’t always obvious, for example, if a nurse might be doing it.

Those are my thoughts for for now. Looking forward I was recommended another book on JTBD (Burleson (2020)) that I’ll plan to dive into.

Cheers.

References