Solving a Real Problem Isn’t Enough.
TLDR: In Motives to be Met, we learn what motivates our (ideal) customers to make a decision that helps us achieve our business and impact goals. This seems obvious, but it turns out many product people are wrong about what these motives are.
I recently asked a PM what was driving people to trial his product, which is aimed at team leads to help them track performance on their teams. “People want to have productive teams,” he replied.
I can almost guarantee that “having productive teams” is not what motivates people to trial this product.
In fact, what motivates people is rarely “solving the problem.”
This is kind of heresy in the land of the brick and hair on fire, but even in that example, if someone’s hair is actually on fire, they won’t be seeking a solution from you right away. They will first just solve the problem with whatever they already have on hand, and only start looking for something else if that doesn’t work well enough.
To extend this pretty stupid metaphor, someone isn’t taking the brick just because it puts out the fire, they’re motivated by the fear of what will happen when their hair goes up in smoke or continues burning.
In other words, we ARE here to solve a problem, but simply creating a solution doesn’t motivate people to buy or adopt it if we don’t meet their motives.
It’s frustrating that we keep encouraging product people to focus on the idea of problems and solutions without deeply understanding how people will make a decision. There are jobs at stake. My PM friend’s company is nearing the end of their runway, even though they feel confident that people have a problem and that their product is a good solution.
I’ve been at a startup where we knew there was a real problem, built plenty of features to address the problem, and no one works at that startup today. In retrospect, though maybe it wouldn’t guarantee we would have survived, if we had focused on an ideal customer and understood what mattered to them, we likely could have built way less product for more customers.
We get seduced by the false idea that people make decisions for purely rational reasons. This kind of thinking leads to building analytically fine products that no one cares about.
Motives & Umbrellas
To give a very relatable example, here’s the best umbrella according to New York Times’s Wirecutter. It’s got great features and it’s not outrageously expensive.
I was walking around NYC recently, on a chilly rainy day that brought out umbrellas all over the place. (Don’t get me started about the proper etiquette of wielding an umbrella on a busy West Village street).
Strangely, the Wirecutter umbrella wasn’t what everyone was popping open. There were almost as many kinds of umbrellas as people, not to mention the people who had a hood, or just got wet. Being NYC, lots of these umbrellas were black, but there were also red, yellow, maroon, and clear umbrellas. There were golf-sized umbrellas and tiny purse-size foldout umbrellas.
When people buy an umbrella, they are doing it because, yes, at some future time, it might keep them dry. That’s the problem umbrellas solve. But the reason they chose THAT umbrella, if it was even a choice at all, is another matter when we consider their motives.
I have, over time, had a number of different umbrellas. Some were simply $5 deli specials to get through a surprise downpour (sorry, environment!). One was a clear umbrella I almost never used due to its impractical dome, but that I schlepped through several house moves due to it’s mod fashionability. Once, I purchased an umbrella actually recommended by Wirecutter, but that was a gift for someone else. More than one seemed to just materialize without my having made any sort of purchasing decision at all.
Feedback is a trap
Here’s a classic PM, UX designer, or founder activity: you show customers or potential customers a prototype and “get feedback.”
You hear people say they like it, or that they think it solves a problem, or that they don’t like some aspect of it. They give you ideas of how to make it better. They tell you what would make it perfect. Great! you think, I’ll make those changes and the dollars will start flowing in!
But when this product or feature goes live, it meets with indifference. What happened? You talk to the same people and they say, oh, we want that but…not now, or some other flavour of not really interested.
People don’t buy things because they are good. They buy things because at the moment where they need to make a decision, they care a lot — not just about the solution, but many things you will never discover with ‘feedback’ on a solution.
Too often with prototypes and feedback, we ignore what drives people to make decisions about choosing to use or buy, and focus on the functional use of the product. It’s not that function doesn’t matter, but it’s not what’s behind the decision to actually use or buy a solution.
The fallacy of ‘benefits’
When a PM tells me they know why people are making the decision to choose or buy their product without doing motive discovery, I’m usually pretty safe in guessing they are making an assumption that ignores the things that make decisions possible: emotions and identity. And because of that, they are building adequate, possibly even innovative ways to solve a problem that don’t feel compelling or important to customers.
When we talk to our customers, we’re not looking for the obvious, “I bought your product because I have a problem that your product solves.” We’re not ‘validating’ that the benefits our product offers are things people like.
I’d say that in a surprising amount of cases, the problem isn’t the even biggest factor in a decision to choose or buy, even though the problem might be very real.
Once you start talking to customers about their entire process, it’s amazing how many times something else comes up. It might have to do with emotional wants, such as wanting to seem smart or wanting to belong. It could be interesting aspects of how a particular business model or UX approach made a difference. In the cases of the fastest-growing, most successful product companies, emotion and identity are almost always integral.
This is true in consumer and B2B product-led businesses.
People may need a place to stay, but AirBnB overcame the objection of staying in a stranger’s home by tapping into a traveler’s identity as an adventurous and savvy person who wants to live the local experience.
Teams might appreciate a convenient alternative to email, but Slack’s early word-of-mouth hypergrowth had just as much to do with being ahead-of-the-curve, Slack’s friendly UI, and the status of being someone who brought the new technology into their company without even needing to ask for a purchase order.
Work decisions are emotional
In B2B, you might expect decisions to be more rational and ROI-driven, but there are usually lots of emotions involved- the person making the decision is often also someone who could be fired or promoted, and also frequently feels overworked and under-appreciated.
We spend more time at work than with our family, usually, so we tend to be invested emotionally and in our identity. As a result, we’re seeing the most successful B2B companies of the past decade using motive-based strategies to succeed.
Just because we’re socialized to see emotions as something to hide or avoid acknowledging in the workplace does not mean we’re not emotional. Understanding this gives B2B companies a huge edge.
Jobs don’t matter without motives
Jobs to be Done frames a problem in the context of a user journey. This is very helpful, and definitely gives us a lot of context about what path a user takes using a product or considering a problem. What’s missing is framing this customer problem around our business objective. We know we need customers to do something and we want to understand what makes them choose to do so as well as what might get in the way.
“People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
This classic statement of JTBD often gets another layer- ‘they don’t want a hole, they want to hang a picture on the wall.’ That’s definitely helpful in terms of how to build and position a product, which may or may not be a drill once you’ve discovered the picture-hanging insight.
But what it still leaves out are motives.
What about hanging a picture up is so important to this person?
Do they need to hang up the picture or is it more aspirational?
What factors matter most to them about the outcome of hanging a picture?
What are they worried about when they consider hanging up pictures?
How do they think about themselves in the context of hanging pictures?
You get the gist! These more emotional components matter when it comes to what will actually drive the person to choose a picture-hanging product.
Meet their Motives
Use the tools of Jobs To Be Done to understand what opportunities you have to solve problems, but make sure you’re also understanding what emotions, identity, and other motives drive decisions.
Of course, build products that are valuable objectively, but if you want those products to succeed, you need to know what matters to your customers in the context of your product and the problem it solves.
Learn how to make products people love by understanding what they care about in the first place. Want more help? Connect with us at Changemaker PM or just shoot me a message!
