Motives To Be Met: An Introduction
Let’s explore and discover how we can take the Jobs To Be Done framework to the next level and beyond.
In the world of startups, there’s a truism that 9 out of 10 companies fail. Why does this happen? The most likely answer is that not enough people bought or used the product.
It seems so simple! But many, many products are developed without knowing from the start that people want the solution, or even care about the problem. There are plenty of software products that start with a solution that is “possible” and “innovative” but has nothing to do with how people actually behave.
Many companies think they know what users or customers care about. They have personas with descriptions. They may have even talked to potential customers. But then they launch and getting people to buy is harder than pulling teeth.
Jobs To Be Done has given us a better way to approach customer development. Hallelujah, we are actually talking to people and identifying problems!
But here’s the thing. We learn the problems people have. How do we know what problems matter most?
How do we figure out what to spend our time building and what we can put off for later, or even skip entirely? How do we avoid the trap of “because competitors have it” and make something that matters to our customers? How do we build and position a product that is nearly irresistible for the people we want to serve?
We need to understand more than problems. We need to understand context, identity, and most of all, what our customers’ motives are when they consider our product. Then we need those motives to inform not just our product but our sales, marketing, support, and process.
Start with people, not problems
In the classic origin story of Jobs to Be Done, Clayton Christiansen tells the story about a researcher hired by “a fast food company” to investigate why customers were buying milkshakes in the morning at a mysteriously high rate. In the days before smoothies were a ubiquitous breakfast treat, the research team set out to find out “why are milkshakes so popular in the morning?”
This work was revolutionary because instead of simply wondering “what makes people like milkshakes?” it asked, “what makes commuters like milkshakes as they drive to work?” In other words, what are these people “hiring” the milkshake to do?
Adding the context around a customer’s decision changes the game. Context leads to better innovation and communication, because product managers can find different kinds of “jobs” for the product, each with its own job description. The same product might meet different demands, or we may find ways to better serve the need we’ve serviced by accident.
Without context, the McDonald’s team would likely just look for ways to make milkshakes ”better” or try to collect feedback from people in the same “demographic”.
As Christiansen said, “when marketers had asked a busy father who needed a time-consuming milkshake in the morning (and something very different later in the day) what attributes of the milkshake to improve upon, and then averaged his response with those of others in the same demographic segment, it had led to a one-size-fits-none product.”
We need to recognise that people may be buying the same product but for very different reasons that depend on context and identity.
In short, JTBD was an awesome step in the right direction, but it wasn’t enough.
Over time, as the process has become a ‘framework,’ I’ve seen JTBD employed as a “problem-finding” exercise, focusing on how people use products. Teams who implement JTBD often come back with “Problems To Be Solved.” The problems often lack priority and more importantly, aren’t tied to a very important factor for us — our business objective.
Introducing Motives To Be Met (MTBM)
Instead of jobs to be done, we should be looking for Motives to be Met.
First, we need to be very clear about what matters to us. We’re going to focus on the motives that drive a decision, and that decision needs to be tied to the metric that matters for us. We want to leave the process with clarity about how meeting a motive will move the needle for our business, and to put off opportunities that aren’t aligned.
The next step is identifying our ideal customer. This isn’t just based on demographics, which is why personas often lead us astray. We want to talk to individuals who have made the decision to take action on the problem, and therefore can drive our business objective. We’re really trying to narrow down to as great a fit as we can without too heavily limiting our pool of prospective interviewees.
If we learn about jobs without knowing who matters to our business decision, we will waste time and resources solving problems for people who can’t or won’t buy what we offer.
We need to understand what our ideal customer cares about at the time they are making a decision that drives our business objective.
Knowing what problems people have isn’t very useful if we don’t know who to listen to, why the problems matter, how much they matter, and what factors might influence their feelings about how a solution works or is communicated.
Don’t leave out feelings
We think that people are rationally evaluating our offer, so if we just have the best list of features, our products will be the obvious choice. This applies doubly when we’re talking about B2B.
But it could turn out, and often does, that people find too many features confusing. Or that the only thing that really matters to customers is buried in a long list that makes it seem unimportant or generic. Or we might even have developed features that actively turn off some people.
And going beyond features, we might be missing out on what feelings, positive or negative, are really driving the decision. Is it wanting to seem smart (emphasize social proof), overwhelm (make your offer simpler), or fear (play up your dependability)?.
When we conduct research, we “keep things professional” to the detriment of understanding how people actually think and feel.
Decisions are almost entirely emotional.
When people have an injury in the part of the brain that regulates emotions, they become unable to make even basic decisions easily. All of our decisions are impacted by emotions, even those that seem very analytical.
We think we’re weighing all the pros and cons in some rational way, but what truly impacts decisions are our feelings, whether it’s a desire for status, anxiety about making a poor choice, overwhelm with the number of things on our plates, or wanting to be similar to other people we admire, just to name a few of the feelings that can guide our decisions.
Motives are motivational
At Stanford, behavioural scientist BJ Fogg developed his formula B=MAP, which tells us behaviour is a result of motivation, ability, and prompts. This led to a host of products in which an action is very easy, or “frictionless” as the parlance goes, resulting in (sometimes even addictive) engagement with apps employing endless feeds, swipes, and ‘likes’, all of which require almost no effort.
Removing friction is helpful, but it’s not the only way we can get higher on the action line. We can learn what motivates our customers, so we can increase their desire to take action (and so we can design prompts that match their motives).
When we really understand what is driving people to do something, we can make sure that our product gets hired for our customers’ most important jobs.
Recently, I met with a CEO who had hired a Jobs To Be Done consultant to help engineer a pivot for their company. In the process, a few ‘jobs’ had been uncovered, with the tantalizing conclusion that there were opportunities just waiting to be addressed, and that all that was needed was to solve these problems to unlock unlimited returns.
But within these somewhat general ‘jobs’ someone might want to hire a product to solve, there are many types of customers with different motives and different levels of need.
We can solve many problems and not move the needle at all when it comes to our business goals. Simply being “useful” isn’t enough. We have to be valuable, compelling, necessary. We have to be impossible to live without.
Explore the whole customer journey
The core practice of MTBM is the customer interview.
The framing for Motives to be Met is quite similar to classic Jobs to be Done. We ask the interviewee to tell us the story of the experience they had making the decision we care about.
We start by going back in time to before they were even weighing options to discover what their status quo was before even considering a solution.
- What was going on in their life?
- What brought a desire to make some kind of change?
- What were they doing before to ‘solve’ the problem?
- What was the event that got them started thinking about a solution?
- What did they do to discover possible solutions?
- How did they think about comparing solutions, if they even did compare solutions?
Since we’re trying to understand this experience from the perspective of their motives, we want to ask not just about what they did do, but also what they didn’t do.
- What internal obstacles were there that they had to overcome to make the decision?
- What almost made them choose something else?
- What compromises did they have to make in the process?
- How motivated did they need to be to address the problem? What might have kept them from doing anything at all?
We do this trying to capture the story arc as much as possible, like we’re making a documentary of the experience they had. We’re trying to construct the ‘hero’s journey’ as we go through their story together. We even ask them things like, ‘what were you wearing?’ ‘what else was going on in your life at that time?”
Listen carefully to how they speak about themselves, and what identity they associate with the decision they made. The most powerful motives are at the core of how we see ourselves, reflecting the Masow hierarchy of needs. Understanding how identity comes into play when making the decision we care about in the context of our business objective can have a huge impact for our success in communicating with customers and building products they care about.
A quick hack to make sure you’re not introducing bias: ask questions that start with “what, when, how, and who.” Avoid yes/no questions (often these are leading) and avoid “why” questions, which can put subjects on the defensive. You’re only there to understand the person’s experience, not to explain things, put words in their mouth, or take them in a direction that makes your solution seem more useful. It’s fine to reflect back what you heard to see if you’re on the right track, but avoid asking if you’re right about what you heard, because people naturally want to agree.
Prototype around motives
Before you build anything for release, you can take the findings you’ve acquired in the interviews to guide what you learn in prototyping. In addition to seeing how people interact with the prototype, you can measure how much the key motives are met. Even a really simple demand test using Google AdWords can help to refine how you frame the motive in tests.
Share your learnings
These motives will help every customer-facing member in your company. Creating a highlight reel, presentation, or report to share with marketing, sales, even customer support. Help them collect more data so you can refine your understanding even more.
“I think we have all been frustrated without that critical discovery understanding and technique. Motives are so overlooked and now I’m seeing, so key! — Monica Bilak, Executive Director, Sprocket, Inc.
Key Takeaways
Motives To Be Met is a new way of thinking about customer discovery and identifying opportunities to meet our business goals.
- It’s not as important to understand what problems people have as it is to understand why they care.
- JTBD can lead to building “useful” things that don’t move the needle
- Understanding the customer journey can de-risk demand, leading to more effective innovation and more successful communication
- Segment around motives not around demographics or people who have the problem
- We’re not throwing out JTBD. MTBM builds on this practice, but focuses on motives helps you to get context AND gives you insights that go beyond just the limited context of the product you have or even the solution you could offer.
- Our deepest motives are more universal and much more “valuable” than any product or solution.
If you’d like to learn more about Motives To Be Met, please reach out!
Acknowledgements to the pricing expert Alan Albert, whose Value Discovery framework is the foundation for many ideas presented here, and to Bob Moesta, whose approach to Jobs To Be Done inspired the interview methods we use in Motives To Be Met. Thanks to readers Evan Samek and Anuj Adhiya. Credit to BJ Fogg, whose work is now helping thousands of people develop healthy habits. Also thanks to my colleagues at Changemaker PM, a product coaching and advisory group focusing on helping social impact product teams succeed.
