(2022-11-22) Maurya Extending The Job Story To A Customer Forces Story

Ash Maurya: Extending the Job Story to a Customer Forces Story. Customer Forces Stories are a powerful way of summarizing customer conversations during your search for problem/solution fit. (customer interview)

A Customer Forces Story describes the causal forces that shape a customer’s journey as they hire a specific product to get a job done and move from an initial triggering event to some resolution event, like acquisition, activation, or cancellation.

Note: Hiring a product isn’t limited to buying. Think of it as choosing a specific product for a specific job.
A product could be chosen for the first time or the hundredth time.
This chosen product could be your product or an existing alternative.*

The reason we use stories is they help us playback what the customer did in chronological order. From there, we attempt to make sense of the timeline by attributing a series of triggering events and forces that help explain their choices and actions along the way.

It’s important to emphasize that crafting a Customer Forces Story is a post-interview process

Writing a Customer Forces Story is like writing a book report.
Before you can summarize a book, you have first to read it in its entirety.

To make this process a little easier, I developed a Story Builder tool that employs pluggable Madlib story blocks: ((2024-04-24) Maurya Back-story Behind Customer Forces Stories (LeanFoundry))

In this post, I will illustrate the Story Builder tool in action using one of these story types: The Existing Alternative Story. This type of story is used to uncover new spaces for innovation by studying how people choose old products (existing alternatives).

Here’s the scenario: We are exploring the opportunity space in the headphones market and have decided to study people who recently purchased headphones. Specifically, we are looking to uncover the following:

• What triggers people to buy headphones?
• Why they bought them — for what job, to achieve what desired outcome?
• What solutions did they consider and not pick?
• What solution did they pick and why?
• What struggles did they encounter along the way?

It’s helpful to break the Customer Forces Story into three acts: beginning, middle, and end.

• Act 1 (Beginning) makes up roughly 25% of the story
• Act 2 (Middle) makes up roughly 50% of the story, and
• Act 3 (End) makes up roughly 25% of the story. see img

Let’s jump in.

Jack Buys New Headphones

In Act 1, we are trying to determine the series of events that moved Jack from some old state without these headphones (status quo) to him considering buying them (passive looking).

In Act II, we try to understand how Jack researches, evaluates and picks his chosen solution

While it would be great to unpack onboarding (first-use) and a specific instance when Jack used the chosen product recently for a run in as much detail, it’s usually not possible to also fit that into a typical 45-minute customer interview.

That is why I recommend limiting the scope of the Existing Alternative Interview primarily to acquisition and scheduling other interviews for other story types

Yes, these Madlibs are intentionally worded and structured in a specific way to normalize and encode any “switching” story consistently.

Doing this opens the door to systematically creating jobs-based customer segments prioritizing problems worth pursuing designing “better” solutions