Experience Objectives
In a seminal HBR paper 1 Theodore Levitt argues that companies are overly focused on producing goods or services and don’t spend enough time understanding what customers want or need. Understanding the customer should come first, and designing the product should follow. Experience objective uses the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) approach combined with Design Thinking to capture and analyze customers’ wants and needs. User research practices like defining personas through interviews, experience maps … are especially useful here. All of this helps to understand who are your users and what are their problems and expectations.
A paper published in the Harvard Business Review 2 observes:
- Strategic adaptation must become an ongoing, iterative process of hypothesis, experimentation, learning, and action
- The value-creation potential of a business model should be based on making a hypothesis on what’s the “job to be done” for customers
The Experience Objectives view provides a template to analyze customers’ JTBD, see below:
Job to be Done: Move Money
Job Performer (Who): The person doing the main job, the end user
- A treasurer managing working capital
Jobs (What): What the performer wants to achieve
- Main job: Move money to meet working capital financing needs
- Related jobs: Manage accounts, perform account netting
- Emotional/social job: Ensure that unmet financial needs don’t slow down the company’s growth
Stages (How): The steps to get the job done
- Forecast cash flows
- Initiate transactions
- Reconcile transactions
- Clear and settle actions
- Report transactions
Needs (Why): Requirements or desired outcomes during the process
- Lower the cost of financial operations
- Reduce foreign exchange risks
- Minimize administrative burden
Circumstances (When/Where): The context around the job
- Treasurers have varying levels of financial expertise
- Financing needs vary by industry, market segment, and geography
We recommend using Design Thinking to conduct the iterative learning process that verifies customer hypothesis though prototyping and experimentation.