Beamly, a Coty company, recently won a DADI award for Technical Innovation for My Makeup Artist built for the MaxFactor brand.  Daniel Gost and his team designed the application using customer insights gained from Jobs-to-be-Done research conducted with thrv. We interviewed Daniel about how Beamly used Jobs-to-be-Done.

Daniel opened the conversation with a really interesting observation about agile: "Even though we practice agile development and have an 'it’s ok to fail' mentality, the iteration really only happens on the solution. This puts a lot of pressure on choosing the right problem. JTBD helps a ton with that."

The key to choosing the right problem was how JTBD helped the team empathize with the beauty consumer. He pointed out, "Because the interviews were focused on the consumer's goals, they understood how customers do things with lots of different solutions, not just Coty products, and what their obstacles were."

Daniel's project started with a request from Coty--deliver an innovative experience for MaxFactor using AI. It was a pretty broad remit.

The deeper customer empathy fostered by the JTBD work enabled Daniel and his team to connect to customer problems, narrow their focus, and deliver a useful product. As Daniel put it, "JTBD helped us find the "Why" which we used to tell the story of our product and gain buy-in across our organization.

There are three important Whys Daniel identified in this process.

1. Why does the customer care? "With the full job map--all the steps the customer needs to take to achieve their goal successfully--we understood where the customer was coming from and where they needed to go. This put a given problem in context and shaped the way we thought about potential solutions."

2. Why is the problem worth targeting? "Putting qualitative and quantitative research together with thrv was really helpful here. The initial qualitative interviews helped identify potential problems. The quantitative survey showed us if enough people struggled with each problem. We then went back and did more interviews to find out why customers thought each unmet need was an issue."

3. Why the product idea is good? "When we had idea generation sessions, we kept it pretty open, but since we had narrowed down the needs we wanted to work on, it was easy to see when ideas went out on a tangent. The good ideas targeted the unmet needs clearly. If they didn't, it was easy to say no to them. Analyzing our ideas against the speed and accuracy of the customer's existing solutions for the need was the second key. It helped us put ourselves in our customer's shoes.  It was hard to say yes to something that made us think, 'gee this won't help our consumers do things faster and more accurately.' This is a different perspective for the beauty industry. It wasn't until we broke down the JTBD into all of the steps and needs that we realized how complex, functionally difficult, and slow it is for someone to look the way they want."

Daniel explained that a deep understanding of these 3 Whys made it easier to explain his idea to colleagues. Before using JTBD, everything was up for debate and in a design review people would comment on absolutely anything. The unmet needs helped narrow the focus of reviews. Their JTBD insights aligned everyone around the customer.

It was great to hear that Daniel was able to lead a better process by using JTBD, but I wanted to know if he would do anything differently the next time around. In response, he offered a great tip, "Worry less about having a super clear stack ranking of customer needs based on the scores from the quantitative survey. It's a huge improvement to know that you are focused on a real problem so there's no need to stress about whether or not you are working on the *top* need."