A product team at a leading enterprise software company was faced with a newly public competitor. Their competitor was growing faster, taking market share and market value. The team needed help knowing how to compete and accelerate their growth.
Our team helped the team identify the Job-to-be-Done that their business customers were hiring their products to do. We identified the unmet customer needs within the job and analyzed competitive weaknesses by using the unmet needs.
Once the unmet needs were established, the team was able to use speed and accuracy to identify not only competitor
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A brick and mortar retailer was losing share to a large online retailer and a new, fast-growing startup in a consumer market. With both larger and smaller competitors closing in, the retailer needed to identify a new way to differentiate their product offering.
Our team helped the retailer understand how consumers struggle to get multiple, two-sided jobs done. We identified the jobs, unmet customer needs, and competitive weaknesses, which led to creating new product ideas to get the job done faster and more accurately for consumers. Throughout the process, we used our Jobs-to-be-Done framework to measure the customer value of new ideas relative to the competitors to mitigate product roadmap risk.
By focusing on the job, our team was able to identify a problem the retailer was facing from their customer’s point of view. From this, we developed a detailed analysis of why the company was losing market value and how to fix it with new product offerings to create equity value with less risk.
Executive MBA programs were experiencing a 43% decrease in company sponsorships, while the number of students paying their own tuition increased by 42%. Kellogg School of Management was no exception. Despite the increase in self-sponsored enrollment, they were struggling to identify why students were willing to pay out-of-pocket and whether or not this represented a threat or a growth opportunity.
Because executive students were hiring an executive MBA for different reasons than a corporate sponsor, it was critical to understand the real, underlying market or the Job-to-be-Done. Our team helped Kellogg identify the job (“realize my full potential”) and unmet customer needs in the job-to-be-done that were not being satisfied by competitors.
Kellogg gained clarity on their true market, competition, and customer needs. They used Jobs-to-be-Done to determine new competitive threats, such as LinkedIn, that were previously not analyzed or even considered. As a result, they could position their program to compete by helping executive students overcome their struggles to realize their full potential.
A large, public B2B software company had multiple competitors with very similar products. The problem was they had an undifferentiated product and messaging, so customers weren’t able to distinguish why or how the company’s product was more valuable to them. As a result, their team was experiencing major pricing pressure and needed to justify their invoices to their large enterprise customers (CFOs) who were questioning the value they were getting.
We helped the company’s team identify their customer’s Job-to-be-Done and all the needs in the job. This enabled the team to differentiate their product from competitors by focusing on unmet needs that they satisfied faster and more accurately. We provided them with a new way of positioning the product in their market, and a new way to demonstrate the value of their products to their customers.
With a focus on the Job-to-be-Done, the company was able to align their internal teams and develop a stronger positioning strategy so their sales team can more directly differentiate from the competition. Their existing and new customers better understood the value they were getting.
A large pharmaceutical company had invested in a medical device start-up to help with testing drug hypotheses in humans. These drug trials are extremely expensive and time-consuming. The medical device company wanted to build a device that would accelerate the process of collecting blood samples.
Our team identified the Job-to-be-Done, all if its steps, and all of the needs. Medical professionals knew how to execute the job, but the market opportunity was to enable patients to execute the job on their own, without the need for a trained professional.
By identifying all the needs, thrv helped the company build a product roadmap that would enable a much larger set of customers (patients) to execute the job and reduce the risks and expenses associated with large-scale clinical drug trials.
A business software company was under competitive pressure from a large competitor who partnered with a smaller start-up. This put the company in a difficult situation, and they needed to determine what to build, market, and sell in order to differentiate from their competition.
thrv analyzed the customer’s Job-to-be-Done and the competitive offerings in the market. This enabled the company to identify their competitors’ weaknesses and where customers were underserved.
The company developed features to directly target the unmet customer needs in the market. This lowered the product development risk because the new feature did not require any technical risk. It only required changes to the existing product that satisfied the unmet need faster and more accurately than the competition.