Customer Research on MYLES — Strategy & Innovation Consulting

Functional, Emotional, and Social Jobs: Understanding the Full Picture

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The 70% of Customer Needs That Your Product Team Ignores

When I ask product teams in manufacturing and MedTech what their customers need, the answer invariably focuses on performance specifications. Faster cycle times. Higher precision. Better durability. Lower weight. More throughput.

These are functional needs — and they matter. But they are not the whole picture. Not even close.

In every JTBD/ODI study we have conducted — across loader cranes, surgical instruments, feeding systems, power management, agricultural equipment — emotional and social outcomes account for 30-40% of the total underserved need landscape. In some categories, they dominate it. A product team that captures only functional needs is making investment decisions based on 60-70% of the available information. They are leaving the rest to chance — and to competitors who pay attention.

How to Conduct a JTBD Interview: Questions, Process, and Template

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Why Most Customer Interviews Produce Useless Data

Your team runs customer interviews. You hear phrases like “it would be great if…” and “we really need a way to…” and “our biggest pain point is…” You diligently record these insights, synthesize them into themes, and feed them into your product roadmap.

And then you build the features, launch them, and discover that adoption is lukewarm.

The problem is not that you talked to the wrong customers. The problem is that you asked questions designed to extract feature requests when you should have been asking questions designed to extract desired outcomes. Traditional customer interviews are solution-oriented — they probe what customers want in a product. JTBD interviews are outcome-oriented — they probe what customers are trying to accomplish and how they measure success.

JTBD vs. Personas: Why Traditional Segmentation Fails

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Six Personas That Were All Wrong

A medical device company — a mid-size European firm with strong positions in surgical instruments — came to us with a problem. They had invested six months and a significant budget developing buyer personas for their flagship product line. Six detailed profiles: “Efficient Eva,” “Research-Driven Rainer,” “Budget-Conscious Barbara,” and three others. Each persona had a name, a photo, a backstory, demographics, psychographics, goals, frustrations, and preferred information channels.

The Complete Guide to Jobs to Be Done

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Why Most Innovation Fails — and What Jobs to Be Done Changes

Here is a number worth pausing on: industry research consistently puts the new-product failure rate at roughly 70% — Doblin’s well-known study reported 96% across all innovation initiatives; subsequent academic work has put the figure for new consumer products in the 70–80% range. Whichever number you trust, the majority of new products do not meet their financial targets. Not because teams lack talent. Not because budgets are thin. They fail because teams build products around what they think customers want rather than understanding what customers are actually trying to accomplish.

What Are Jobs to Be Done? A Primer for Product Leaders

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Question Your Product Team Is Not Asking

Every product team asks some version of “what do customers want?” It is the default question. It drives surveys, focus groups, advisory boards, and roadmap meetings. And it is the wrong question.

Customers do not want products. They want progress. They want to move from a current state — marked by frustration, inefficiency, risk, or dissatisfaction — to a better state. Products are just the means. When your product team focuses on what customers want in a product, they get a list of feature requests filtered through the customer’s limited awareness of what is technically possible. When they focus on what progress customers are trying to make, they get a durable understanding of the market that outlasts any single product generation.

The Job Map: Mapping What Customers Are Trying to Accomplish

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Mistake Everyone Makes Before Building a Job Map

When product teams discover Jobs to Be Done, they typically start in the same place: they write a job statement and then immediately ask “what do customers want?” They generate a list of needs, rank them by frequency of mention in qualitative interviews, and call the result a job map.

It is not a job map. It is a prioritized list of feature anecdotes organized under a job statement header. And it fails — consistently and predictably — because it skips the step that makes the job map actually useful: decomposing the job into its functional process steps before identifying any outcomes.