Integrating JTBD into Client Work: Jonathan Morgan on Applying JTBD
Jonathan Morgan is a design strategist with nearly 20 years of experience. Currently serving as the Director of Innovation & Design Strategy with Balance Innovation, an international business consultancy, he’s helped dozens of companies grow through human-centered approaches.
Jonathan and his team have had great success integrating jobs to be done (JTBD) into their processes. He’s effectively blended JTBD and other methods, such as UX design, experience mapping, and business model design. JTBD is now a cornerstone of their approach.
Jonathan joined us on “JTBD Untangled” to share an example of applying JTBD with one of his clients. He provided a great deal of practical advice and demonstrated how to incorporate JTBD with other activities.
Jim caught up with Jonathan afterward for this interview. Enjoy!
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JIM: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background
JONATHAN: I live in the “don’t knock it until you’ve visited it” capital of the US, Cleveland, Ohio, and work as the Director of Innovation Strategy for Balance Innovation. My journey has been long and winding.
After graduating from college in the early nineties, I started a band and spent over a decade on the road. During this time, the web emerged, and since we barely made enough money to survive and needed to run our band like a business, I learned to build computers from spare parts, hack software, create websites, and build online communities. My dad was an architect, and his belief that design should improve people’s lives has always resonated with me, eventually drawing me to user experience design and human-centered innovation.
Over the next decade, I worked my way into roles as an interaction designer, UX analyst, UX designer, and UX Manager. Then, more than twenty years after completing my undergraduate degree, I earned my master’s degree under Karl Fast, who introduced me to a new way of thinking about innovation, technology, and user experience.
This led to new opportunities for me, such as becoming the Director of User Experience at Rosetta (now PublicisSapient) and the Director of Innovation Strategy at Balance Innovation for the past nine years.
JIM: How did you get into JTBD? What attracted you to the field?
JONATHAN: I’ve studied innovation methodologies for years and found many overly complicated, focusing too much on engineering and technology development processes rather than people’s needs.
As we refined and developed the research and strategy discipline at Balance Innovation, I introduced a modified version of Indi Young’s Mental Model Diagramming (MMD) to identify innovation opportunities. MMD has been a highly effective tool to synthesize qualitative data and identify innovation opportunities. Like Job Mapping, it’s a visual synthesis method that resonates with the ‘designer mind.’
Seeing parallels between MMD and JTBD, I read everything I could on JTBD, including the JTBD Playbook, and quickly started experimenting with live projects. Our team’s approach was relatively easy to learn, and our clients LOVE that we can quantify and score needs and opportunities.
Its accessible language and metaphors simplify client communication and collaboration. Also, since there are various approaches or flavors to JTBD, we see it as a relatively flexible framework rather than a single rigid methodology, giving us the flexibility to build the best plan based on our client’s needs.
JIM: Tell us more about your client work. How do you use JTBD on projects? What’s your process?
JONATHAN: We serve various clients in different industries with wide-ranging needs, but nearly all of our projects originate from a desire to disrupt an industry or category. When we scope projects, we typically give them titles like “The Future Of…”
Adaptability is a strength of our team. It’s typical for us to shift gears regularly. We might work with a consumer product brand that strictly focuses on physical products, followed by work with a software-based medical services company, an emerging smart home platform, and so on.
We embraced JTBD’s flexibility to develop an end-to-end framework and process that serves our clients’ additional needs above and beyond the typical outcomes of JTBD. We call it the Balance Innovation Framework. We break down a program into two core stages: The Problem Space and the Solution Space.
The Problem Space largely follows the JTBD process, including Job Mapping, Importance/Satisfaction survey, and development of Job Stories. What’s different is our final output of the stage, the Experience Design Toolkit, which includes prioritized Innovation Opportunity Spaces, Mindsets for communicating individuals’ need-states as they get their job done, and Experience Principles to guide the design and optimization of product concepts. We also develop an Experience Map, a highly detailed Job Map that contextualizes the other toolkit elements.
The Solution Space is concentrated iterative design. It’s a loop of ideation, concepting, and testing. As we refine potential solutions, we’re working with our client’s design, engineering, and manufacturing teams to dial in the details and ensure solutions are defined in a way that fits their core capabilities and feasibility constraints.
We also work closely with the business and leadership teams to ensure solutions align with the overall strategy of the brand and show promise for significant return on investment. The outcome of our programs is typically a 1- to 5-year roadmap of product and service concepts.
JIM: Can you share any stories of how you used JTBD with a client (anonymous if needed)?
JONATHAN: We typically take on two types of projects: those designed to lead to new-to-the-world solutions and those with a general solution or product category in mind. All of our projects involve JTBD in some way, even when clients have a defined solution in mind. In these cases, we reverse-engineer the solution to hypothesize the JTBD it serves.
Our research focuses on the core JTBD while ensuring interview participants have some connection to the type of products or services our clients sell. For instance, a client wanted to create a new line of countertop kitchen appliances targeting young, busy professionals. We identified that people tend to use countertop appliances more regularly in the morning, so we focused our research on “Feel Energized for the Workday Ahead” while being sure to recruit people who frequently use a variety of kitchen electrics in their morning routines.
Our research was still largely solution-agnostic. Only in ideation and product development do we channel our creativity back towards the type of products they need to create based on corporate objectives and existing product verticals. In the end, the Desired Outcome that scored highest related to efficiency, but in a twist, the end goal of that efficiency was to free up time to relax, read the paper, spend time with the kids, or be mindful before work.
Ultimately, we designed and developed a full line of products that align with the opportunities, mindsets, experience principles, and context of the morning routine. The solutions were minimal, with a consistent experience across all products. One detail of a single-serve coffee maker that I especially like was when in standby mode, instead of harshly flashing the standby lighting, we mirrored the cadence of deep breathing of approximately 15 breaths per minute, adjusting easing to achieve the desired experience in testing — just a subtle, subliminal cue to take a breath and enjoy the morning.
On the whitespace innovation side, Simoniz, a car cleaning and care brand, asked us to find new-to-the-world opportunities. The JTBD was initially ‘Make my car look new again’ and evolved to include ‘Protect my car from the elements,’ and research centered on shadowing individuals as they clean and protect their cars. We defined more than a dozen high-value innovation opportunities and reframed them as job stories for use in ideation.
Ultimately, the project led to the creation of 15 discreet solution concepts or lines of solutions. We just learned a couple of weeks ago that nearly 100% of these concepts have been greenlit and will hit the stores in December 2024 through the Fall 2025.
An added benefit of working closely and often embedding our client teams is that the process of doing the work changes their culture to one that loves the problem as much as the solution. This article in the Globe and Mail shows how the seeds of our work have influenced the culture of innovation at Canadian Tire (parent company of Simoniz).
You’ll find references to the Simoniz work toward the end. Inside the lab where Canadian Tire is developing thousands of new gadgets (Globe and Mail). And another article that speaks to a specific line of Simoniz products as a result of the project. (National Post)
JIM: Thanks for that — those are great stories. How do you introduce your clients to JTBD, if at all? What hurdles do you have to overcome to do so?
JONATHAN: Selling JTBD can be tricky. We have an extremely high ‘win rate’ on these projects once we can walk through the benefits of the approach in person. Getting clients to take that call is difficult and relies on long-term relationship building. We look for leaders in organizations responsible for filling the pipeline with differentiated products, services, or features.
We also look for people who are in an innovation mindset. So, if we get a sense that the person or organization is more focused on keeping up with the competition rather than leading, we know we will have a more difficult time getting them to see the value of our work.
Ultimately, we have to infect potential clients with the idea that people, just like them, want to make progress in their lives, and we can help the client serve customers in meaningful ways their competition doesn’t. It also helps to have concrete success metrics from other projects.
Our go-to metric comes from a client who shared that they release an average of 6–8 new products per JTBD project and that each product accounts for approximately $2–3MIL in annual sales at a 40% margin. It ultimately comes down to the ROI of investing in us.
JIM: How have you integrated JTBD with other approaches from design, innovation, lean, and the like?
JONATHAN: Since our projects typically end with product or feature roadmaps, we look for ways to validate early solution ideas and concepts. The scope of our engagements differs, but ideally, the first step is to validate the value propositions of our solution concepts. This helps us isolate and measure value creation before validating design execution.
My go-to for this is a MaxDiff survey and the Kano Model. In the Kano Model, we ask, ‘if the solution did X, how do you feel?’ and ‘if the solution did not do X, how do you feel?’ for each of our stated value propositions. Asking these questions helps us understand the degree of value people place on the feature. I suggest Googling MaxDiff and Kano Model to learn more — I can’t do it justice in a short interview.
Another excellent method for evaluating business value and roadmap prioritization is the RICE framework. RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. We also employ Design Thinking and Lean approaches, typically in the form of Design Sprints and iterative design.
Some might think these approaches slow the design and development process, but they are quick to execute. The time it will save later in the design process is well worth a few extra days of upfront work.
JIM: Any advice you’d give to other practitioners looking to bring JTBD into their work?
JONATHAN: Start by reading as many perspectives on the methodology as possible. It helps to get into some form of structured training to get an insider’s perspective. I personally took several of the JTBDToolkit courses and had my entire team do the same. (I promise Jim and Elaine didn’t put me up to that!)
Like with most things in life, we get better with repetition. Once you understand the language and process, at least at a basic level, try it out with something small and relatively mundane. It doesn’t have to be work-related.
Stick to a JTBD where you fit the profile of the Job Performer — something like Exercise My Dog. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just something relatable to you. Start by creating a simple Job Map.
As you feel more comfortable with the process and outcomes, pick something work-related but keep the altitude low and focus on a relatively straightforward and narrowly defined JTBD. If you stick with an internal JTBD, practice interviewing co-workers. The overarching gist is to start simple and low-risk and have fun with it.
JIM: Thanks, Jonathan!
