Ep. 233: Eckhart Boehme | Uncovering Hidden Customer Needs: The Power of Jobs to Be Done

What if the key to creating truly innovative products and solutions lies at least as much in uncovering the deep emotional and attitudinal needs of your customers as in mastering technology?

Eckhart Boehme, founder and managing director of Unipro Solutions, shares his approach to putting Clayton Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done framework into practical use. Eckhart demonstrates how in-depth interviews with customers and their families can reveal the underlying personal experiences, emotions, and desires that truly motivate people to seek out and purchase products or services. With these insights in hand, companies often uncover fundamentally different needs than they first anticipated, sometimes even opening up new markets or uses for their products.

We also discuss Eckhart’s Wheel of Progress model, which he designed to reveal the hidden layers of reasoning behind customer decisions. It provides a systematic way to deconstruct customer narratives and identify the jobs that are most likely to drive customer decisions along their cyclical journeys. Learn how this model segments the customer journey into phases of motivation, decision-making, and action. He brings this all to life with a compelling case study about finding a senior living place for an elderly loved one, revealing a hidden but critical job to be done: giving the elderly parent a sense of purpose.

Our conversation also lays bare some common pitfalls when applying the Jobs to Be Done framework, such as focusing too narrowly on functional jobs while missing the bigger picture of the customer's overarching goals and emotional needs.

Guest: Eckhart Boehme, Founder and Managing Director, Unipro Solutions

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-stamped list of topics covered

[1:19] How Jobs to Be Done goes deeper than traditional customer needs analysis

[3:02] Clarifying what Jobs to Be Done entails and why it’s a game changer

[6:08] The Wheel of Progress model and its role in dissecting customer decisions

[10:41] Applying Jobs to Be Done in complex customer service scenarios

[15:00] The practical steps and challenges in implementing this framework

[20:14] Examples of transformative customer insights derived from in-depth interviews

[22:10] Strategies for businesses to effectively harness Jobs to Be Done

[30:54] Future trends and directions in customer experience research

Time-stamped list of notable quotes:

[6:26] “You want to understand where the story starts. What [event] triggered people [wanting to conduct] research and go through pain. Understanding what triggers people have is very valuable because then you can start building a relationship—even before people have started going to a search engine to look for a solution."

[7:51] “When we look at the customer journey, we call it ‘the cycle of progress’ because we think that people make progress in cycles."

[16:01] "We try to design our offerings and the marketing and sales processes to focus on helping customers make progress.”

[24:23] “Jobs to Be Done helps you to do the right thing and design thinking helps you to do things right."

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about Eckhart’s Wheel of Progress
• Learn more about HBS professor Clay Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done Theory and his famous story about how to improve milkshake sales