Anna Hughes, Director of User Research at Promethean, walks through how her team applied the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework to a real classroom management product challenge. Over five weeks, the team moved from a sprawling prototype with vague value propositions to a prioritized set of hero features grounded in quantified teacher needs. The talk covers the full process: scoping the job hierarchy, structured qualitative interviews, metric collection, survey-based quantification, and value proposition development.
Key Takeaways
- Scope the job hierarchy early. JTBD research can operate at many altitudes. Mapping high-level goals down to discrete task steps helps teams focus on the right questions rather than trying to unpack everything at once.
- Keep job metric statements solution-free. A valid job metric captures the need in the customer's language with no embedded solution. Statements that name a specific tool or method already foreclose the design space.
- Collect more than you need in interviews, then ruthlessly prioritize. The Promethean team gathered over 300 raw job metrics from 10 interviews, then cut to 50 for the survey. Removing duplicates and aligning on meaning as a team is essential before quantification.
- The importance-satisfaction gap reveals where to invest. Plotting survey results by importance versus satisfaction identifies clear opportunity zones, table stakes, sleepers, and cost savers. Large gaps signal high-value features worth prioritizing.
- A feature-to-pain-point mapping exercise sharpens prioritization. Features that address multiple pain points rise to the top. Gaps in coverage point to blind spots worth exploring in ideation.
- JTBD builds internal confidence as well as customer understanding. Framing the output as a prioritized, quantified list of needs, rather than qualitative themes, made the work legible and credible to product and leadership stakeholders who were unfamiliar with the method.
Questions & Answers
- If you were to advise a company unfamiliar with Jobs to Be Done, what is the one big benefit of the framework, especially in a service industry?
- The biggest benefit, and the way Hughes sold it internally to stakeholders who found the concept intangible, was the output: a prioritized, quantified list of customer needs that teams can directly develop solutions for. That tangibility, framed as 'you're going to get a list of eight needs we're going to go tackle, and we'll know how to resource and prioritize,' made it credible to product and leadership stakeholders who had no prior exposure to the method.
- What are the best practices or lessons learned from wanting to be hands-on with the research and give your team experience, including how you work with vendors and partners?
- Hughes adopted a coaching model internally, similar to what Vend Bridge used with her team. For a recent project on software licensing models, she sat with the product manager to align on research questions and objectives, co-developed the interview guide, ran the first interview while the PM observed, debriefed together, then had the PM run the next interview while she observed and gave feedback. She has used this approach with multiple product managers and finds it builds their confidence, keeps quality high, and lets her shape the interview process while transferring skills to colleagues.
Session Notes
Context and the Starting Problem
Anna Hughes is Director of User Research at Promethean, an educational technology company that makes interactive displays and lesson-planning software for classrooms. In late 2021, the team ran a three-day design sprint on the broad topic of classroom management, which covers everything from behavior management to lesson transitions to room layout. The sprint produced a prototype and generally positive reactions from the handful of teachers interviewed, but the team suspected false positives.
The unanswered questions were familiar to anyone who has been through a design sprint: What will teachers actually pay for? Which features matter most? What is the real value proposition? Are we even solving the right problem?
Why Jobs to Be Done
Hughes considered several quantitative methods including conjoint analysis, Kano, and A/B testing, but kept returning to a question rooted in Clayton Christensen's JTBD framework: do we really understand what teachers are trying to accomplish, and what they are hiring different tools to do for them? She proposed a JTBD study, got buy-in from product and management, and then had to figure out how to actually execute one.
When you go into the literature and you start doing exploration about how do I actually execute a jobs to be done project, there are so many resources out there, and there are books and canvases and things you can download, but there was no 'and here's how you do it.'
Hughes engaged a coaching partner, Vend Bridge, based in Switzerland, specifically because she wanted to learn the method alongside her team rather than fully outsource the work. The model involved explanation at each stage, team execution, critique, and iteration. The full project ran over five weeks.
Phase 1: Mapping the Job Hierarchy
The team started by mapping their assumptions about teacher jobs into a hierarchy. At the highest level sat broad goals like helping students prepare for life and contributing to the community. Below that were more specific jobs tied to planning, delivering, and reflecting on lessons. The hierarchy served a practical scoping function: it let the team choose the right altitude for their research rather than trying to study everything at once.
Phase 2: Structured Qualitative Interviews
For each of the 10 interviews, the team built a Miro board with cards representing discrete steps in the lesson planning and delivery process. The interview opened with a concrete prompt: tell me about the last time you planned a lesson. From there, the interviewer asked the participant to put the task cards in order, add missing steps, and correct any language that did not match how they actually worked.
The team listened for signals that pointed to job metrics: phrases like 'this always takes extra time' or 'I never do this.' When those signals appeared, the interviewer would restate what they heard in job metric form and invite the participant to correct it.
What Makes a Valid Job Metric
- Stated in the customer's own language.
- Solution-free. Saying 'I want to use Google Drive to compile my content' is not a job metric because it names a solution.
- Precise enough to be measured. It should include a direction (minimize, maximize) and a unit so it can be rated in a survey.
- Example: 'I want to compile content in the fewest possible steps when setting up a lesson so I can remember everything.'
Observers, not just interviewers, were essential. While the interviewer ran the conversation, observers captured rough job metrics in a shared spreadsheet in real time. Across 10 interviews the team collected over 300 raw job metrics.
Phase 3: Survey Quantification
Three hundred metrics is far too many to survey. The team removed duplicates, aligned on meaning, and cut the list to 50. These were grouped by stage in the lesson journey and loaded into a Qualtrics survey.
For each metric, respondents rated two things on a five-point scale: how important is it that you can do this, and how satisfied are you with your ability to do it today. The gap between importance and satisfaction is the opportunity signal.
Reading the Results
- Table stakes: High importance, high satisfaction. Competitors must meet these to be in the game.
- Opportunities: High importance, low satisfaction. The biggest investment targets.
- Sleepers: Low importance, low satisfaction. Lower priority.
- Cost savers: Low importance, low satisfaction. Not worth significant investment.
The Promethean results showed overall low satisfaction across the board, meaning teachers found existing solutions lacking across most job metrics. The spread of results was wide, which made it possible to identify clear hero features rather than everything clustering in one zone.
Largest Opportunity Areas
- Selecting teaching methods and tools: 165% potential improvement over current solutions.
- Compiling content: large gap between importance and satisfaction.
- Managing distractions and interruptions during the lesson: one of the biggest pain points overall.
- Technology failures in the classroom: a specific and significant pain point, notable given that Promethean is itself an EdTech provider.
- Saving notes and reflecting on how to improve a lesson.
Phase 4: Feature-to-Pain-Point Mapping
With quantified needs in hand, the team split into sub-groups and mapped existing prototype features to the identified pain points. Groups then swapped and critiqued each other's mappings. Features that addressed multiple pain points naturally rose to the top of the priority list. Gaps, areas where no existing feature addressed a pain point, flagged potential blind spots for new ideation.
Student focus and attention emerged as the dominant pain point. When a lesson is interrupted, students lose focus, and regaining that attention is difficult. Technology failures were a major driver of these interruptions.
Phase 5: Value Proposition Development
In a final workshop, the team pulled together the job category, the primary pain point, the relevant features, and the desired customer action to craft a value proposition. The exercise forced specificity: a vague promise like 'save teachers time planning lessons' (which describes nearly every EdTech product) was replaced with something concrete.
One click, all eyes to the front.
For a teacher, that promise is immediately legible. It addresses the exact pain point the data identified: losing student focus during a lesson and struggling to get it back. The team came out of the project with seven hero features, a scoped solution area, a customer-centered value proposition, and enough confidence in the underlying needs to move into planning for the next quarter.
Applying JTBD Beyond a Single Project
Hughes has since adapted the coaching model she experienced with Vend Bridge for use internally. When working with a product manager on a new research question, she will co-develop the interview guide, run the first interview while the PM observes, debrief together, then swap roles for the next interview. This builds PM research capability without fully delegating the quality of the work.
Transcript
Read the full transcript
foreign hi everyone my name is Krista Reed and welcome to October 27th accelerant research virtual insights conference I am so happy that you have joined us that you're able to listen in to the incredible speakers that we have lined up for you I am here to introduce our final speaker today her name is Anna Hughes and before we get started with her presentation the few things that I'd like to walk through you've probably heard this a few times now if you've joined us quite frequently we are at the mercy of tech just bear with us if there's a glitch if a microphone goes out a camera goes out a dog barks a baby cries you name it it will probably happen in this current environment that we're in today so bear with us we'll be up and running this is being recorded So if at any point you have connection issues don't you worry we'll make sure that you're able to access us all of the presentations the next is just to please be respectful with your comments your questions we will make sure at the end of Anna's presentation to pull all of the comments and questions that we're receiving in all of the feeds so we'll do our best to make sure that you get answers to whatever questions that you may have if we're not able to answer all of them today we'll be sure to collect your contact information and follow up with you and then the next is just Network engage interact speak with one another share your information this is really a forum for you so take advantage of it of this opportunity to make collaborations to get to know other networkers and researchers as well and just enjoy the process and so with that I am more than thrilled to introduce Anna Hughes she's going to talk about jobs to be done in the real world and with that Anna it's great to have you I'm going to stop sharing my screen I'm going to go behind the scenes and the floor is yours thank you thanks for um having me here today I'm so excited to join everyone and talk about one of my very favorite topics which is jobs to be done um so I'm going to share my screen here um there we go let's move that here alrighty so um all right um so a little bit about me I thought we might want to know who you're listening to today um quickly I'm Anna Hughes I am director of user research for Promethean Promethean is in the educational technology space we make a big interactive touch screen displays for classrooms and then we have software that helps teachers um uh create plan and deliver lessons that take advantage of that interactive nature of the of the panel so I started off in social sciences I have a degree in Psychology I did some work in mental health for a while got into the business World um and I've had lots of different kinds of roles um everything from product management to product marketing um I've worked agency side client side I've worked for big companies and little companies I've worked in industries from everything to from travel to frozen fish to Veterinary devices and over time what I've come to learn about myself is uh first of all I love my family obviously I love my dogs um here you can see pictures of my husband my daughter and I we had just built those stairs on our house in Seattle I loved a row um and really what I love about every job I've really had in the business world has been the opportunity to kind of blend my love of understanding humans um with whatever role I'm in so so in all of these roles I've you know had some aspect of my work which was really trying to understand um why people do the things they do why they buy the products that they do Etc um and what I've really come to understand also about myself is that I love educational technology so that's me all right So today we're going to talk about applying jobs to be done in the real world um and I'm going to use a case study to kind of um walk you through how I learned about jobs to be done and um and and how it works in applications so the challenge um for our team in this case study is that um back in late 2021 we did a design Sprint focused generally on this area of classroom management which is a huge broad area um for those of you who know anything sort of about teaching or classrooms classroom management is everything that happens in the classroom except for kind of the actual lesson content so it's managing student Behavior it's managing transitions between topics or between classes it's how the room is laid out it's the seating chart it's um rewards and you know uh I guess demerits maybe for Behavioral issues um it's kind of everything so it's a giant broad topic and so we we have this uh design Sprint we generated lots and lots of ideas um our fantastic designers built this really beautiful prototype and this was a classic agile design Sprint so this was done over the course of three days um and we did a couple of well we did a um a handful of a couple of interviews kind of going into the design Sprint and then um the we did uh another handful of interviews once we had our prototype to show it to people and um get some feedback on the concepts um because this was such a big broad topic and the Prototype covered I felt like kind of a lot of everything um we kind of walked away feeling like yes people seemed um generally enthusiastic about where we were headed but we kind of felt like maybe we had gotten some false positives and we weren't quite sure where to go next so we had lots of unanswered questions um and I'm sure that those of you on the call have probably heard lots of these questions you know from your partners in in product like what will teachers pay for it which is the most important feature what's our value proposition um even what are we really competing with do we really know enough about how teachers are planning and delivering lessons today and what would really compel them to change their behavior and change the way that they plan and deliver lessons um so as I as we were kind of going through all these questions I think you know to me the this all came back to this really big question which is are we really solving the right problem and are we solving it in the right way so once we all agree that we still kind of had this question in our head about whether or not we're solving the right problems then it was a question of Okay so we've kind of agreed that on what the question is but there's so many methods out there to choose from when you're trying to figure some of these things out right like so do we do a conjooint to get to um pricing information do we do Kano or Mac stiff on the features that we have to see which ones people really like do we do a b testing comparative testing magnetic testing like there were a million obviously possibilities and ways that we could go um I happen to be a big fan of um Clayton Christensen um and so this this this um quote just kept popping up in my head about what companies really need to hone in on is the progress the customer is trying to make in a given circumstances what they're really hoping to accomplish and when they buy a product what is it that they hire it to do and this kind of kept bubbling up in my head which was do we really understand enough about um what teachers are trying to accomplish at each of these stages do we really know what they're hiring different tools to do for them so I proposed back uh you know maybe we should look at this jobs to be done methodology and so um I got buy-in from you know my management from product management and they're all like yes let's go do it and I said okay and then I was like oh my God now what do I do I don't really know how to do this and when you go into sort of the literature and you start doing exploration about how do I actually execute a job speed done project there are so many resources out there and there are books and there are canvases and things you can download and you know I felt when I went back to um the original um Harvard Business School review um know your customers jobs to be done article it was like it was beautifully laid out and I could see how in this you know um example that they use their that you know they the the fast food company understood that people were buying milkshakes to keep them full until lunch and that was gorgeous but I didn't but there was no like and here's how you do it so um so I started looking at um I talked to people in slack I read things whatever and so um what I kind of came to the conclusion was that this was a time for me to really uh uh go outside of you know the company and try to find some help with this um and we were really fortunate um in the sense that we we had some funds and I was able to um uh find a company called vend Bridge they're located in Switzerland um and what I really liked about them was first of all um as an edtech company we didn't have tons of money to spend so like strategy and um uh uh some of the others I've forgotten now um intercom some of those were kind of outside of our price point and honestly I didn't really want to just Outsource this project to someone else I wanted to learn how to do jobs to be done and I wanted my team to benefit from the experience as well so um so vanderbridge has this really interesting model they do this these coaching engagements where um basically at every stage of the process they do a little bit of kind of um uh explanation and um uh Direction on what we're gonna do we go away as a team do the work come back get some critique and then we execute and move on so at the end of this what we had was um a beautiful sort of job to be done project and um kind of an all new knowledge base that in in our company so that's kind of what I'm here to share with you today um so we have this beautiful framework where we started with kind of um over on the left side you can see we spent most of our time understanding the needs and then on the right hand side mapping the features of this prototype or this notion that we had around classroom management to actual needs all right so to start with um we we mapped out kind of what are our assumptions about uh planning and delivering lessons and and what do we think about why teachers do the jobs that they do and and we laid this out in this hierarchy um so you know at the highest level you know teachers tell us things that you know they're there to help students prepare for for their lives they're here to contribute back to the community and connect with us with students with families and other educators um and you could kind of spend you could have lots and lots of research around those high-level jobs you could probably spend your whole life you know sort of unpacking those um but what was really helpful about this hierarchy is that um it was an opportunity for us to really scope in and and hone in on the altitude for our research and where we wanted to focus our time so in this case um we had some very specific questions to answer about how do teachers go about planning a lesson um delivering a lesson you know reflecting on a lesson those kinds of things so um so we put together sort of a map and this is a little bit of a truncated map it was a little more detailed but um but just for uh the sake of discussion this is kind of a simplified view um we laid out what we believed were kind of was kind of the journey what are the steps that that teachers Take Along this journey of planning preparing and delivering lessons um to use as input to our interviews um so so we prepared this and then we um talked a lot about uncovering Job metrics and I think this is where it becomes I felt I feel like the jobs to be done methodology gets a little mysterious um is like how do you actually go about finding these things out when you're talking to someone like you know the whole notion of laying out a sentence that's like I want to do some I want to to compile content um in the fewest possible steps when I'm setting up a lesson so that I can remember everything so I can get home you know in time for dinner um the um the beauty of these statements is that once they're done they are stated in the customer need has been articulated in their own language um they're solution free so this is really important um when we're thinking about jobs to be done is to remove ourselves from trying to solve the problem or even creating statements that include Solutions with them so another another way of saying this is like if I wanted to go back and deconstruct this sentence um if I said I want to use Google Drive to compile my content in the fewest possible steps that's not really a job metric I've already I've stated a solution in that in that sentence which is what we want to avoid here and and these jobs to be done statements we want to just capture the need and then it's our job really to go away and figure out what the solution is but in any case we we really want these statements to be precise have some measurable unit um so that they're ready to be Quantified in a survey um so let me talk a little bit about how we go about uncovering these job metrics so the way we did it um was we created a mirror board and obviously with covid these were all um uh remote interviews but for each interview we developed we put together a mirror board that laid out kind of the more detailed steps that might go into um planning a week planning a day planning a lesson delivering the lesson reflecting on a lesson like all more discrete kind of steps that might go into those jobs and teachers in this case um we talked through okay um I'm getting a notice that my internet connection is unstable it's kind of Stormy in Seattle I'm hoping that um everything will be okay but I am going to turn my camera off um so uh uh so to start our interviews we would have the the participant kind of review these little cards that we had and then we would ask them tell me about the last time you planned a lesson just describe the situation what class was it um what time of year was it what were you trying to teach what you know or what was the subject right and we'd start the conversation and as we would do that we would ask them okay great why don't you help us put these different tasks in order and if there's tasks that are missing let us know we'll add them if if something if we said something here in a different language than you would use please let us know when we can update these right so as we went through our conversation um we were listening for things like um okay so uh let's talk about you know delivering the lesson let's say we're there okay what were the things that you had to complete in order to be ready to deliver that lesson what did you do first what'd you do next what was problematic in that process and then or what workarounds did you have to have so we would hear when we started to hear things like um you know this takes a lot of time to complete with you know then we would want to dig in there and say okay well tell me about it tell me more about that what is it exactly that takes extra time and then you could get into unpacking like oh well you know um I like to collect things from all over the Internet and then I kind of forget where I store them and then I have to go back and find them again oh well tell me about that process of finding them again um so as we went we had these really rich conversations um about this process of planning and delivering a lesson and to the point of the jobs to be done when we would hear things like um uh this always takes me extra time or I never do this those are um sort of clues that we're about to hear a job metric so the job of the interviewer at that point was to say oh um correct me if I'm wrong but I think what I heard you just say is that when you're preparing or or when you're collecting resources for your lesson um you want to do that in the fewest possible steps because I heard you say that sometimes you forget is is that correct and and then you know give the participant an opportunity to correct that statement or whatnot um and that's important for a couple of reasons like you're actually restating back to the participant what you've heard giving them an opportunity to correct you um but also on the back end um the people who were observing were very important in this process so we all had opportunities to interview and then to observe and the job of The Observers as you can see over here on the right this spreadsheet of job metrics is to capture those statements as the interviewer was going so um uh for and so these are really rough notes right that we were capturing on the fly like I to make the lesson plan I want to create as little material as possible from scratch I never want to have to start from scratch um uh the students understand as much as possible what about what's going on in the world um so these are examples of kind of Our rough um job metrics that we were capturing throughout this interview process so um so we use this structured interviewing process and uh we did a total of 10 interviews and throughout those interviews um we collected a total of 300 and more chop metrics so and they were categorized along these different um sort of uh steps along the the journey right um so here are some examples so 300 is way too many to put into a survey which was the next stage of of the process was to quantify what we heard in these um interviews so as a team we sat down and we said okay we've got 300 that's too many first we went through obviously got rid of the duplicates um clarified and talked with each other about oh what did you mean when you wrote this one um and prioritized down to 50 metrics which um we felt like was the absolute Max that we could cram into any one survey um but we wound up with 50 metrics that we wanted to go out and quantify um in our uh in the next stage of the of the process so we have our 15 metrics um we built a survey and qualtrics um where we um in the survey we asked users to rate the importance of these job metrics um uh and we kind of collected them in logical groups like you know when you're planning your week for instance um so we asked the respondents to rate how important in each of these metrics was so how important is it to you that you have to create as little material as possible from scratch on a scale of one to five you can see the rating skill there and then for that same job we asked them how satisfied are you with your ability to do that do this today how satisfied are you that you can create lessons without creating material from scratch so what we're looking for in this survey as as our output is kind of this Delta between what's important to the respondent and how satisfied they are with their ability to um to complete that job so we're looking so the big opportunities are the ones where you can see here where the um kind of the Blue Line oops my colors got a little messed up but the Blue Line represents satisfaction so you know over here to the right of this Arc you can see the blue line is relatively low meaning I'm not very satisfied with this part of my job or my ability to complete this job the way I want to or accomplish the thing I set out to do and how important that job or that um task is so where you see these gaps between importance and satisfaction are big opportunities for improvements in the lives of these teachers and then here's another way of looking at it over here which is um customers expectations of a product when they hire it or you know when they use it and their uh degree of satisfaction so um what we're looking at here is kind of plotting if you plot out these you know satisfaction versus importance um and these little dots represent all of the little job metrics um up here um on the top right you have table Stakes things things that people are like yes I'm very these are very important and I'm very satisfied with my current solution so in order to compete you're going to have to make sure that you account for those things um down here on the bottom right these are the opportunities these are areas where um where people uh might not um might think things things are really important but they have low satisfaction again big opportunities there um sleepers these are things that are you know they may not be terribly satisfied with with these experiences but they're not terribly important so um probably not the first place to invest and then cost Savers are things that are you know sort of uh low importance low satisfaction so don't really bother spending much time there um okay all right so moving along so these are kind of um uh um uh what we're looking for these are examples these are not our actual results can everyone see my screen okay is this I just got a notification I'm not about something about my people being able to see my screen so hopefully everybody is following along okay all right so move moving on into our actual results we here we go okay so here I was hoping for a little bit of interaction so I've got a couple of markings here um I've called out these are Big areas of opportunity are there other things that people notice about um about this graph these were our actual results and throw them in chat not sure if people can come off of mute but I'm watching the chat if anybody wants to throw out an answer hi Anna so this is Krista um people will be able to respond in the chat no one else will be able to go off of mute though but I do want to confirm I am able to see your screen without any issues okay cool thank you oops all right well um overall low satisfaction among jobs perfect yep absolutely that is one of the things that I noticed for sure so this so if you can see here our median level of satisfaction with their ability to complete these jobs is very low um teachers are saying you know the solutions I have today are not great anything else that people notice I've kind of drawn a bracket around it I kind of gave a hint there foreign well I will tell you what I think what I what we saw here with these with this bracket is that um uh there's a lot of differentiation of these job metrics right so they're they're really spread out which means that um there's opportunity really for for us to um pick out hero features right so these two kind of over here to the far right um or sorry kind of down here in this opportunity area it's easy to for us to kind of single out opportunities for improvement right if everything was all clustered together it makes it a little harder to tease out which which things are going to be our hero features which are and which are kind of um less important but because things were well distributed um it also means that we had some good opportunities um to separate out some hero features um and obviously with this kind of low overall satisfaction um we have this great opportunity to improve the lives of of teachers when they are planning and delivering lessons so another visualization of this you can see here where these purple arrows are there are some gigantic gaps between um satisfaction and importance so things like selecting teaching methods and tools um this 165 this percentage is the potential improvement over the current solution so if we were able to solve these problems for teachers um we would improve their lives by 165 percent or improve their ability to um uh complete these tasks and feel satisfied about their methods of uh set of completing the tasks similarly under compiling content we have some really big opportunities to improve um gigantic opportunity here with managing kind of distractions and interruptions during the day and interestingly underneath the hood here in this interruptions technology failures in the classroom or are an absolute massive pain point for teachers which is really interesting for us to hear as Ed Tech providers and then just being able to save notes and reflect and know how to improve the lesson so so we got all these metrics back and we're like oh my gosh this is so exciting we actually know what teachers need and if we look at so average importance for all metrics was about a six and you can see that there are lots of things here that are really important for teachers um and so lots of opportunities for improvement so we kind of um distilled out of this six main kind of pain areas um that you know were on this value map number one again was interrupting the lesson um number two was really quickly finding and organizing these resources and so on so um so we were able to kind of identify where these need spaces were and then um we wanted to map those and really identify what were the hero features or what are the the really exciting features that are going to get that when teachers see them or they're going to say yes that solves my problem I'm so excited about that I can't wait to use it um so what we did then was we went through a mapping exercise and we split up into teams and we each took a set of features and a set of pain points and we mapped them together and then we swapped and we rated each other so um so that we all had a chance to look at all the pain points and also to kind of question each other and say really is that really that much of a priority or you know is this really addressing that pain Point um so which was you know led to some really fruitful conversations but what we can kind of see here is where we have a feature that addresses lots of pain points that automatically kind of Pops at the top of like okay you know aside from technical considerations and whiz-diffing and all of that stuff in an Ideal World you really want to prioritize obviously the features that are going to solve um pains for your customers um and so where we can do three that would be a priority over one over a feature that only solves for two um what you see here in this pain point two column is that um we you know we didn't really have features that were addressing that pain point and so maybe that's a blind spot maybe that's an opportunity for us to ideate on some um uh some new Concepts or some new features that we hadn't thought of so out of this um we recognize that student focus is a huge pain point I talked about a little bit about interruptions um so you know what the pain Point around an interruption is that you lose your students Focus they drift off they get distracted by something else um you know they lose the train of thought all of the things that happen to us as adults also happen to children when they get interrupted um and especially around these technical issues so now we have everything right like we have like okay we know the kinds of features that we want to prioritize um and we know that we're solving real customer pain points we kind of know the job area that we're targeting you know we've we've got a a much tighter scope for our solution than we did when we started um we have our set of hero features the things that we believe are going to really um capture um the excitement and attention of um of teachers when they see our solution um and we kind of kind of know what we want them to do but we haven't really pulled that together into um a value proposition so we did another Workshop where we took um we looked at okay what are the themes around kind of the needs what are the solutions that we think map and how do we craft those into um a value proposition so we're looking at you know the specific job category right so um in this case we know that delivering a lesson there's lots of pain points in there and we know the biggest pain point is that interruptions occur students lose their focus once they get lost it's hard to get them back hard to get them refocused um and we're calling for the sake of this discussion we have the attention grabber toolkit um but in our solution you know we have um tools to help teachers get their their students um to refocus um and so you know the desired action is for them to go sign up for a trial um and so uh in the middle here's our promise right this is really the value proposition is what it is that we're promising to our customers so our outcome really here of all of of this work which actually happened I guess time scale probably people want to know time scale this happened over the course of five weeks so it was pretty quick um you know we really as a team got together and we're pretty focused on getting this done quickly um because we were going into planning for the next quarter and we wanted to make sure that we had all of the information we needed um to spin up a team and get going on this um so the outcome here really was that you know we have a value proposition it's believable it's compelling it's centered in customer needs um and we know that we're going to have a product that we can deliver that will um uh deliver against those customer needs so we started off with this problem area of like we have so many ideas and so many things we want to do narrowed down now to we have these seven hero features we can be much more targeted um and uh um about how we deploy our resources and how we prioritize what we're going to do and then to this question about will they pay for it we know we have this customer centered value proposition we haven't landed on a price point we haven't done you know a pricing study but we know based on what we've heard from teachers and the needs that we're going to solve for them that this is going to be that something that's very compelling and we believe people would be willing to invest in and of course as we go we will do pricing studies we've got that on the map on our roadmap but uh but we do feel confident you know now that we have this customer centered value proposition that we have something that people would be willing to pay for so we started off if you remember with this like really giant prototype that did all kinds of things and and you know we had this sort of they uh value proposition of yeah we're going to help teachers save time when they're planning a lesson which is kind of the promise of every piece of educational technology out out there it's it wasn't very compelling even to us who are designing the solution um and instead of that our new value proposition one click all eyes to the front which is um just beautiful if you're a teacher the notion that you're going to get your students refocused you're going to get them re-engaged you're going to have their eyes to the front and on the lesson engaging with you so that is what I have today I wanted to leave plenty of time for questions um so um I will pull up my little q a um Heidi if you were to advise a company that wasn't familiar with jobs to be done what the one big benefit is to this framework what is it in a service industry yeah Heidi um thank you that's a great question and it's one that I kind of struggled with bonus just being totally transparent um my manager and my you know the people in the product team were not at all familiar with jobs to be done they hadn't really and it felt very intangible to them the biggest benefit and the way that I was able to kind of sell this internally was this notion of coming out with this prioritized set of needs that we could then develop solutions for um and it and done in a way that was more scientific if you will than had been done in the past um and that was really the big selling thing was making this super tangible for my stakeholders was you're going to get this you're going to get a list of eight needs or whatever it is that we're going to go out and tackle and we'll know how to Resource and we'll know how to prioritize any other questions comments and I have a question for you so before you got right into the presentation um you talked about wanting to be Hands-On with this research and project and also give your team experience what are some of the best practices or lessons learned that you've started to incorporate as you think about how to work with your team how to partner with other suppliers or vendors or just approach your projects in general great question um this was a terrific model for us in terms of how to Mentor other teams so for instance um so one of um one of the things that we're interested in is the notion of continuous interviewing continuous feedback right and so one of the challenges that we have as a research team is how to mentor and encourage other teams to engage in research as well so I really have kind of taken this Consulting approach with a lot of how I engage now with other teams so a good example was recently we were uh had a project to investigate um licensing models for software um so I sat down with the product manager and we talked through the research questions we talked through the objectives um and he had some you know very specific questions so um that he wanted to get answered so we developed an interview guide together um we we talked quite a bit about who he wanted to talk to um and then and then I just used the model right so um I did the first interview with the first customer and had him observe and take notes afterwards we debriefed and we talked about that experience he took the next interview again afterwards and I took notes we debriefed and discussed you know what how he felt about it and you know and I gave him some pointers um so um it's worked really well and I've done that now with a number of our product managers and it's worked really really well I think it helps them feel more confident in their skills and um and and I think I don't know how other researchers out there feel about this but it also gives me a little bit of comfort to be able to guide and shape that interview process a little bit um and help you know kind of make sure that we're uh sharing best practices with our colleagues awesome thank you yeah I am not seeing excuse me any further questions on YouTube anyone else have a question here within the zoom function that you'd like to submit in the chat all right I think we are all out of our questions then all right thank you so much this was great I really appreciate you being the closer for us the last uh presenter of the day yes thank you great way to end thank you so much and thank you everyone for joining if you would like to view the recordings these will be available to you if you have any further questions you weren't able to to submit them live please don't hesitate to do so thanks for joining us and we will see you at the next virtual insights conference have a great day everyone
