How do we get personas to "do their job"?

What are "jobs to be done"?

The "jobs to be done" (JTBD) approach assumes that a market consists of people who want a task done or a problem solved. In return, they buy a product. As Theodore Levitt, marketing professor at Harvard Business School, said: "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!".

Imagine if all developers, marketers, strategists and R&D managers in your company had a common understanding of what customer needs are and which of those needs are unmet. Such alignment and focus changes everything and cannot be taken for granted: historically, the main cause of product and service failure is a misalignment with customer needs. No wonder: 95% of product teams don't agree on what a "customer need" even is. Jobs-to-be-Done Theory provides a framework for defining, categorizing, capturing and organizing all of your customers' needs.

With the knowledge of customer needs, a product team can:

• Determine which needs are unfulfilled,
• Discover customer segments with unique, unmet needs,
• systematically design groundbreaking products
• Predict which new concepts and offerings will prevail on the market,
• coordinate the measures of marketing, development and R&D in order to orchestrate the systematic creation of customer value.

Before a company can define the needs of its customers, however, it must first define its customers. This is where data-driven personas comes into play. They then fulfill a dual role, because they are a need of the company and in turn show the company the needs of its customers. In order to gain a deep understanding of the customer's task to be completed, a company must be able to identify these "needs" of the customer in connection with the completion of this task.

Design and use personas correctly

For personas to help us make the right decisions and target our customers correctly, they must not only be data-based, but also use the right data: A company that sells shoes needs to know what trends the target group follows, what their fashion budget is and where they look for new shoes. If you want to sell a toothbrush to the same people, you don't need to know how many times a year the customer can or wants to buy new shoes and whether she is looking for comfort or the latest trend.
Before we create a persona, it is therefore important to clarify which characteristics of this persona reflect real needs that our product can solve, and which would simply fill the poster but not add any value in the specific case.

But wait! There is one more step before that, which is often skipped: When we develop a product, you usually have a customer in mind who will find our product useful. When the product is then launched on the market, 99 times out of 100 it will be used in a different way than originally intended. This is a tough nut to crack for product developers. To avoid it, we take the traditional route: you define your target market, then create personas and try to define the problems within the personas.
How about we turn the tables for once: We list the problems that our product can solve and then segment the problems. By focusing on the problem, we can define what value we create and who is interested in that value. This path then leads to a much more insightful persona because it is unbiased.

Too many personas also cause confusion: have you ever tried to have a conversation with 5 people at the same time? In the B2C context, there can be a few personas, especially to cover the various sales channels. But in the B2B context, the champion persona is the most important, while other personas should primarily address potential objections. In any case, it is better to focus on the few that are really important and serve our specific goals.

Persona templates help us to develop an idea of our persona and their pain points and also to ensure that nothing is forgotten. However, they can also be limiting and "outside the box" thinking is often vital, especially in marketing. Therefore, when creating your personas, consider the specific goals you want to achieve through marketing or product initiatives. For example, depending on the target group, this may include using or avoiding technical jargon, using a certain design or font for advertising or making customers laugh.

Personas should be able to answer the following questions:

• What do customers NEED, or what problem do they want to solve?
• What are our challenges?
• What skills does my company need to master these challenges?
• What motivates customers to make a purchase decision?
• What functional and emotional benefits does my product offer customers?

And then: get the whole team on board and share responsibility for the functioning of personas. In our persona playbooks, you will find precise details for each persona, which "jobs" they can do with it and which measures this persona helps with. This makes it easy to get all team members on the same page and pull together.