10 Dec Jobs-to-be-done and Opportunity Score
What is Jobs-to-be-done?
Jobs-to-be-Done Theory by Anthony Ulwick had a major impact on the processes of knowing and understanding customers’ needs.
It is dedicated to the exploration of the customer’s need and making it visible and “tangible” for your entire organisation and everyone involved in developing a product for THAT customer.
In his own words “How would decision-making improve if everybody in your organisation had knowledge of all your customer’s needs? How much more effective would your product and marketing teams be if it were possible to determine with a high level of confidence exactly what customer needs are underserved? What possibilities would arise if it became possible to discover segments of customers with unique sets of unmet needs? Knowledge of all the customer’s needs changes everything”.
Anthony Ulwick starts this discourse in his “What Customers Want” book and you can read more about the theory and frameworks, with the later addition and development – here.
Opportunity Score
Gap analysis is closely tied with the opportunity score.
Now, how to calculate the Opportunity Score?
Anthony Ulwick, in his book “What Customers Want” describes his outcome-driven innovation approach. To make opportunities more tangible and quantify them, he emphasizes the importance and satisfaction.
Ulwick’s formula is;
Opportunity Score = Importance + Maximum (Importance – Satisfaction, 0)
In this formula, we subtract satisfaction from importance, as in gap analysis.
What’s different here is that Ulwick doesn’t allow the difference between the Importance and Satisfaction to become negative (as we can see, it can not go below zero). And by adding to this difference the importance he solves the problem for the gaps of the same size.
Ulwick considers opportunities with scores greater than 15 (the scale is 0-10, so the min is 0 and max 20) to be very attractive, and the ones with a score below 10 to be unattractive.