What are people really trying to do with data?
JTBD and DMCA. Opportunities in the business of data.
Why do people want data? What do they use it for? What are they trying to do, really?
What kind of itch can be scratched using web scraping and web automation? How can we benefit from these technologies?
Put simply, four verbs: Decide, Monitor, Create, and Automate.
Let’s first look at something called the JTBD framework. JB.. what? Jobs-to-be-done.
Here’s a good description: https://www.productplan.com/glossary/jobs-to-be-done-framework/
The jobs-to-be-done framework is an approach to developing products based on understanding 1) the customer’s specific goal, or “job,” and 2) the thought processes that would lead that customer to “hire” a product to complete the job.
The customer doesn’t need a drill. The customer needs a well-drilled hole.
If we apply this lens to web automation and web data acquisition, we will have three goal states that data can help accommodate:
Reduce uncertainty, increase comfort, increase credibility
Create new revenue stream / increase existing revenue
Reduce hassle and cost, saves time and effort
We can now map the four previous verbs onto each of the three different goals.
Reduce uncertainty, increase comfort, increase credibility
Decide
Support (and often justify) decision making
Validate assumptions and hypotheses, answer questions
Sample use cases / application: Price intelligence, Market research, Alt data for finance
Monitor
Brand performance / reputation, market share, compliance enforcement
Create new revenue stream / increase existing revenue
Create (and build)
Training data to create AI model, surface pattern
Build asset (content generation, populate and enrich catalogue)
Reduce hassle, reduces cost, saves time, effort, resources
Automate (and streamline)
Sample use cases / application: BPA / RPA, lead generation, recruitment intelligence
Understanding this will help you spot opportunities and gaps in the market if you are a product manager, business operator, or entrepreneur. Can you think of any other essential function of data?
Next week we will look at the different common use cases that businesses use data for. What exactly do they decide, monitor, automate, and create?
Bonus: Four fundamentals of the jobs-to-be-done framework: https://productcollective.com/what-is-jobs-to-be-done-framework/
People buy products and services to get a “job” done. The job describes what the customer is trying to accomplish, not the solution that they use to accomplish it.
Jobs are functional with emotional and social components. When you dig into these emotional and social components, you’ll pick up the language customers use to describe their unmet needs. When you can describe your value proposition using your customer’s words that improves your go to market message.
A Job-to-be-Done is stable over time. What someone trys to accomplish stays pretty consistent over time. How they try to accomplish that job changes as they become aware of new and different products.
The Job is the unit of analysis. When you focus on customer jobs, you fall in love with the problem rather than the solution. That improves the chances that your product design addresses customer’s needs rather than blindly delivering functionality that adds limited value.
Originally published to Proses.ID.