Category: jobs-to-be-done

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AI Amplifies What You Already Are

Okay, at least two of these are true. (1) AI is the most powerful tool for improving human experience. (2) AI is the first step towards the Matrix or the Terminator. (3) AI is a super easy way to make people feel like they don’t mater.  Two of those depends almost entirely on what you were already doing in 2022 pre-AI.

So, gut-check time! Who were you before Gen-AI? You know, before we were talking about lowering operating expenses, the death of a dozen roles, or downplaying the thing because it can’t do X (yet–bites nails because the new model does W). Because that 2022 version of you (or the company) is in your DNA and it’s a lot harder to change.

Prompts don’t create human-centricity, empathy, or culture. It let’s you think, sure, and even might speed things up, but in the end you are what you were. We haven’t had the time to change. So, if your experience strategy is (and was) built around understanding humans to remove friction, great! You’ll do that faster. But if your strategy was mostly around reducing Average Handling Time and diverting traffic to a cheaper channel and containing them there: uh oh. Instead of one annoying chatbot handing a few calls, we’ll let it handle a million and people STILL won’t get what they need!

Check it: lower operating expenses look great on a quarterly report. Attrition shows up a few quarters later. Instead of AHT, maybe use AI to do qual at scale and measure Intent (did they get what they reached out for) + Satisfaction (were they cool with it) + Effort (how hard did they think it was for them to get what they needed). That’ll let you peek under the hood at cost WHILE figuring out what to fix.

But make experience strategy and human-centric culture your DNA first. THEN build on it. Maybe even in bullet-time.

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Agility Is How You Actually Respond to Humans

woman looking at dog running through playing tunnel

I’ve said it before, I’m not sure if I’ve seen true agile in big old companies. Usually they say, “We’re agile!” but are running waterfall with sticky notes or a kanban. And approval gates called alignment meetings. And lots of PowerPoints. Goodness gracious, lots. Transformation while keeping everything the same. The vocabulary changed. The operating model didn’t.

That is a problem for experience strategy because agility is not decor. It is the power that makes it possible for people to respond to people.

I’ve said it before: agility isn’t about speed. People hear “agile” and think “faster.” Speed is a byproduct of agile-done-well, but that’s not the point. The point is responsiveness. The capacity to learn something real about a human and flex to do something about it.

Human needs aren’t etched in stone. (Today anyway. I guess they were and maybe, they will again? Hope not.).  The person your product was designed for six months ago has shifted. Their context has changed. Their options have multiplied. Their tolerance for friction has decreased. If your development and delivery process takes twelve months from discovery to release, you are designing for someone who no longer exists. You will ship something accurate to a moment that has already passed.

Now, by “agility” I don’t (only) mean a way of dev-work. I mean the full stack of what it takes to respond in real(ish) time. I mean leadership that is close enough to the work to make decisions without three layers of approval. Teams that are empowered to act on what they learn from customers without waiting for a quarterly roadmap review. Systems that ship in time-boxed increments so that learning happens continuously, not at the end of a long build cycle when it’s too late and too expensive to pivot. Organizational trust as a prerequisite, not an afterthought.

The cost of delivering the wrong thing on schedule is worse than the cost of a short delay to get it right. Stinks to ship stuff that no one uses, can’t find, or find annoying. On time. On budget. Irrelevant. Eek. That is an expensive way to learn something you could have learned earlier (and cheaper).

Ten days with real user feedback costs a fraction of what it costs to build a full quarter’s worth of wrong. Businesses that have made agility work financially are not necessarily the ones moving fastest. They are the ones failing smaller and cheaper, learning more often, and compounding those learnings into products and services that are genuinely closer to what humans need.

Sure. There are contexts where agile is the wrong approach. Like if you’re building a bridge. But if you’re building a service, a journey, or a product…

Anyway, you can’t take apart the conversations around experience strategy and agility. Experience strategy defines the direction: who we serve, what they need, and here’s the friction we are committed to removing. Agility is the engine that let’s the strategy flex. Without agility, experience strategy becomes a document. A pretty one, sometimes. But a document.

The question is not whether your organization says it is agile. The question is whether the humans who interact with your organization can feel a positive difference. Whether the things that were broken are getting fixed. Whether the feedback is actually landing somewhere. Whether the system is learning.

If it isn’t, the methodology doesn’t matter. You’re not agile. You’re going through the motions, and the humans on the other end feel it.

Flex to build the real thing or don’t call it agile.

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Eep! Your Experience Is Leaking Money

leaking pipe fixed with plastic

Your CFO doesn’t think experience is a big deal. That’s the problem.

Here’s how it goes. The experience team presents work. Everyone nods. Someone asks about ROI. The convo shifts. Then the CFO, or someone from that world, says something like, “This is great, but what about operating expenses?” And just like that, experience shifts to soft-stuff: fund when there’s margin; cut when there isn’t.

Experience strategy isn’t a feel-good pillows-on-chocolate play. It is the bones of how your biz relates to the humans who pay for what you do. And the humans who don’t come back. And the humans who tell other humans not to bother. Ouch.

Think about the last time you tried to do something that should’ve been easy. Pay a bill, update an account, return something you bought. And it wasn’t easy. Maybe you stayed. Maybe you called someone. Maybe you said, “screw it” and went somewhere else. Now multiply that moment by every person who interacts with your company. Every day. Some of them push through. A lot of them don’t. And the ones who don’t send you a bill. They just leave.

Experience problems = financial problems.

Listen. I’m not saying experience strategy automatically produces those numbers. I’ve seen experience initiatives that went nowhere because they were disconnected from the actual human journey, dressed up as personas and great stories that never changed a single touchpoint. Experience strategy only produces financial outcomes when it is actually strategy. When it shapes decisions about what you build, how you build it, who is empowered to fix it, and how flexible you are to the shifts.

Experience isn’t the shiny output. A shiny layer of polish. Companies that are winning treat experience as an input. They are asking the experience question before they build, not after. They are asking: what does this human need to accomplish, and are we helping them do it? They are designing for the job the human is trying to get done, not the job their internal teams find easiest to support.

The cost of not asking that question shows up in call center volume, cart abandonment, bug tickets, lower retention, and higher acquisition costs because retention is slipping. It shows up with employees who spend half their time working around systems that don’t actually serve the work. There’s your operating expense. We just don’t trace it back to experience.

The first move is getting your finance and experience functions in the same conversation about the same metrics. Not experience presenting to finance. Not finance signing off on experience’s budget. Both disciplines looking together at where friction lives in the human journey and what that friction costs. When those two conversations become one, the resource decisions change. Because the problem is finally visible.

Experience is not a soft cost. It is either an investment with a measurable return or a liability with a measurable cost. There is no version where it is neutral. Your CFO needs to know that. So do you.

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Where A Persona Fails

people looking at people personas

Personas are fine right up until they’re not. By then it’s too late. Usually, it’s right around the point that demographic data gets put in.

Designing for the function of paying without physical cash or credit card allows some mental flexibility. Differentiate the function between a millennial and a grandfather, suddenly your biases are making assumptions. Worse if you start throwing race in there.

Want to create better solutions for everyone? Listen to people, regardless of their background, and address the jobs they’re trying to get done. Derive empathy from their experience.  Iterate around that.

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Jobs To Be Done

Don’t walk. Run. Order this now. Honestly, put down the stickies. Put down the customer journey map that you’re working on based on some demographic with unnecessary detail about that suburban mom having two kids. Buy this book now.

I’ve updated this with the link to the e-book

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Data and Screens

If there is a viewable area, there will always be more data than can fit in that viewable area. If that isn’t an axiom, it should be.

We work on data tables that we put in the magazine and then put the same, or even more data on the website. No eye can handle all of that data. It’s not a font size problem (condense it to make it fit) but rather a content detection problem. Our eyes see that there is content but we can’t tear it apart.

Edward Tufte wrote about presenting visual data and the penchant for adding (essentially) chart junk. Noise that doesn’t tell the reader anything new. A table is essentially a chart with data where all the relevant data is important at different points. Which means that at some point of interaction, most of it becomes chart junk. A bit strong but I’m trying to get that point across.

This is the reason why Excel, with almost endless data columns and rows, let’s you freeze rows and columns. Or hide columns. So someone’s eyes can momentarily not deal with the chart junk.