How to create a JTBD survey
This is the second story in the series of introductions to the jobs-to-be-done.
How to create a JTBD survey
Before you start
To create a JTBD (jobs-to-be-done) survey, first, have the list of personal outcome metrics or statements prepared that you want to analyze deeply. More about it in a previous story in this series - How to do JTBD interviews and define personal metrics.
Do not just put any random JTBD or desired outcome metric into your survey. Think about which ones:
Are more likely to give you higher importance and lower satisfaction.
Are not common needs that everybody has.
What are you looking to achieve?
Have a clear END goal in mind, if you can. What do you want to ACHIEVE? What action will you take at the end of the research?
JTBD survey is part of the exploratory JTBD analysis and continuous discovery.
JTBD survey can have different goals:
Figure out what the majority of people need* (statistical mean aka average)
Stack importance of different needs and opportunities
Identify the degree to which each need is unsatisfied
Find hidden unmet needs, business or public opportunities
Find which needs are highly correlated together, meaning, that if somebody needs A, then they are very likely also to need B.
Identify very specific segments and niches in the market, so you could be the first mover, or provide your products to an unsatisfied group of existing customers
Launch a new and successful startup and figure out what exactly to build
*need - by need I mean opportunities that are both very important and very unsatisfying for people at the same time.
You, probably, don’t want to invest your limited resources in addressing only the needs of a few, until you are looking to address a specific hidden segment.
If you are a beginner with JTBD statistical analysis or have a new project, idea startup, or a small team or an agency that doesn’t have time to spend months on detailed research, then just start by finding top needs on average, so you could see where to focus and what to do next.
Create 2 categories of questions
All questions in JTBD surveys can be categorized into 2 groups:
Profiling, open-ended questions
JTBD questions
Profiling questions are personal questions like region, age range, and gender. However, it is EXTREMELY important to have as many open-ended questions at the beginning of your JTBD survey so you could later find out what different segments (clusters) of people have in common.
Think about what you will do when you will have results. If you just have JTBD questions, you then might group respondents into different segments based on similar needs.
Demographics, almost all the time, are very poor indicators of success due to the absence of a causal relationship.
Instead, focus on psychographics. Ask people what they do, what is their profession, what are their dreams, and what their biggest challenges are. What do they do before or after doing a particular job or a journey? What is their experience with something, their health, family status, interests, hobbies, preferences, etc?
Finally, the main part of the survey will be JTBD questions.
Without profiling questions, you will not be able to understand what makes each segment unique.
For each JTBD create 2 questions (1-5)
For each personal outcome metric, need or JTBD create two questions on a scale from 1 to 5 (called the Likert scale)
Ask people:
How important is this job (1 - very unimportant; 5 - very important)
How satisfied are they with how they get this job done now (1 - very unsatisfied; 5 - very satisfied)
For example, you decided to analyze this JTBD “taking colorful photos while on vacation”.
You can adapt each question, or you can simply copy and paste the same words for each JTBD, to save time. You could end up with these 2 questions: While on vacation, how is important it for you to take colorful photos? And While on vacation, how satisfied are you now with how you take colorful photos (or using <insert competitor or any solution>)?
How to create a JTBD survey using Google Forms and Spreadsheets
Besides manually adapting each JTBD question every time, you could simply create a separate section where JTBD is the title of this section, and then you could have the same two questions always - “How is this important for you?” and “How satisfied are you with this?”
That way you could easily create a JTBD survey yourself in any online form/survey tool like Google Forms for free.
As a description to each section explain what 1-5 score mean.
Now you can just quickly copy entire section and only change the title of the section.
Repeat for as many JTBD sections as you want.
Finally, in order to be able to analyze and visualize results later, connect your new Google Form with a Spreadsheet by going to Responses > and clicking on the green Spreadsheet logo in the top right corner, and create a new spreadsheet.
This will automatically create a new spreadsheet in the same Drive folder as the form.
Create a short link, save it somewhere, and send this survey link to people you want to survey.
Now every time you have a new response, a new row in the first tab in that spreadsheet will be added automatically.
How to create a JTBD survey in ATHENNO
Creating a JTBD survey manually is not a wise decision, because it will take a lot of manual work, and time, and then it might be impossible to analyze results just in a spreadsheet.
You can generate JTBD surveys automatically and as soon as you will receive responses, all the insights, segments, opportunity scores, opportunity map charts, etc. will be created for you in a second!
In ATHENNO you can do it for free.
First, you must finish at least some JTBD interviews. You can create a goal, then experiment with the type “Interview” and log an observation. Fill out behavioral forces and journey-to-be-done (timeline) and define a job story. Now you have a clearer picture of the metrics.
Go to the JTBD section and create a new journey, then jobs-to-be-done and finally add your personal metrics.
Then go to the Surveys section and create a new survey. Add some high-level profiling questions. Then select a journey, JTBDs, and metrics you want to make part of this survey.
Go through the preview and save. Then go back, and check that everything is looking right. Show it to your team. As soon as you are happy, go back and edit the survey to change the status to public.
This will publish a survey, will generate a public link and you will be able to copy that link and start collecting responses.
As soon as you will receive the first response, a new link under the responses column will appear.
There you will see your analysis results automatically and they even will be updated in real-time for you as you collect more responses!
When you are done, close the survey.
Based on findings you can then create a new market as a group of people (with similar characteristics) + job they try to get done (similar metrics they need). ATHENNO will calculate a market score for you automatically.
Finally, you can create a new opportunity or multiple opportunities, such as “56% of young adult Americans need to boost their credit and travel bonuses”, and think about possible solutions.
What next
Now just send your survey to people and collect at least 20, ideally 70+ responses. [TODO: How to find leads for JTBD analysis]
And that’s it, you can quickly see average results right away.
If you need more sophisticated insights, you might need to take your data out into a CSV file and then do any statistical, factor, or cluster analysis in Python or any statistical software.
Summary:
Have a JTBD/needs/metrics ready before you start
Have a clear goal upfront. Know what you are looking to ACHIEVE, not just do. And know what ACTION you gonna take with insights you could discover.
Create 2 categories of questions (a: profiling, open-ended questions, and b: JTBD questions)
For each JTBD create two questions on a 1-5 scale (for importance and satisfaction)
Implement a survey, for example in a Google Form, and collect responses into Google Spreadsheet. Or you can generate a beautiful JTBD survey and see insights automatically using ATHENNO for free.
Start sending it to people, and then analyze results and present findings to the team and leaders/executives/investors.
This was the second story in the series of introductions to the jobs-to-be-done.
How to create a JTBD survey
