The Secret Lives of Customers: A Detective Story About Solving the Mystery of Customer Behavior

The backbone of the method I introduce here is a series of four, logically sequenced questions that you’ll return to again and again. They organize the information you’re seeking (as defined by the “Language” just described) and function as both a compass and roadmap for many market investigation techniques—above all, the one-on-one customer interv

The second element of our language, a job can be either a problem someone is trying to solve or a goal someone is trying to achieve.

What’s needed is a language that guides us to ask the right questions which lead to the right kinds of insights at the right level of detail. The right questions are those that help us discover what really matters to customers: the problems they most want to solve, the goals they most want to achieve—the jobs they most want to get done. Identifying

A language that defines what information you’re looking for • A method for discovering, organizing, and interpreting that information • A mindset that maximizes your chances of doing so

Answer it from the perspective of customer jobs to be done. Don’t define your business by the products you sell, or by your business model, or by some set of customer characteristics. Define your business by the customer jobs you exist to solve, and let that be your North Star.

what we do when we choose what products or services we buy, or solutions to adopt. Just like those law firms, we have jobs we need to get done. We have lots of these, all the time, and when they pop up, we look around for ‘candidates’—products or other solutions—we might hire to get those jobs done. And we hire the solution that is the best fit for

the core market. It’s where we have a solution our customers love, that’s better than the competition’s, and that’s aligned with our mission and identity.”

“The last thing we do is mark the boxes where we’ve learned a customer’s job and circumstance intersect. I use a check mark to indicate the job is well satisfied by the solution of interest—in this case, Tazza. I mark it with an X if a customer has that job in that circumstance, but there are big help wanted signs.”

For market maps, latitude is the jobs people are trying to get done, and longitude is the circumstance in which they have those jobs.