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The Product Manager’s Dilemma: For Which Jobs Is Jobs-To-Be-Done Best Suited?

Demystifying Task Analysis of the JTBD Strategy

When I first waded into the JTBD pool a decade ago, I found myself conflicted. I was enamored with this theoretical approach to making disruptive strategies into executable roadmaps to solve customers’ needs, but I was simultaneously confused by the cottage industry terms that cropped up around the JTBD community.

The ancestry of the JTBD theory can be directly traced back at least 25 years to Tony Ulwick’s book, Business Strategy Formulation, and later codified in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution. Before these, dozens of marketing and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) works reference many forms of Task Analysis, which closely resemble Jobs processes.

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Key Takeaways from the 2021 Design + Diversity Conference

Embedding inclusive design and user accessibility into our everyday ways of working starts with us designers. At ITX, we walk the talk and take our commitments seriously. So when we learned about the 2021 Design + Diversity Conference, we made a point to show up – in force.

The 3-day, virtual event featured a diverse set of speakers and attendees. Conference keynotes addressed the following topics, each fundamental to the growth and acceptance of inclusive design…

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Why Adopting a Diverse and Inclusive Mindset Matters in Your Product Development Process

Whether you’re building products for hundreds, thousands, or millions of individuals, design that provides as many points of access as you have users is no longer a nice-to-have. For reasons based not only in social responsibility but in sound business management, inclusive design is a must. And embedding it into our everyday ways of working begins with the designers and design teams whose duty it is to carry the banner forward.

Over the past few years, the UX design team at ITX started thinking about adopting a more inclusive lens in our work and soon came to realize why it was so important to us as designers, but also as human beings.

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How We Championed a Product Inclusion Mindset

If the mission of User Experience is to design experiences that improve the lives of others, how can we allow the process we use to conceive these experiences, and ultimately the product or service themselves, to exclude whole segments of people? That is precisely what happens when we allow irresponsible design practices to deliver harm through the experiences we’ve helped create.

To begin to address these flaws, designers need education around inclusion, awareness of what inclusive design looks like, and a pathway to action that embeds inclusive practices into the design and development process.

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Illustration showing inclusion in digital products

Why Client Advocates Are the New Currency in the Age of Digital Disruption

The sooner business leaders turn their attention from Profit to Advocacy as the primary measure of success, the sooner they will see growth in both. Profit offers a snapshot of success, but Advocacy is predictive of future success. As long you as continue its care and feeding, Advocacy will remain the gift that keeps on giving.

Building a client base of advocates gives you a big leg up on the competition. It means that you’re surfing the wave of digital disruption instead of being dragged along the jagged reef below. It may even mean that you are the disruptor – not only of competitors in your space, but of yourself too. That’s a good thing. And advocates help you do both.

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Illustration of diverse group of people with different opinion icons above their head as currency

Prioritizing Stakeholders Drives Targeted, Impactful Outcomes

Why Treating Every Client As #1 Gets Us In Trouble

Clarifying Our Vision Through Strategic Stakeholder Prioritization

In any thriving business, possessing a clear, mutually understood vision of whom your organization serves stands as the hallmark of robust strategy and compelling leadership. This understanding becomes particularly critical as organizations expand, necessitating that leadership teams grasp and effectively communicate the complexities of stakeholder hierarchies. These hierarchies guide more informed, effective decision-making that aligns with the organization’s long-term objectives.

However, misconceptions or misalignments within these hierarchies can lead to significant strategic missteps, often manifesting as widespread confusion about the primary focus of service. This blog proposes a structured approach to dissecting and prioritizing stakeholders to ensure targeted, impactful engagements.

Several years ago, I collaborated with a major corporation grappling with a technology crisis. To make a long story short, market criticisms about security vulnerabilities within their key software precipitated a hasty decision to overhaul and re-platform the application. Driven by a reactive concern for market perceptions – primarily focused on stock price impact – the corporation’s leadership mandated a rapid redevelopment cycle. This rush sidelined potential incremental improvements, aiming instead for feature parity with the legacy system.

Upon release, the new version (while technically superior) failed to meet user expectations. This led to market backlash and a tarnished brand reputation. While totally understandable, this scenario exemplifies a breakdown in understanding service hierarchies, where the focus skewed too heavily toward investor concerns at the expense of user satisfaction.

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Could IT Legacy Modernization Have Kept the Lights on in Texas?

Consider the recent weather-related tragedies in Texas. Most seem ready to pin the blame on Texas’ near-total isolation from the rest of the U.S. power grid. And they’d be right – but only in part. The Lone Star State’s grid independence actually got its start nearly 100 years ago as a way to avoid federal regulators.

Still, that piece of trivia ignores what many are calling leaders’ longstanding indifference to IT infrastructure problems that, when examined critically, could bear responsibility for the widespread power outages, extensive property damage, and tragic loss of life throughout Texas.

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IT Computer aligned with Texas and a heartbeat

Business as High Art (A Bird’s Eye View of Culture)

A well-run organization, with highly motivated and aligned people, is a powerful form of high art. It includes the performance art of your people delivering services and coordinating activities at scale and it has artifacts, symbols, and physical art that have the potential to leave a profound impression on the people it touches. The art manifests in and through all of the layers of the organization’s culture.

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Freedom and Structure: The Creativity Curve

The motivation of the people you surround yourself with is the wellspring of creativity in your life.

There is a complex relationship between motivation, psychological safety, the structure you impose, and the innovation that results. It is not as simple as you might think. The guru on the subject, author Amy Edmonson, Ph.D., coined the term ‘psychological safety’ and has spent the bulk of her career as a professor and researcher at Harvard University studying teams, teaming, and the dynamics of this phenomenon.

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Great Business Leaders

The greatest of leaders shift the thinking and behaviors of those they lead in ways that cause more caring and more influence through competence. They transform the thinking of those they serve by shifting the language of the group from “I” to “We” thinking at scale. Their work transforms their followers into leaders, through language, by empowering them to each scale both caring and influence in their work. The most successful leaders craft language, create tools, and follow through with actions that allow their leadership to resonate for generations. Natural leaders have an uncanny ability to inspire others into action to create sustainable, long-lasting positive results. They do it by purposefully scaling both the capacity for influence and the capacity for caring in those they lead.

Great leaders profoundly scale the capacity for caring and the capacity for influence of the people they lead.

 

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