Design@SAIF - Issue #16

Once upon a time, not so long ago, designers and marketeers held the idea of Personas key to product definition, development and marketing. That is quietly, steadily fading away. What's replacing it? Harvard Professor and author of Disruptive Innovation, Clayton Christensen—talks of the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD). JTBD shares a lot of common ground with Design Thinking—both are ways of framing and reframing problem from a people perspective. 

Here are few links to help you make sense of JTBD and apply it to create products with razor sharp relevance. 

Start with a shorter-than-5-min introduction to JTBD by Christensen [video].

"The fact that you're 18 to 35 years old with a college degree does not cause you to buy a product, it may be correlated with the decision, but it doesn't cause it". There are insights to be had beyond segmentation. Thats what led Christensen and his team to think along the lines of 'hiring' a product—and it is uncannily similar to the tenets of DesignThinking (did I say that again), articulated in management-speak and terms-du-jour (think Purpose Branding). 

Last in my JTBD list—here's how the JTBD philosophy is being translated into product design/development flows. This is Intercom's story: "a powerful thing to understand when building a product is the motivation behind people’s actions. At Intercom we use Job Stories to discover them."

"There’s no shortage of UX designers who do as they’re told, and deliver what’s expected of them. This is why there’s so much bloatware in the world." An entertaining read—opinionated, nasty and cynical at times—but then there are some truths in this list.

Non-Product/Design

Insightful, witty and full of mind bogglingly complex visualisations—these may be 14 mins well invested: 'Tim Urban knows that procrastination doesn't make sense, but he's never been able to shake his habit of waiting until the last minute to get things done.'

Until next week,

@JDallcaps @SAIFPartners