I never thought we would sell out but we did. Over the last few days we’ve seen our stocks dwindle and now we’ve officially run-out of our JTBD cards. Luckily we’d seen this coming and instead of just ordering a reprint we’ve been working behind the scenes to redesign the cards a bit and add some new ones.

I started by looking at how well they did the Job I had designed them to do. I watched as people used them in workshops and saw that people always used the “back of the cards” rather than the front as I intended. Interesting. How could I encourage both sides to be as useful?

I decided to run the colour coding across both sides to make it easier to use the cards directly during an interview and to reinforce the learning story; colours encourage you to think about the purpose of each question and help you build your own interview flow.

I also noticed that there were more and more questions about applying the cards to business to business projects and wanted to add some new questions to help people learn about these contexts. We’ve added 8 new cards to the deck and replaced instruction cards with a little booklet.

Another problem we have solved is making sure that after a workshop we still had all the cards; with 42 similar cards and perhaps multiple packs it was really annoying. Our solution, especially as we now have 50 cards was to number each card.

Finally after working on my Analytics Cards, I wanted to make both decks feel like they came from the same place with similar packaging and instruction booklets.

So, drum-roll… today we pressed the button to create the new version of JTBD Cards and they will be with us very soon.

Buy JTBD and our other cards directly from us in Singapore


3 Comments

Michael Ritchey · 13/05/2017 at 04:13

Love the last version of JTBD cards, Jonathan, and it looks like these new additions will be great. I’ve been recommending the cards to others who do customer development, but today something happened that caused me to be unable to recommend them, and since it has everything to do with your site and nothing to do with the excellent quality of your product, I thought I should let you know, because it’s losing you revenue.

Imagine you don’t own Crimson Sunbird. Imagine Crimson Sunbird has hired you to figure out how they can increase revenue, and you’re engaging me, a newly-converted customer, in a JTBD interview using your cards. You get past all the Big Hire stuff, realize I love your product, and proceed to the Little Hire stuff, asking me “How did you share your buying story with friends and family?” or “What would you recommend to others seeking similar outcomes?”

I reply, “Well, I started recommending the cards to all my close friends and associates who were doing customer development. Then I was writing this great email to the director and program managers of our very large Engineering division recommending they buy cards for lots of people in their organization. I go to the Crimson Sunbird site to grab their URL so I can paste it into the email… and stumble upon a whole string of political tweets by the Crimson Sunbird founder. The tweets were right out in full view on the home page of their business website. They were basically in opposition to the political beliefs of the majority of the people in my state. I really wanted to recommend Crimson Sunbird’s product, but there’s no way I’m going to damage my business reputation by recommending a website that promotes political views that will probably offend many of my neighbors, friends, and colleagues.”

As the interviewer and consultant, what questions would you ask the customer next? More importantly, what recommendations might you make to Crimson Sunbird? Is there anything you might say to Crimson Sunbird about the usual relationship of a company’s revenue to its separation of business branding from the personal politics of company officers?

Again, I WANT to recommend your excellent product, Jonathan, but you’ve made it impossible for me. There’s more than one solution to this problem I’m having in recommending your site, and none of them involve you changing your political beliefs, changing what you tweet about, or being non-political in your personal life or on social media. Your political beliefs alone have no bearing on whether I could be friends or business partners with you. But when you project your political beliefs onto your business site or brand, it affects whether I can recommend your business, and to whom.

    jonathanbriggs · 13/05/2017 at 13:37

    Thanks for your comments Michael and for raising the issues you do. I agree that I should be separate from my products and try to be as much as that is practical.

    As an educator I feel compelled to point out interesting and sometimes controversial content especially using Twitter. I won’t always endorse or agree with everything contained there-in but sometimes I do.

    I feel very strongly indeed that in politics at the moment we are not empathising with those left behind by progress and change and we’ve seen the effect on elections and referenda in various parts of the world. I regret the planned #brexit isolation of the UK in particular as I think this will damage friends and family there.

    I hope that if we met we’d discover that we had a lot in common and actually more agreement than disagreement. In my world disagreement is good as it sharpens up our thinking and helps us create better solutions to what ails the world.

    Appreciate you being part of this.

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