At a glance Companies struggle to understand what their customers really want. One reason is that organizations tend to distort customer input at two key moments: when they talk to customers and when the customer findings are passed on internally. In other words: They play Chinese Whispers. Jobs-to-be-done and a concept called Value Metrics help to prevent this from happening. Everyone knows the popular Chinese Whispers game we all played as kids. Someone starts to whisper a

To grow in a market, a company needs products that offer either greater value or a lower price. From a financial perspective, the former is more attractive. Since value is subject to the customer’s momentary perception, decision-makers need to be perfectly clear on what their customers really want, what they are doing to accomplish a task and what is getting in their way, whether consciously or not. The challenge here is that with each new solution in the market, customers’ v