In our experience, structured customer development work is right up there amongst the most valuable things a founder can do in the early days of their startup. Once you have an idea that feels strong, it’s imperative to speak with customers about it. But good customer development is tough to do. It takes a long time, think 10-20 hours of interviews plus preparation and digest time, and conducting structured interviews with strangers is outside the comfort zone of many founders. So lots of entrepreneurs skimp on this vital piece of work. That’s a bad decision. It leaves you flying blind when with a little hard work you can be seeing clearly.

Let me use the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework for product development to explain why.

Reams have been written about the JTBD framework. I will give you a high-level summary here, but if you are building products then I recommend spending some time with Google to find out a bit more.

The core idea of the JTBD framework is that customers use products or services to do a job for them (in the US many people say they “hire” the product or service to do the job, but that doesn’t translate too well into UK English so I prefer “use”).

For example, I used my bike to do the job of getting from home to work this morning. I could have used a bus or a tube, but I used a bike.

That job breaks down into component parts. I have to access the mode of transport, pay for it, travel, dispose of the mode of transport at the other end and maybe get from the disposal point to my final destination. With my bike that breaks down to getting it out of the bikeshed in my front garden, no payment, cycle for 15 mins, put it in the bike rack in our office garden, and then walk five metres to my desk. If I was getting the bus the breakdown would be walking to the bus stop, paying with my iPhone, sitting on the bus for 30 mins, getting off the bus, and walking 200 metres to my desk.

Each of those component parts has associated outcomes that I’m looking for. Some of those are functional and others are emotional. Taking the travel component of the job, the functional outcomes I’m looking for include speed, comfort, exercise and predictability whilst the emotional ones include safety, anxiety, and consistency with my identity as an active person.

Those component jobs could be broken down further and then there would be outcomes associated with each job at the next level of detail down the stack. Part of the art of using the JBTD framework well is picking the right level of detail to work at.

The work I’ve described so far is a desk exercise. That’s valuable, but the real insight comes from talking with customers to discover what’s important to them, how satisfied they are with their existing provider, what needs to change and how much they would be willing to pay. The focus should be on the outcomes they want and their answers will tell you what features you need to build and where the opportunities for differentiation lie.

Before you start you will probably have a gut feel for the answers customers will give you to these questions. I originally titled this post “Two compelling reasons to do structured customer dev” because unless you do it you won’t know whether you are right or wrong until you’ve invested the time and money it takes to design your MVP, build it, release it and find some customers. Now that we all follow lean development methodologies mistakes are much cheaper than they used to be, but they are still a hell of a lot more expensive than 10-20 hours of customer dev.

Common mistakes which lead to wasted effort include building a feature to drive an outcome that isn’t important to customers and not realising that an outcome provided by competitors is important for customers. This second one is particularly dangerous as it will result in low conversion and might lead you to the erroneous conclusion that your point of differentiation isn’t resonating (a false negative).

The second reason to do structured customer dev is that the interviews can yield insights which drive marketing. An example from Photobox. They sell personalised photo gifts, photo books, mugs, calendars etc. Using the JTBD framework they established that one of the jobs they do for their customers is help them remember when a birthday or anniversary is coming up and they need to give a gift. Through the customer interviews they discovered that remembering and not forgetting had very different emotions associated with them. Remembering something is nice, but not remarkable, whereas not forgetting means avoiding all the anxiety associated with forgetting something important and letting someone down. They used this insight to change the subject line in some of their reminder emails. The message moved from “remember XYZ” to “don’t forget XYZ” and the response rate was much improved.

I could go on for ever about the importance of customer dev work. It really does make a huge difference. The reason many founders skimp on it is that the benefits often seem a bit nebulous. I hope they seem less nebulous now.

A quick shout out to Dave Wascha from Photobox who was kind enough to spend time with the Forward Partners team on Monday educating us about the JTBD framework. His talk was the inspiration for this post.

The blogosphere has transformed entrepreneurship. Twenty years ago there were precious few resources available for founders and most either had to find an advisor who had done it before or rely on trial and error. That increased the power of the network effects at the heart of startup hubs where it was easier to find those conversations – especially Silicon Valley. These days it’s all different and a decent guide to doing just about anything is only a few clicks away. Here at Forward Partners we’ve contributed our fair share of such guides at The Path Forward.

However, whilst all this great content is amazingly valuable for entrepreneurs it gives them a new problem. If they try to follow the best practice advised for fundraising, recruitment, brand, writing code, product management, and growth then they will quickly run out of hours in their day, at least in the early days when resources are scarce. Moreover, this advice isn’t only coming from the blogosphere, it is coming from investors, board members, mentors, accelerator programmes and friends at other startups, making it harder to deal with than it should be.

I’m not criticising here. Much of the advice is highly-insightful and well-intentioned, and I’ve doled out my fair share (including on this blog). What I am saying is that founders need something more. They need to work out where in their companies they should apply best practice and where they should not.

For most startups these days the first answer is product. If we look at the three biggest startup successes of recent years, Google, Amazon and Facebook, then it’s clear their early success was underpinned by true excellence in product. However, this hasn’t always been the case and isn’t the always the case now. To go back a generation of startups, the success of Oracle and Microsoft came more from being great at sales and partnerships than from being great at product.

Still, for most startups today best practice in product, including customer development and lean development principles, will be critically important. But great product is rarely sufficient on its own, and most successful companies will have an additional spike or two in the other areas listed above.

The task for founders, then, is to first identify the areas where they will excel. That will be determined in part by the market they are in and in part by the experience and capabilities the founding team brings to the table (but don’t make the mistake of focusing where founders are strong if it isn’t right for the market). The second task is to work out the minimum requirement in all the other areas. That’s complicated, and will change as the business matures and standards rise across the board. It’s also something that the blogosphere doesn’t help with.

A simple ‘where we will excel and where we will do just enough’ framework will also be helpful when founders are talking with mentors and advisors. Too often I see mentors frustrated when their advice isn’t actioned and entrepreneurs avoiding mentor conversations for fear of leaving with a list of recommendations they won’t have time to implement. When a startup is just a handful of people it’s ok to be great where it counts and average where it doesn’t matter so much.

Two weeks ago I wrote about our Skill and Pace value. Another of our four values is Enjoy The Journey. This one is more axiomatic for me than the others. Everyone at Forward Partners is devoting a significant part of their life to the cause and if it’s not enjoyable, what’s the point? The journey is the destination.

But what does it mean to live the value “Enjoy The Journey”?

First and foremost, it’s about finding meaning in our work.

Straight up fun is also important of course and we go out regularly as a team and with our partner companies to do crazy things and have a few drinks together, but I liken that stuff to the role of an important supporting actor. You need it, and the film wouldn’t work without it, but it’s not enough on its own. The lead actor, the rest of the cast, the script, the set and everything else have to be right too.

I think of table football, ping pong tables, Play Stations and beers in the office in the same way. They can help people enjoy their time at work but they are a sub-plot, not the main story. It’s been said many times recently, but perks are not culture.

So how do we find meaning in our work?

First, there’s a question of attitude. You have to want to find meaning in your work, and to be willing to work at it.

I love this from Tim O’Reilly’s recent introduction to Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View newsletter:

From When Nietzsche Wept, by Irvin Yalom: First will what is necessary. Then love what you will.

There’s a profound insight there that I’ve tried to live by, long before I read the quote. Life asks many things of us that we don’t want to do. Some of them are distractions, but some of them are necessary. It’s so easy to be full of resentment toward things that we feel are keeping us from our joy. Finding joy in what needs doing is magical. Learning to love the things that are necessary—like daily chores—is the secret of happiness.

For most of us at Forward Partners meaning can be found at three levels:

• Taking joy in helping founders build their companies
• Taking pride in their role in building Forward Partners
• Mastering their craft, be that design, development, growth, talent, back office or investment

Taking insight from Dan Pink’s seminal book Drive and Paul Dolan’s Happiness by Design, the final components that bring enjoyment and fulfilment are autonomy (i.e. the ability to control our own work life and schedule) and some time having plain old fun – which is where the beer and ping pong comes in.

Our job as a company is to create an environment which makes it as easy as possible for our people to find meaning at all three levels, provides for autonomy and is fun to work in. Here are a few of the things we do:

• Manage by objectives
• Provide regular feedback
• Back companies that go on to enjoy significant success
• Be clear about our mission and the contribution we all make to our success
• Recognise success
• Celebrate our wins (big and small)
• Find interesting work for people to do
• Offer training and development
• Maximise on-the-job learning opportunities
• Encourage people to blog, speak at conferences and become recognised experts in their field
• Recruit and promote people who get on with each other (this is why many companies have a ‘no assholes’ rule)
• Create opportunities for friendships to build, especially cross team
• Go out and have fun together every now and again

So far, I think we are pretty good at this, but can definitely do better. We do many of these things well already, but some of them we could do with more conviction. Living our Enjoy the journey value is journey in itself, and to really live it requires constant thought an iteration.

You might have seen that the week before last Balfour Beatty (here) and Mace (here) weighed in on the future of construction. Both are quite radical in the breadth and depth of impact they predict, whilst the technologies they choose are perhaps unsurprising to anyone immersed in the startup ecosystem. The Balfour Beatty piece is more detailed and they predict humanless construction sites by 2050 (which is admittedly a long way off – broadband is less than twenty years old) saying that drones, robots and 3D and 4D modelling will get us there.

Construction is a massive industry with low productivity that hasn’t seen much penetration of tech. Balfour Beatty and Mace clearly see that changing and towards the end of the Balfour Beatty article they herald the arrival of a “constructech” market. Fintech, and more recently proptech and insurtech are startup categories that many VCs and corporates are targeting and I’m guessing they are indulging in a bit of marketing to try and stimulate activity in their own backyard.

I think they will succeed. As noted, construction is a massive market, but it is messy and complicated for startups due to the bespoke nature of most construction jobs and heavy regulation. As technology advances these problems become more tractable, and there are parallels with healthcare and govtech which face similar challenges and are already enjoying more attention from entrepreneurs and investors.

I expect we will see two classes of constructech startup:

• Startups selling tech enabled services to existing construction companies – e.g. site mapping services using drones
• Startups leveraging new technologies to compete with existing construction companies – e.g. a new housebuilder which has radically different economics (maybe charging based on usage or building for a fraction of the cost)

This is a common pattern for startups bringing tech to new industries. There are some companies that support existing industry structures and some that disrupt them. When this battle played out in media the disruptors mostly came out on top, but in ecommerce and marketplaces (where we make maybe half our investments) the game is still on – Amazon is a winner, but it remains unclear who will take the rest of the seats at the top table. In financial services none of the biggest companies are recent startups, although that’s partly a matter of scale and large numbers of entrepreneurs are building great businesses.

It’s interesting to think how it will play out in construction. The reasons that startups have struggled historically aren’t going away and it’s hard to do big things in a small way, so I suspect incumbents have more of an advantage than they do in most industries.