Craft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps

Key Insights

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  Compass identified 'Triple D' challenges with scale: duplicated efforts, disjointed workflows, and distance from users.

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  They chose to map jobs to be done rather than user journeys to capture agents’ needs beyond product-specific interactions.

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  The focus was narrowed initially on the seller-side context due to identified growth opportunities and clearer stakeholder alignment.

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  Existing research artifacts were scattered, inconsistent, and often biased by individual experiences or product domains.

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  A taxonomy of scenes, jobs, and tasks clarified conversations and helped distinguish stable contexts from changeable actions.

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  Collaborative digital whiteboarding (Miro) enabled iterative messy-to-clean synthesis of fragmented research data remotely.

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  The jobs map became a 'single source of truth' that helped product teams prioritize by workflows rather than siloed features.

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  Maintaining the map is a manual ongoing process involving weekly reviews and monthly stakeholder meetings.

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  There is recognition that mapping agent jobs alone isn’t sufficient; understanding clients of agents is an emerging focus.

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  Though initial samples were large and varied, survey-based quantification of jobs to be done was smaller and supplemental.

Notable Quotes