Evolving Market and Research Needs

Understanding the Need for Change

Where it Began

I began my career on the business side of things; first in a small manufacturing company where I got to travel around the country managing large technology implementations (not computers) and shortly after that in commercial banking. My last few years had me spending 50% of my time leading a large technology project for my division. I got the technology bug from this.

When I left banking I decided that I wanted a complete switch to technology. Having no training didn’t deter me, I eventually became an accomplished end-to-end solution manufacturer (I did everything from beginning to end). I started in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) industry which became the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry.

I spent a year or so watching watching what others were doing and producing and realized that maybe I should’ve staying in banking! 😂 It was a disaster and the monthly headlines on the tech rags about CRM failure rates resonated with me.

While I had to learn things that an Economics major didn’t learn (like what a ‘dll’ was, and how to code) I had this other thread going on in the background trying to figure out why these projects were failing - from small businesses to large enterprises. It was easy to point fingers at the complexity of the hardware and OS components as this was before virtualization and cloud computing.

But that wasn’t the problem. If it were, virtualization and cloud computing would have resolved the failures. But they didn’t 🤫.

I went on a writing journey that began on technology and how-to’s. But, I was always thinking this …

“Am I solving the right problem?”

One day Bob Thompson from CustomerThink.com emailed me out of the blue and asked me if I would contribute on his website. Being a strategy website, I didn’t I was the right person and told him so. He asked me “What are you struggling with?” And that cinched the deal. I told that I struggled with knowing whether I was solving the right problem.

He suggested I write about the journey I would take trying to solve that dilemma. And the rest is rest is history.

Working in Large Consulting

Fast-forward about 10 years or so. I had already been introduced to Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) after being initiated into a private back-channel community of people in the technology, CRM, and strategy worlds. It was comprised partially of industry analysts like …