Case Study: Morgan and YourGrocer
How does a grocery delivery service make parents lives better?
Morgan Ranieri was fed up. Getting home from work at seven o’clock at night meant he couldn’t get the groceries he wanted, for the stores he wanted to shop at were closed by then. Instead, he had to settle for the supermarket chains around Melbourne, Australia, where Morgan lives. I say “settle” because the food quality at these supermarkets isn’t very good. Shopping there also meant he wasn’t supporting family businesses, which was something he liked to do.
Sensing that he shared this struggle with other people, he teamed up with his colleague Bandith and created YourGrocer. The concept for YourGrocer was simple: have your groceries delivered to you from local, high-quality food shops.
Over the next few months, Morgan and Bandith did some tests to see if the YourGrocer concept could work. They investigated what the competition might be, what logistics would need to be in place, and how many local shops were interested in partnering with them, and they even did some preliminary testing with a few customers to get feedback.
Their tests told them that an opportunity did exist. However, to grow their business, Morgan and Bandith needed someone with more technical expertise to join the team. Morgan met Francisco (Frankie) Trindade at a local Meetup. Morgan said, “Over the next month or so, we began speed dating, in a sense — getting to know one another before deciding to work together.”
In this case study, we learn how Customer Jobs helped Morgan build a consensus among team members, what customers did and didn’t value in a solution, find the right marketing messages, how it helped first-time customers switch to Morgan’s product, and how he could reduce churn.
Customer Jobs helps you persuade others that an opportunity exists. Frankie wanted to make sure an opportunity existed before he joined YourGrocer as its third cofounder. This is when Frankie introduced Morgan to Customer Jobs. Frankie told Morgan that he wanted to spend more time learning what Job(s) customers would use YourGrocer for. He especially wanted to do this before writing any of the software that would power the business. Morgan said,
It was Frankie who introduced me and Bandith to Jobs (Customer Jobs). Actually, the first thing Frankie did when he joined YourGrocer was to make sure we all understood the principles of Customer Jobs. We spent a week learning about it and figuring out how we would interview customers. All of us learning about Customer Jobs, and then interviewing twenty customers together, was a great way to induct him as YourGrocer’s third cofounder.
How does your team benefit from doing Customer Jobs research together? The newly formed YourGrocer team gained an unexpected benefit of doing Customer Jobs research together. As Morgan said,
This shared learning experience really helped bring us together. We developed a shared understanding of what the business needed to be — which was missing in the beginning. At the start, we all had very different ideas about what customers were struggling with and how we should solve it. I was the typical visionary cofounder who has the next five years planned out in my head — which is very dangerous. But Frankie didn’t make many assumptions. He wanted to take it one step at a time. His middle name should be “Pragmatic”: Frankie Pragmatic.
Interviewing about twenty customers got me, as a business cofounder, and Frankie, as a new technical cofounder, on to the same page.
Are data about “types” of people information or misinformation? The first aha moment for the YourGrocer team was when they realized that their customers didn’t match the assumed demographic. Morgan said,
We had an assumption about what our customer demographic was — or the idea of who our target customer was. The reality turned out to be quite different. We thought we were creating a business for young professionals who wanted to buy groceries online. It turns out, almost every single one of our customers was a young family — typically a young mom with a couple of kids at home.
At first, the YourGrocer team created the business out of their own need — that is, a way for busy young professionals to buy groceries online. But because most of the company’s customers were young families, the team needed to adjust. “It just turned out that the type of customers we were targeting at first [young professionals] didn’t really work too well for our product, but this other group of customers [parents] was ripe for it.”
How do struggling moments arise? What is it like to be pushed to change? Morgan and his team had now picked up on a group of struggling customers. The next step was to learn how and why these people were struggling. What was the struggling moment? This meant that Morgan first needed to talk with these customers about the different ways they had purchased groceries before. Morgan began to uncover the triggering events that would push these customers from one solution to another.
The push that eventually led our customers to YourGrocer often began a couple of years in the past. They’d start off shopping at the shops they liked. Then they’d have their first child. Getting around to these shops with one kid was difficult, but they could deal with it. But once they had their second child, that would really change things. Having a second kid made it almost impossible to get to the local shops they wanted. That’s when they switched from their local shops to buying at the two big suppliers here.
As a customer’s family grew, more of his or her time was dedicated to caregiving. It also made traveling to multiple food shops difficult. This would lead these families to consider other ways of getting their groceries, such as at supermarkets.
Discovering these triggering events helped Morgan understand how demand was being generated and how it pushed these parents to seek a solution. This helped him get an idea of how these parents were trying to make their lives better — that is, what Job they were trying to get Done.
What is it like to learn what customers do and don’t like about solutions they’ve tried? Next, Morgan had to learn how these parents had already tried to solve their problem — namely, how to get groceries when they had children to take care of. Comparing and contrasting these solutions would help him understand what these customers did and didn’t value in a solution. In particular, these parents complained about cost, poor-quality food, and not being able to choose foods they wanted.
The big supermarkets do fresh produce badly. The other local delivery suppliers that do fresh produce well are expensive. Some of them even have these subscription models where you get a preselected assortment of groceries. Customers can’t pick and choose what they want, when they want it. Our customers didn’t like that. They were getting a bunch of stuff they didn’t want, not using it, having it all go bad, and getting frustrated by that. Often, all these issues with other services had been going on for some time. They were just putting up with it. Then, we came along. It was just what they had been waiting for.
What are examples of things customers value? Before starting YourGrocer, Morgan and his team already had a pretty good idea of what the business would be: home delivery from the quality shops his customers loved. Now they were filling in any blanks and confirming their assumptions of the value that YourGrocer should deliver. Here’s what they were learning:
Convenience had become these customers’ top priority. They used to value food quality the most, but traveling with their kids to multiple stores proved too difficult for them. This pushed them to trade food quality for convenience.23
After convenience, they wanted to be able to choose foods they wanted. This ruled out services that delivered to the home but didn’t allow buyers to choose their own food options.
Quality got pushed to the bottom. Ultimately, these customers ended up choosing food from supermarkets. While supermarkets offered the lowest-quality foods, they ranked the highest on convenience and selection.
How does JTBD help you create a message that connects with customers? The YourGrocer team members were confident that they now understood what the customers valued and that the team could deliver this value. The next step was to figure out a message that would connect with customers. Once again, customer interviews helped Morgan and his team figure this out.
In the beginning, we didn’t know which messages would stick with customers. We would say, “It’s good to shop locally, because it’s good for the environment. It’s better food. It’s better priced. It’s convenient. It’s local shops. It’s good for your community.” We were throwing out half a dozen different messages out there without knowing which ones would persuade customers to try us.
Morgan solved this problem by asking his customers JTBD-style questions, such as “What stood out to you about us?” As he did so, he began to gain rich details about customers’ motivations.
One thing we really like about Customer Jobs is that you want to learn from customers what they’ve done in the past. You’re not just asking customers their opinion at the time you’re talking with them or through a survey. We would ask them, “What did you tell your friends about YourGrocer?” Or, better yet, “Can you show me the text in your phone that you sent your friend about us?”
Morgan’s customers had no problem pulling out their phones and showing him the text messages they had sent to others about YourGrocer, as well as any Facebook posts they had made about shopping with it. In those messages, Morgan saw customers express what they felt was valuable about YourGrocer. He learned that the messages they sent to other people were about getting groceries from a store.
We knew that customers wanted quality foods. But just saying we offered quality wasn’t enough. We learned that customers trusted our message of quality only because of the local stores we featured on our site and advertisements. Other messages didn’t stick with them — being good for the environment, our competitive pricing, the ease of use when compared to other delivery services. All that kind of stuff wasn’t really standing out to our customers. It turned out, they were buying from us because they recognized the stores that we featured on our website.
This is when the YourGrocer team honed their advertising message. It combined convenience, variety, and quality into one statement: “Online grocery shopping and same-day home delivery from the local shops you love.”
What anxieties do first-time customers experience? What might prevent customers from using your product? So far, Morgan has learned about how important convenience is to his customers. Just how important this was became even more salient when he talked with customers about the first time they tried to use YourGrocer for delivery. He said,
We learned about this one anxiety: a lot of people came to the site and had trouble trying to figure out how YourGrocer would fit into their lives. We kept hearing comments such as, “I just don’t know when my groceries are going to get delivered.” This struck us as odd because we give really flexible delivery options.
This anxiety didn’t make sense to Morgan and his team. They offered flexible delivery hours, so why were customers commenting about not knowing when their groceries would be delivered? The answer lay in customers’ shopping habits and expectations. Morgan said, “It turns out that customers had this obstacle in their buying path. They decided what groceries to buy only after they’d figure out when they’d get the delivery. We had it reversed: you would pick your groceries first and then decide when to have them delivered.”
First-time customers coming to the site already had an idea of how YourGrocer was going to work. They had a habit or expectation of coming to a site, finding out how soon they could get a delivery, and then deciding what to buy. When this expectation was violated, they became frustrated and anxious. At this point, they would abandon trying out YourGrocer.24
To fix this problem, YourGrocer adjusted the checkout process. It asked customers to pick a delivery window first and then walked them through the grocery-selection process. “That helped,” Morgan said. “We saw conversions go up after that.”
What habits prevent customers from making progress? Can customers’ habits be competition? Anxiety wasn’t the only emotional force the YourGrocer team members would face. They also had to navigate customers’ existing habits. Morgan said,
Dealing with customers’ existing habits was definitely a challenge with repeat-purchase customers. They had this habit around being able to duck down to the local store when they ran out of a key ingredient while cooking. Then, while they were at the store, they’d pick up extra groceries. In this case, they wouldn’t need to come back to us for another two weeks. Sometimes they’d fall out of the buying cycle, and we’d lose them as customers. Habits like these are our biggest competition.
If Morgan wanted to keep customers coming back, he needed to make sure that customers developed new habits around using YourGrocer. He couldn’t focus on only the outcomes customers were looking for. He had to think holistically about the customers’ JTBD. Customers didn’t just want their groceries delivered; they wanted a solution they could use to make their lives better.
So, how did Morgan and his team solve it? They focused on helping customers become more successful at using their product.
We get people to set up regular orders with us. We set up e-mail triggers to help remind them that they might need something. The first one goes out three days after getting your first delivery. We send you an e-mail saying, “Hey, do you need a top-up on anything? Here’s a free delivery of any size so that you can top up with us.” Seven days after your last purchase, we e-mail you again and ask, “Do you know how easy it is to repeat last week’s order? You can just click this button and get everything delivered again.”
These e-mails are part of YourGrocer’s efforts to help customers become better meal planners. This is important to note because customers aren’t consciously joining YourGrocer to become better meal planners. It wasn’t an outcome that customers were seeking; however, meal planning is what customers have to be able to do if they want to use YourGrocer for their JTBD.
What progress are customers trying to make? Morgan and his team came to understand their customers’ JTBD by combining their own intuition with what they learned through customer interviews.
An important part of our customers’ Job to be Done is, “Give me a way to provide quality food for my family without the stress of running around.” The phrase “YourGrocer does the running around for me” came up quite a bit during the interviews. Before YourGrocer was available to them, if they wanted to go to these local shops, they had to be willing to deal with running around to these different stores — and deal with the hassle of having their kids in tow.
Morgan had the first part of the JTBD: his customers were struggling to get quality groceries without all the stress. Next, it was time for him to understand how customers were expecting their lives to be better when they had the right solution. What would it be like when this Job was Done?
YourGrocer helps families get back their Saturday mornings and weekends. With us, they can now buy good food for their family without having to sacrifice their Saturday mornings or weekends visiting all these different stores. That’s the trade-off they were struggling with before. If they wanted quality food for their family, they’d have to give up some family time so they could go shopping. If they didn’t want to give up family time, then they’d have to deal with poor-quality food from the supermarkets.
How can you beat the competition? Eliminate the need for the customer to make a trade-off. YourGrocer wins because it does what every great innovation does — that is, it helps customers break a constraint. Using YourGrocer means no longer choosing between quality food for the family and quality time with the family. Morgan said,
Once the convenience trade-off was equalized — YourGrocer makes local shopping just as convenient as using a supermarket — then other trade-offs, such as quality and supporting the community, became the differentiators. That’s what sets us above the supermarkets. That’s the real progress that people are able to make with us.
What’s the JTBD?
From the data Morgan has given us, I’d say that the struggle for progress is as follows:
More about: My family having quality food, taking away the stress from grocery shopping, more family time, convenience
Less about: Grocery shopping online/supermarket /local shop, supporting the local community
Again, any kind of task or activity associated with grocery shopping is just a solution for a JTBD — it’s not part of the JTBD itself. I know people who employ housemaids to keep the household fridge stocked with food and groceries. That entails no shopping at all — you pay someone else to take care of it. For those who can’t afford or don’t like that solution, grocery-delivery service is a nice alternative.
The progression of solutions in this case study helps us understand what customers do and don’t value. In the beginning, parents were fine visiting multiple shops. They were willing to trade convenience for food quality. But when their family grew, saving time and reducing stress became more important to them. This is how we know that their desire to evolve, their JTBD, is heavily related to finding a way to solve that stress and to save time.
This case study also demonstrates how customer needs or wants change over time and don’t belong to the customer. We may think we’re measuring a need, but we’re really just measuring what a customer does or doesn’t like about a particular solution. We must keep in mind that a “need” represents an interaction between the customer, their desire for progress, and whatever product they’ve hired for their JTBD. If one of those parts changes, then customers’ needs will change along with it.
Put it to work
Don’t depend on demographics. At first, Morgan thought he was making a product for young, urban professionals. This demographic certainly did represent some of his customers; however, it turned out that his most dedicated customers were families. Not only that, they almost always had two or more young children.
We can learn from this that demographic thinking can be misleading. It was the customers’ situation — not personal characteristics — that determined why they bought. Sometimes, you do have to collect and use demographic data. They can help you when you buy ads and develop promotional material. If you need to develop an ad for video or print, you’ll have to cast actors and set a scene. That means making concrete decisions on what those people should look like, what they do, and where they are. However, these data shouldn’t be used as a basis for product and marketing decisions. They are corollary data, not causal data. Use demographic data only as a guide or hint to help you find JTBD data.
Know the difference between customers who switch because they are unhappy with your solution and those who switch because changing life circumstances prompt a redefinition of progress. In Morgan’s case study, the local food shops may or may not have known why their customers stopped shopping with them. Was it because supermarkets offered more selection? Was it about quality? Was it about price? As it happens, none of these applied. These customers switched because they needed more convenience.
Let’s slow down and think about this. Notice something important and subtle here. By only observing customers, these businesses would have deduced that some switched to supermarkets. In response, these shops might have been tempted to change their businesses to be more like supermarkets. A butcher shop might think it should offer a wider selection of foods or lower its prices. Yet these things were not why the shops were losing customers. It was about convenience.
Next, imagine that these shops did learn that they were losing customers because of convenience. What should they do about it? This is a turning point where many businesses go terribly wrong. The knee-jerk reaction for many businesses in this position would be to figure out ways to offer more convenience themselves. They might be tempted to develop their own delivery services. This could be risky; delivery might just add to their costs without a significant return in profit. Instead, the way to win back customers and keep existing customers was to coordinate with YourGrocer — a partner who would deliver groceries on their behalf. They didn’t have to change their product at all.
Too often, businesses try to increase revenue by developing new products and features that are beyond their expertise. While they may capture more revenue, the endeavor ends up being a drain on time and money. This results in increased costs, minimal revenue gain, and likely a decrease in profits. Avoid this scenario by understanding why customers are switching away from your product. It could be that you can win back customers with little or no change to your product, as these small grocery stores did.
Create better advertising and promotional material by speaking to what customers value. Talk with customers to learn what messages connect with them. Don’t simply show them a bunch of ads and ask what they like. Instead, learn what made them think that one solution was better than another. How did they describe using a product to their friends and family?
Morgan learned that just using the word quality didn’t convey quality to customers. He needed to show pictures of the shops where the food came from. The shop logos did convey quality to customers.
Teams become more motivated, build consensus, and share a vision when they do Customer Jobs research together. Morgan’s third cofounder, Frankie “Pragmatic,” wanted to do JTBD research before joining YourGrocer. He also wanted to do it before he built anything. The benefits of this approach cannot be understated. First, the YourGrocer team immediately built consensus about what kind of product they needed to offer. Second, the team got the design of YourGrocer pretty spot-on the first time. They made a few adjustments along the way but never needed to make any significant pivots to the business model or how the company was going to solve its customers’ JTBD.
Learn more
This story is an excerpt from the book When Coffee and Kale Compete. You can download it as a free PDF, or buy it in paperback & kindle right here.
If you have more questions about Jobs to be Done, or want help applying JTBD concepts to your business or startup, contact me.
