After you've run your first batch of problem discovery interviews, you can begin to cluster your raw canvases into jobs-based customer segments.

What are the common patterns?

Look for common patterns across the top of the customer forces canvas, namely:

• Triggering events

  There are generally three places we look for when we want to find triggering events:

  1. Bad experiences, something happened in the world (e.g. pandemic) and things that used to work no longer work and that creates a suboptimal experience for a lot of people.
  2. Changes in circumstance, something changes in people's life.
  3. Awareness nuances, what's already happening to them where they are realizing that something is different (e.g. regulation change, doctor's diagnosis). Anything external to you that makes them all of a sudden aware of a problem.

• Desired outcomes

• Chosen existing alternatives

  They don't have to be specific brands. You can generalize to a category of products. For example, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he looked at smartphones in general, he didn't take a particular brand. He looked at all the smartphones on the market at the time and said "here are the shortcomings with all of them" and positioned the iPhone as the best smartphone in the market to overcome those shortcomings rather than comparing it to a specific competitor.

People that share similar triggering events, desired outcomes, and existing alternatives tend to behave more similarly and can be grouped together as a segment.

When looking for patterns avoid relying solely on memory but actually reference and tabulate the results from your raw canvases. You should have one for each interview that you conducted.

The reason this is so important is because of recency bias where we pay disproportionately higher emphasis on recent events and conversations which can easily skew your conclusions.

Create an archetypical customer forces canvas

Once you’ve identified a job-based segment, create an archetypical customer forces canvas that summarizes key insights in the other boxes into an archetype that describes this segment.

You only want to capture common behavioral attributes and drop any outlier behaviors in the process.

Rank your top 3 customer segments

After processing all your raw canvases and grouping them into one or more archetypical canvases, identify your top 3 clusters. These are worth investigating further.

When you go through this analysis, you may find that sometimes the most common story you hear is not the most viable or is not the most feasible. So it's not always about the biggest cluster, it really is about the cluster that meets all the criteria of desirability, viability, and feasibility. Ideally we want to end up into one or more than one of these clusters.

Early adopter criteria

Outcome: 3 archetypical customer forces canvas clusters based on triggering events, desired outcomes, and chosen existing alternatives