Onwardly, a cybersecurity management tools provider that had grown quickly since launching in 2020.
The client
Onwardly, a cybersecurity management tools provider that had grown quickly since launching in 2020.
Opportunity
Onwardly’s core product and feature set had been built on the back of research done at launch. The business had grown since, but the founder needed to know whether the next round of investment should go toward extending the current proposition or toward a different part of the market altogether, and neither question could be answered without first understanding what was actually driving customers to choose Onwardly over a competitor, or not.
Approach
Rather than start from a list of feature ideas, we diagnosed the causal drivers of customer choice using Jobs to Be Done. That meant being deliberate about who we spoke to before anything else: customers who had made a recent, real choice of cyber security provider, split across those who chose Onwardly and those who chose an alternative, so the research could explain both sides of the decision rather than only the customers who already agreed with it.
We then ran deep exploratory interviews, at least an hour each, with both cohorts, reconstructing the choice each customer had actually made and why: the Jobs they were trying to get done that were driving their choice of provider, and where their current solution was failing to get those Jobs done. We aggregated the interviews to name the Jobs driving choice and behaviour across the market, and the specific opportunities to help customers make more progress against them.
Outcomes
The research identified three stages of cyber security maturity that organisations move through, and fourteen Jobs to be Done that emerge as they progress, together explaining the choices Onwardly’s prospects and customers were actually making. That gave Onwardly a specific, defensible recommendation: focus on the early stage Jobs of less mature organisations, a segment the large established providers were over serving rather than genuinely competing for. We paired that with a disruption strategy grounded in Christensen’s disruption theory, naming the measures of customer performance Onwardly needed to win on as a low cost new entrant, rather than trying to out-feature providers with a decade’s head start.
