Key Takeaways
1. Focus on the "Job to Be Done," Not Your Product
The core message of JTBD is clear: focus on people’s objectives, not on your company, offering, or brand.
Customer-centric imperative. In an era of unprecedented consumer choice, business success hinges on understanding customer needs. Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) provides a powerful lens, shifting focus from internal offerings to external customer objectives. This outside-in perspective is crucial for maximizing growth and ensuring relevance in dynamic markets.
Beyond the product. People don't "hire" products because of demographics or features; they employ solutions to accomplish specific objectives. Theodore Levitt famously illustrated this: "People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole." The drill is merely a means to an end, and true innovation lies in understanding that end.
Predicting behavior. JTBD moves beyond mere correlation to uncover causality. By understanding the underlying objectives and progress people seek, organizations can better predict customer behavior and create solutions that truly resonate. This foundational insight informs every aspect of a business, from product design to marketing and strategy.
2. Deconstruct the Job into Core Elements for Clarity
A common language of JTBD helps filter otherwise irregular market feedback into a normalized system.
Structured understanding. JTBD provides a systematic framework to classify and organize customer insights, transforming irregular feedback into actionable intelligence. This common language and structure enable teams to align around a shared understanding of customer needs, fostering collaboration and predicting customer-driven growth.
Five core elements: The JTBD framework breaks down customer objectives into distinct components:
- Job Performer (who): The ultimate end-user executing the main job.
- Jobs (what): The performer's aim, including main, related, emotional, and social jobs.
- Process (how): The chronological procedure of how the job gets done.
- Needs (why): The desired outcomes or requirements during the job process.
- Circumstances (when/where): The contextual factors framing job execution.
Hierarchical perspective. Jobs exist at different levels of abstraction, from broad aspirations to micro-jobs. Asking "why?" moves you up the hierarchy to broader goals, while asking "how?" drills down to more specific steps. This flexibility allows teams to scope their innovation efforts appropriately, ensuring focus without limiting potential.
3. Uncover Jobs Through Deep Qualitative Research
You have to get out and talk to job performers in formal interviews.
Discovery, not invention. Jobs are not brainstormed or assumed; they are discovered through direct engagement with job performers. Traditional research methods like surveys or analytics often miss the qualitative insights into why people act as they do, making in-depth interviews indispensable for uncovering true jobs and needs.
Two primary interview approaches:
- Jobs Interviews: Open-ended discussions focused on the performer's objectives, process, needs, and circumstances, independent of any specific solution. The critical incident technique helps uncover specific pain points and ideal states.
- Switch Interviews: Developed by Bob Moesta, this technique reverse-engineers why customers switch from one solution to another, tracing their "purchase journey" to uncover underlying motivations and the "Four Forces of Progress."
The Four Forces of Progress. This analytical model helps understand switching behavior:
- Push: Problems with the current solution.
- Pull: Attraction of a new solution.
- Anxieties: Uncertainty about adopting change.
- Habits: Familiarity with existing ways of working.
By analyzing these forces, organizations can pinpoint opportunities to drive demand or mitigate churn.
4. Map the Job Process to Systematically Identify Opportunities
Mapping the job, not the buying journey, provides unique insight.
Visualizing the flow. A job map is a chronological visualization of the main job, breaking it down into a sequence of smaller, functional sub-goals or stages. Unlike a customer journey map, it focuses on the performer's intent and process, independent of any specific product or brand interaction.
Universal stages. Tony Ulwick's Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) method proposes eight universal stages for any job:
- Define: Determine objectives and plan.
- Locate: Gather materials and information.
- Prepare: Organize and set up.
- Confirm: Ensure readiness.
- Execute: Perform the job.
- Monitor: Evaluate success.
- Modify: Adjust and iterate.
- Conclude: End and follow-up.
This structure helps ensure comprehensive coverage of the entire job, from beginning to end.
Strategic insights. The job map serves as a central artifact for organizing insights and identifying innovation opportunities. By examining each stage, teams can pinpoint where customers struggle, where current solutions fall short, or where new value can be created. It defines the scope of your business and guides product roadmaps, competitive analysis, and marketing efforts.
5. Quantify Underserved Needs for Strategic Innovation
Identify unmet needs and define your target markets all through the JTBD lens.
Prioritizing opportunities. While a job map reveals where opportunities lie, quantifying underserved needs helps determine which opportunities are most impactful. This involves identifying needs that are highly important to job performers but currently poorly satisfied by existing solutions.
Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI). Ulwick's ODI method provides a rigorous process for this:
- Gather desired outcomes: Collect a comprehensive set of needs from qualitative research.
- Formulate precise statements: Use a "direction of change + unit of measure + object + clarifier" format (e.g., "Minimize the time it takes to gather documents").
- Survey job performers: Rate each outcome for both importance and satisfaction.
- Calculate opportunity scores: Pinpoint needs with high importance and low satisfaction, indicating the biggest innovation potential.
Beyond ODI. Simpler approaches, like Dan Olsen's importance vs. satisfaction matrix or Scott Anthony's Jobs Scoring Sheet, offer lighter alternatives for prioritizing needs based on team assumptions or less extensive data. Regardless of the method, the goal is to focus innovation efforts on solving the most critical, unmet customer needs for predictable market success.
6. Design Solutions with Job Stories and Aligned Architecture
After understanding the problem you are solving, use JTBD to design products and services that customers really want.
Guiding design. JTBD extends beyond problem discovery to directly inform solution design. It ensures that product development is anchored in customer needs, preventing the creation of features that customers don't truly value. This alignment reduces waste and increases the likelihood of product-market fit.
Job stories. As an alternative to traditional user stories, job stories frame design problems by focusing on context, motivation, and desired outcome: "When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome]." These portable, modular statements guide designers and developers, connecting specific features to broader customer objectives.
Solution architecture. The conceptual structure of a product or service should mirror the user's job to be done, not the underlying technology. This "blueprint" (like User Environment Design or mental model diagrams) organizes capabilities around customer objectives, enhancing usability and comprehension. JTBD also guides hypothesis testing throughout development, ensuring continuous learning and risk mitigation.
7. Optimize the Customer Journey for Seamless Value Delivery
Use JTBD to accelerate your go-to-market efforts as well.
Beyond innovation. JTBD isn't just for product creation; it's vital for delivering value effectively. How an offering is introduced and supported is as crucial as the solution itself. JTBD helps optimize the entire customer lifecycle, from initial awareness to long-term loyalty.
Key delivery plays:
- Map the Consumption Journey: Visualize the buyer's experience (consumption jobs) in finding, acquiring, and getting value from a solution. This differs from a job map by focusing on brand interaction.
- Onboard Customers Successfully: Guide new users into the job they want to accomplish, not just the product. Tailor onboarding based on their solution experience and job comprehension.
- Maximize Customer Retention: Use "inverted Switch interviews" (cancellation interviews) to understand why customers churn. Address root causes and leverage the Four Forces and Fogg Behavior Model to build habit-forming solutions.
- Provide Relevant Support: Train support agents to listen for the customer's underlying job, clarify their intent, and resolve issues by addressing the core objective, not just the stated task.
Holistic customer success. By applying JTBD across these delivery touchpoints, organizations can build stronger, more enduring relationships with customers, ensuring they achieve their desired outcomes and remain loyal.
8. Leverage JTBD for Enduring Strategic Growth and Organizational Alignment
JTBD not only frames innovation and marketing efforts, but it also provides a way of grounding strategy in real-world observations.
Antidote to disruption. Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption highlights how incumbents often overlook cheaper, lower-performing solutions that eventually upend markets. JTBD helps companies diagnose disruptive threats by comparing how well different solutions (including potential disruptors) get the same job done, allowing for proactive strategic responses.
Jobs-based strategy. Tony Ulwick's Growth Strategy Matrix categorizes strategies (Differentiated, Dominant, Discrete, Disruptive) based on whether an offering gets a job done "better" and/or "cheaper." This framework helps companies intentionally position their offerings to target specific customer segments and achieve predictable growth.
Organizational alignment. To truly be customer-centric, companies must organize around jobs. This means shifting from rigid functional or hierarchical silos to cross-functional teams aligned to specific customer jobs. This fosters a common perspective, reduces coordination costs, and empowers teams to make customer-focused decisions.
Expanding market opportunities. JTBD encourages companies to ask, "What business are we really in?" By looking at the broader "progress" people want to make (higher-level aspirations) and related jobs, organizations can reframe their offerings and discover entirely new avenues for growth, as exemplified by Airbnb's expansion from accommodations to "trips."
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