Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice Page 4

  As amazing as it sounds, the truth is companies routinely try to satisfy customers’ needs without a clear definition of what a need even is. It is like trying to solve a word puzzle without knowing what a “word” is. So let’s not assume customers have latent needs.

  Why does it matter? Take a look at your organization. Everything it does is based on what unmet needs the company decides to target. The marketing team must know the customer’s needs in order to define the company’s value proposition, segment markets, position products and services, and create marketing communications. The development team must know the customer’s needs so it can understand the strengths and weaknesses of the company’s products, decide what new features to add to existing products and what new products to create. The R&D department makes technology investments based on its understanding of customer needs. Finally, the sales team’s success depends on its ability to show customers that the company’s products meet their needs.

  How to get a handle on customer needs is an unsolved mystery—and that mystery is killing innovation. Before a company can succeed at innovation, managers must agree on what a need is—and the types of needs that customers have.

  The key to solving this mystery lies in Jobs-to-be-Done Theory.

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  JOBS-TO-BE-DONE NEEDS FRAMEWORK

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  Imagine the implications of knowing all your customer’s needs. How many people in your organization today know all your customer’s needs? Imagine if they all shared a common understanding of what a need is. How would decision-making improve if everybody in your organization had knowledge of all your customer’s needs? How much more effective would your product and marketing teams be if it were possible to determine with a high level of confidence exactly what customer needs are underserved? What possibilities would arise if it became possible to discover segments of customers with unique sets of unmet needs? Knowledge of all the customer’s needs changes everything. So how can it be achieved?

  Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt said, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!" Clayton Christensen said, “People buy products and services to get a job done”. In his most recent book he says, “Customers don’t buy products; they pull them into their life to make progress.”

  These are the basic constructs of Jobs-to-be-Done Theory, but these constructs are only the tip of the iceberg. Jobs-to-be-Done Theory has a game-changing implication:

  Jobs-to-be-Done Theory provides a framework for (i) categorizing, defining, capturing, and organizing all your customer’s needs, and (ii) tying customer-defined performance metrics (in the form of desired outcome statements) to the Job-to-be-Done.

  Knowing all the customer’s needs in a given market dramatically changes the way a company approaches the innovation process. With a complete set of customer needs in hand, a company is able to discover hidden segments of opportunity, determine which needs are underserved and overserved, decide which strategies to pursue, simplify ideation, test concepts for their ability to get a job done in advance of their development, and align the actions of marketing, development, and R&D to systematically create customer value.

  With knowledge of all the customer’s needs and which are unmet, a company can predict which new concepts and offerings will win in the marketplace. Evaluating a new concept against all the needs (when those needs are defined as the metrics customers use to measure value when getting a job done) will reveal how much better a proposed concept will get the job done.

  Because customers are loyal to getting a job done, customers will switch to new solutions when they are able to get the job done significantly better. In our experience, new products that get the job done 20 percent better or more are very likely to win in the marketplace. Knowing that a product will get the job done 20 percent or more is the key to predictable innovation. ODI makes this possible.

  While applying Jobs-to-be-Done Theory over the past 25 years, I have developed the Jobs-to-be-Done Needs Framework (see the figure on the next page).

  This framework introduces the types of customer needs that must be considered to gain a deep understanding of what a customer is trying to accomplish. They include (i) the core functional Job-to-be-Done, (ii) the desired outcomes tied to the core functional Job-to-be-Done, (iii) related jobs, (iv) emotional and social jobs, (v) consumption chain jobs, and (vi) the buyer’s financial desired outcomes.

  While a job describes the overall task the customer is trying to execute, an outcome is a metric the customer uses to measure success and value while executing a job. For every functional and consumption chain job there exists a set of up to 50 or more desired outcome statements.

  The Jobs-to-be-Done Needs Framework reveals the complexity involved in understanding all the needs in a market. It is not as if the customer has a handful of needs, or that there is just one customer. A diverse group of customers in a given market often collectively have well over 100 needs. In more complex markets such as health care and social media, customers may have 200 needs or more.

  The customers’ needs are multilayered and complex. Customers have needs related to buying, using, and owning a product. They have emotional and functional needs. Customer need statements are mutually exclusive—they are defined independent of each other. A complete set of needs is collectively exhaustive—it incorporates all the needs a customer has for a given job. Each need must be stated separately and categorized correctly. Why?

  The goal of innovation is to devise solutions that address unmet customer needs. For a company to be successful at innovation, this means it must not only know all the needs in the market, but it must be able to determine which needs are unmet. It must also be able to determine if there are segments of customers with different unmet needs. These are the insights that enable the innovation process to become more predictable. Without these insights innovation remains a game of chance. Having them changes everything.

  What are the chances, for example, that a company will randomly conceptualize a solution that addresses 14 unmet needs in a segment of the market that represents about 25 percent of users? It’s very unlikely to happen by chance. A company would have to know the segment exists and precisely what needs are underserved before it could predictably achieve success.

  But how long would it take a product planning team to conceptualize a solution that addresses those same 14 unmet needs if they knew the segment existed and exactly what those unmet needs were? In the case of the Bosch circular saw product team (see the case study in chapter 5), it took just 3 hours. This is the power of the ODI process. Innovation is transformed from a game of chance to a science when the customer’s desired outcomes (customer metrics) are known in advance of ideation.

  One important factor that cannot be overlooked is that most markets are not homogeneous—meaning in nearly every market, customers do not agree on what needs are unmet. Some customers in nearly every market struggle more than others to get a job done. This confirms what we learned in marketing 101—in nearly every market exists segments of customers with unique sets of unmet needs.

  Discovering segments of customers with unique sets of unmet needs and determining precisely what unmet needs exist in a segment requires statistically valid market research, not just observation or other qualitative research methods. Customer personas that are built around demographic and psychographic data and claim to represent customer “segments” are highly misleading as they usually create phantom targets.

  Trying to guess at what needs-based segments exist and which needs are unmet introduces risk and variability into the innovation process. This is why statistically valid quantitative research is an essential part of the ODI process.

  All of this begins with understanding what a need is and what type of needs customers have. The Jobs-to-be-Done Needs Framework provides an important function. Given all the customer insights that companies consider each day, the framework reveals what inputs are needed,
how they should be categorized and organized, why they are captured, and how they should be used. The framework brings order to a historically chaotic practice.

  THE CORE FUNCTIONAL JOB-TO-BE-DONE

  People buy products and services to get a job done. The job the end user is trying to get done is the core functional job. A deep understanding of the core functional job enables a company to create product or service offerings that get the job done significantly better than competing solutions.

  The core functional job is defined in a single statement, such as “cut a piece of wood in a straight line”, “pass on life lessons to children”, or “monitor a patient’s vital signs”. How a company should go about and define the core functional job is discussed in Chapter 4.

  The core functional job is the anchor around which all other needs are defined. It is defined first, then the emotional, related and consumption chain jobs are defined relative to the core functional job. For example, if the core functional job were defined as “pass on life lessons to children”, then we would seek to discover the customer’s emotional and related jobs as they are trying to “pass on life lessons to children”. All other jobs are in the context executing the core job.

  Companies routinely want to know the functional jobs that customers are trying to get done for two reasons: (1) so they can discover new jobs to address (or new markets to target), and (2) to define a market they are already serving in a new way so they can use Jobs-to-be-Done Theory to discover how to serve it better. While the first activity requires a company to discover multiple functional jobs a customer is trying to get done, the latter requires a clear definition of just one functional job.

  Market selection, the more complex scenario, is defined as the process of deciding what new markets a company should enter to establish attractive new revenue streams. To execute this process a company should first pick the customers (job executors) it would like to target and then determine all the functional jobs those customers are trying to get done. Next, through quantitative research, a company can determine which of those jobs are most important and least satisfied and will make the most attractive markets to target for growth. This exercise is critical for startups and established companies who are making investment decisions that will drive their growth.

  While new market discovery is important, we usually find ourselves helping companies’ better position their existing offerings and creating new products and services in core markets they have been entrenched in for years. So more often then not, we find ourselves trying to figure out the core functional job(s) an existing customer is trying to get done. While this is generally not too complicated, it can be when the offering is a platform-level solution.

  More specifically, in an existing market where a company’s offering has many applications or purposes, it is more difficult to determine the core functional job(s) the customer is trying to get done. In situations like that, we employ qualitative research methods to uncover all the reasons a customer may use the offering and then use quantitative research and factor analysis to group together like attributes and discover the core jobs customers are trying to get done. This approach has proven effective in banking (where banks are a solution that are used to get many jobs done) and social media, an industry where the top players offer platform-level solutions that are used for hundreds of purposes.

  When defined correctly, a functional Job-to-be-Done has three unique and extremely valuable characteristics:

  First, a job is stable; it doesn’t change over time. It’s the delivery vehicle or the technology that changes. Take the music industry, for example. Over the years people have used many products to help them “listen to music” (the Job-to-be-Done). This has included record players, tape and cassette players, compact disc players, MP3s and streaming services. Through this decades-long evolution of drastically changing technology platforms, the Job-to-be-Done has remained the same. The job is a stable focal point around which to create customer value.

  Second, a job has no geographical boundaries. People who live in the USA, France, UK, Germany, South Korea, China, Russia, Brazil and Australia have many jobs in common that they are trying to get done. The solutions they use to get those jobs done may vary dramatically from geography to geography, but the jobs are the same. The degree to which the customer’s desired outcomes are underserved may also vary by geography, depending on the solutions they use, but their collective set of desired outcomes are the same. Consequently, knowledge of the Job-to-be-Done in one geography can be leveraged globally.

  Third, a job is solution agnostic. The Job-to-be-Done does not care if your company provides product, software, or service offerings. The job has no solution boundaries. This means that a deep understanding of the job will inform the creation of a solution that combines hardware, software and service components. It also informs a digitalization strategy—ways to use technology to get a job done better.

  DESIRED OUTCOMES ON THE CORE FUNCTIONAL JOB

  By focusing on the core functional job the customer is trying to execute and studying it as you would study a process, it becomes possible to uncover the metrics that customers use to measure success and value as they execute each step in that job. These metrics are included in specially formed need statements we call “desired outcomes” (see chapter 4).

  While defining the functional job correctly is important, uncovering the customer’s desired outcomes (the metrics they use to measure success when get the job done) is the real key to success at innovation.

  To uncover the customer’s desired outcomes, we dissect the core functional job into its component parts (job steps) using a job map. The job map becomes the framework from which to capture desired outcome statements.

  Desired outcome statements explain precisely how customers measure success and value as they go through each step of the core functional job. They describe how it is possible to get the job done more quickly, predictably, efficiently and without waste. It is common to find that between 50 and 150 desired outcomes statements are applicable to the core functional job. For example, when trying to listen to music, a listener may want to “minimize the time it takes to get the songs in the desired order for listening”, or “minimize the likelihood that the music sounds distorted at high volume”.

  We follow a strict set of rules when constructing desired outcome statements—for example, they are purposely designed and structured to be measurable, controllable, actionable, devoid of solutions, and stable over time. They are also structured so they can be prioritized for importance and satisfaction using statistically valid market research methods.

  RELATED JOBS

  While getting the core functional job done, it may be important to the end user to get other functional jobs done as well. Knowing what those related jobs are is important as it can lead to the creation of a platform-level solution that gets many jobs done. It is not uncommon to find that 5 to 20 related jobs might be on the mind of the end user.

  While making a presentation, for example, a knowledge worker may want to emphasize a point projected on a screen, advance slides, time the presentation, or shut off the projector. Enabling the execution of all these related jobs done on a single platform describes how the telescopic pointer of years ago has evolved into today’s wireless presenter device. Its value increased as it enabled the presenter to get more related jobs done.

  EMOTIONAL AND SOCIAL JOBS

  While getting the core functional job done, it may also be important to the end user to address important emotional and social jobs. Emotional jobs define how customers want to feel or avoid feeling as a result of executing the core functional job. Social jobs define how the customer wants to be perceived by others.

  For example, a parent who is trying to pass on life lessons to children may want to “feel appreciated” (an emotional job) and “be perceived as a caring parent” (a social job).

  Emotional and social job statements are used to help inform the decisions that lead to the
creation of the value proposition and the effective marketing, positioning, and design of a product or service.

  It is not uncommon to find that 5 to 25 emotional and social jobs may be on the mind of the end user when executing the core functional job.

  CONSUMPTION CHAIN JOBS

  Products have a lifecycle. After a product is purchased (which is a separate job), it must be received, installed and set-up. Then someone has to learn how to use it and interface with it. Someone may also have to transport, clean, store, maintain, upgrade, repair, and dispose of it. While people don’t buy a product so they can clean, repair and dispose of it, a product that simplifies product consumption along one or more of these dimensions could differentiate itself in the marketplace. Dyson, for example, created the bagless system for collecting and disposing of dirt in a vacuum cleaner, making consumption more convenient. Shirt makers, who have differentiated themselves through non-iron shirts, serve as another example.

  The jobs along the product lifecycle are called consumption chain jobs. Each consumption chain job is comprised of its own distinct set of desired outcome statements. The purchase process itself can be considered a consumption chain job as customers must research, evaluate and transact the purchase. This “purchase job” is often worth analyzing to help improve the purchase process. We have completed extensive research with Harte Hanks doing exactly that, revealing significant opportunities for retailers to improve the way they sell their products to in-store consumers.