A practical guide to jobs to be done

a practical guide on how to apply jobs to be done framework. I will introduce a simpler version and a more comprehensive one and show how they are applied in different scenarios

Intro

Jobs to be done (jtbd), a theory popularized by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, the famous author behind innovator’s dilemma. In the simplest term, Jobs to be done is figuring out what job did customer hire your product / service to do. Similar to the 5 whys and first principle of design, it tries to uncover the most fundamental need or reason why customer use the product, services or behaves certain way. It’s useful because it helps company figure out what your customer truly want, and come up with market winning products or services.

Conventional way of tech innovation usually evolve around product or technology. For example in banking, how do we improve checking account? Or how do we use AI? The problem with product is that product is just one way of solving a customer job. If one is tied to a particular product, he / she is likely to focus on improving existing product and miss the true job that customers hire his / her product to do. This will often result in killing innovation. For example, Henry Ford didn’t think about the job as faster horse, which is the current existing product, but getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

Another common pitfall is the trend to segment customer by demographics or persona instead of unmet needs. This can result in product misfit to market or fail to realize the optimal value of your product / solution.

In my research, I have come upon different version of the framework. I will start with the simpler one. The difference is that the simpler version is more suitable for a single person, like the product manager, in pursuit of product idea. The more complicated or comprehensive framework is suitable for company strategy and a much larger project.

Jobs to be done frameworks

The simpler jtbd model

The simpler model is broken into the following 7 steps:

1. Identify the customer’s jobs-to-be-done

2. Categorize the jobs

3. Define competitors

4. Create job statement

5. Prioritize job

6. List related job outcome statement

7. Create outcome statements

1: Identify the customer’s jobs-to-be-done

In the first step, we are trying to identify what’s “the job” customer has hired our product / service to do. We are trying to answer the why question. Why is customer buying your product? How is our customer using the product? In the Henry Ford example, mentioned above, we want to identify the job how to get from point A to B as quickly as possible, and not how to build a faster horse carriage.

The job statement should adopt the following format:

Action + object + context

Ex: getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible

Note, it’s ok that we don’t figure out “the job” in the beginning. As we go through the jtbd framework with desired outcome, customer interviews, and surveys can all help identify the job as we learn more about customer’s needs. Hence, if not sure whether we have the right job, we would need to review “the job” as we go through the framework.

2: Categorize the jobs

The job can be broke down into sub jobs: functional, emotional, and related. The goal is to better capture and organize customer needs.

Example: JBTD: organize and manage music for personal use.

Functional: play / listen the music

Emotional / personal: organize and manage music in a way that feels good

Social: share song with friends

Related job: download music from internet, make playlist, and discard unwanted songs

It’s possible to have sub-jobs up to 50 to 150 depending on the complication of the market.

3: Define competitors

It’s generally good to know the competitors because you need to understand what others are offering and how you can differentiate to win market share. For example, if the competition is offering well served products, then perhaps will need to revisit the jtbd and figure out whether this is still a “job” to be done.

4: List job outcome statement

Think in terms of time, cost, potential errors, quality, ease of use, speed, or any number of satisfaction or dissatisfaction dimension. The desired outcome should also be solution agnostic. The desired outcome should have the following format:

Improvement + measure + object of control

For example, the job of safely transporting passengers from point A to point B has many associated outcome expectations, such as minimize the jerking motion a passenger feels while being transported

5: Prioritize the jtbd opportunity

From the “job”, desired outcomes, and competitive analysis, we will apply qualitative interviews and quantitative survey to identify where the biggest opportunity is and where to focus. We do so with the following:

Method 1:

Try to identify whether the current market is overserved or underserved. One way is to use Likert Scale and ask customers to how important the job is and how satisfied they are with the existing solution and service.

Overserved means that people are very satisfied with the current offering, and there may be a demand for less service at cheaper cost. Underserved means that there is demand for better product / service at premium.

Note that there is almost always demand if we can offer better service at cheaper cost as long as the benefit exceeds the switching cost.

Method 2:

Ask the customer to rank the level of importance on the desired outcomes. The result should correlate with the result of method 1. If there is conflict, then further analysis may be needed. The goal is to figure out where the most unmet needs are.

Note that in this step, customer input is critical. It’s important to analyze the interview or survey to drive meaningful results. From the scale of existing solution and the rank of desired outcome, we can figure out where the most opportunity is. And combine with lean start-up methods, product manager can quickly test their MVP and iterate..

While the above process is suitable for a product manager, the jtbd can also be applied to company strategy level such as area of growth, new source of revenue or disrupt / innovate existing service / product. For such effort, a much more comprehensive jtbd framework is needed, and I will introduce one below.

The comprehensive jtbd model

The more comprehensive model is based on Anthoy Ulwick’s book “Jobs to be Done, Theory to Practice. It outlines a 10 step process from identifying who the customers are to market and product strategy. I tried to summarize and simplify below:

First, Ulwick outlines the 6 categories of sub-jobs:

1. The Core Functional Job-to-be-Done
2. Desired Outcomes on the Core Functional Job
3. Related Jobs
4. Emotional and Social Jobs
5. Consumption Chain Jobs
6. Financial Desired Outcomes

The goal of such categorization better captures customer's unmet needs. The 2 additional job that we haven’t seen before are: consumption chain jobs and financial desire outcomes.

Consumption chain jobs: The jobs along the product lifecycle are called consumption chain jobs. A product that simplifies product consumption, such as installed, cleaned, maintained, upgrade,…,etc., could differentiate itself in the market place. Each consumption chain job is comprised of its own distinct set of desired outcome statements

Financial desired outcomes: An understanding of buyer’s financial needs impact product and business model innovation. For example, what product features are valued by the buyer after the feature cost is factored into the equation?

Next, Ulwick outlined a comprehensive 10 step process for jtbd strategy.

10 step process:

1. Know your customer
2. Identify the jtbd
3. Uncover customer needs / desired outcomes
4. Find segments of opportunity
5. Define value proposition
6. Conduct competitor analysis
7. Formulate innovation strategy
8. Target hidden growth opportunities
9. Formulate market strategy
10. Formulate product strategy

For someone that like to keep things practical and simple, some of the steps can be combined. However, Ulwick is trying to make it comprehensive so it can accommodate more complicated jobs. The 10 step process is called ODI (outcome driven innovation)

1. Know your customer

Who are your customer? Typically, there are 3. The end user, the decision maker, and the support team. Jtbd attempts to satisfy needs all customers. With cloud and SaaS or BaaS, we have seen the role of support team becoming more in-house or in some instance even non-existent.

2. Identify the jtbd

This part is similar to “identify the job” in previous framework

3. Uncover cusotmer needs / desired outcomes

In addition to what’s already covered in previous framework, Ulwick provided a “job map” to help capture desired outcome. The job map describes what the customer is trying to get done (needs view). It’s not a customer journey or experience map.

The job map can be useful in the following way:

1. The completed job map can lay out the long term strategy goal of the organization
2. Innovative ideas can come from analyzing the job map, as it points out hole and inefficiencies in current offerings.
3. Framework and guide to capture desired outcome

Desired outcome statements can be uncovered using any of the popular interviewing methods, such as one-on-one interviews, focus groups, and observational and ethnographic interviews.

4. Find segments of opportunity

Instead of traditional segmentation by demographic or persona, the more effective segmentation is by cusotmer’s unmet needs. In Ulwick’s framework, this step is where interviews and survey with customers occur, and provided following 4 steps:

1. First, analyze the jtbd and desired outcomes.
2. Next, we survey statistically representative sample of customers. Their answer reveal how important each desired outcome, and how well the solution today satisfy those outcomes.
3. Use factor or cluster analysis to segment customers based on unmet needs.
4. Last, questions to uncover factors that may cause certain customers complexities and also reveal whether each segment is under or over served.

I think this is one of the most important step in Ulwick’s framework as this step is about how to incorporate user inputs in a systematic way to serve as foundation for the analysis later.

5. Define value proposition

This section use the findings from previous to identify value proposition. Further the author suggests to secure a winning value proposition, a company must:

1. know where in the job customers are underserved,
2. Clearly communicate the value proposition to the customers and how their needs can be satisfied,
3. Do everything in its power to satisfy the targeted unmet needs better than the competitors.

6. Conduct competitor analysis

As already covered in the previous framework, competitor analysis is used to provide analysis of existing solution, and validate the value proposition

7. Formulate innovation strategy

After the value proposition has tested against competition, the next step is to figure out whether to adopt dominant, disruptive, or differentiation strategy:

1. Differentiation strategy (better service at higher cost): is applied when the market is underserved.
2. Disruptive strategy (worse service at lower cost): is applied when the market is overserved
3. Dominant strategy (better service at cheaper cost) can and should be applied anytime if such strategy is available. The only caveat is to make sure the benefit clearly outweighs the switching cost

8. Target hidden growth opportunities

The main point here is that Ulwick provided a formula to figure out which jtbd or value proposition provides the most opportunity for the company when faced with multiple choices.

The mathematical formula we use is as follows:

Opportunity score = outcome importance +max(outcome importance — outcome satisfaction, 0)

This is helpful when trying to prioritize all opportunities across the company as it helps the company to focus its resources.

9. Formulate market strategy

As a result of Ulwick’s jtbd framework, ODI, the company would have both quantitative and qualitative data on customer unmet needs. The company can use such information to formulate the basis for its market strategy:

1. Decide which offering to target at each segment.
2. Communicate the strength of the offering for the segment.
3. Include outcome based value proposition in communication.
4. Build digital marketing strategy around unmet need.
5. Assign lead to ODI based segment.

This shows how the jtbd can be applied and benefit at strategic level rather just at product / solution level.

10. Formulate product strategy

Once ODI has pointed out most unmet needs per segment, company can take the following 7 course of action for specific product strategy:

1. Borrow features from other company offerings.
2. Accelerate offering in the pipeline or R&D.
3. Partner or license with other firms.
4. Acquire another firm to fill the gap.
5. Devise new feature set.
6. Devise new sub-system or ancillary services.
7. Conceptualize ultimate solution.

Conclusion

As evident above, this framework is much more elaborate, and can be applied to the entire company as a much larger project. Though, for smaller project, I think step 5, 7, and 8 can be combined. So, it comes down to what you are trying to achieve, or what’s the job-to-be-done, and there are different solution (or different version of the jtbd framework that can be applied). But the ultimate goal is the same: try to figure out customer’s true need, and how to best meet or satisfy it.