How to Master Jobs to be done
Lessons from Competing against luck
The book in a few sentences
- Innovation can be far more predictable than you might think. Try to determine what causes your user to behave in a certain way by understanding the jobs they are trying to get done.
- Jobs to be Done (JTBD) = Progress customers are trying to make in a given context.
- Jobs are enduring. They don’t change much over time. How you might address them will change.
- To solve a JTBD, you need to integrate your company around experiences that deliver on the job.
- Opportunities to find jobs exist everywhere, whether it is your own life, non-consumption, or workaround and compensatory behaviors
- It’s not enough to measure the “Big Hire” which is when the customer buys the product, also measure the moments of “Little Hire,” i.e., when they use the product
- Monitor both forces that help your customer move towards your product, and forces that cause your customer not to adopt the product
The book in more detail (and my color commentary)
If you are a Product Manager, or a designer, you probably use Jobs to be Done…..or are just sick of hearing about the concept😃.
The reason why I think JTBD caught on is simple; it provides the right vocabulary to talk about “customer problems.”
I always felt customer problems were limited, because when it brings the image of this pain point that customers can easily recognize and feel.
But often they cannot express these “pain points” and these problems.
But customers can give us clues on what job they were looking to do, if we ask them in the right manner.
The problems with JTBD
JTBD to understand at a surface level, but challenging to master.
Just like a diet. Conceptually, dieting is simple. Eat in moderation, mostly plants. Simple right? Yes, yes, I can see the eye roll
So let’s break it down as a first step to mastering it.
What are Jobs to be Done?
Fundamentally:
Job to be Done = Progress a user is looking to make in a particular context
Both are extremely important, and Clay does an excellent job emphasizing that. So does Des Traynor in his talk on “Product strategy in a growing company.” I am going to use Des’s example here.
Des said that “satisfy my hunger” is the progress that many foods can be hired to make. Steak can, Chinese takeout can, fish and chips can, burgers can, chicken tikka masala with naan can. (OK you get it, I am hungry).
But when you add context to it, things change. For example, if the setting is “in under 10 minutes while I can drive with the other hand,” the answer is likely — Pizza! It fits the progress AND the context.
My Kellogg classmate Ben Thompson also wrote an excellent article on this called “Aggregators and Jobs-to-be-Done.” He lays out the rationale for why Uber considering the acquisition of a Scooter sharing company. It made sense because both were doing the same job “transporting users to the desired destination.
I did see one omission from Ben, which is so unlike him. The exclusion was the missing context from the JTBD. “Going somewhere” is progress that users can be making in various settings, e.g., I am trying to go on a vacation to a tropical paradise sometime this December. But I would not, could not want to go in an Uber. But in the context of “get to point A within 100 miles in a relatively cheap manner without the hassle of driving,” it seems to fit in the job correctly.
The right experiences
Clay emphasizes that to “nail” a JTBD, you need to nail not the features, but the experience. For which, you will need to re-align your organization towards the JTBD.
I gave two examples of this in my blog post on “Applying Michael Porter’s concepts.” But let’s consider another example from Clay’s book: that of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU).
SNHU re-oriented their experience for 30+ adults who were looking to complete either a few courses or their master’s degree, via online learning. The Job was “Help me learn a particular skill while I continue to work full time and stay where I do.”
Initially, they were routed and treated the same way as an 18-year old trying to apply to college. But what matters in the context of a 30-year-old trying to finish their undergraduate degree is so different than an 18-year-old looking to decide where to go to college.
You don’t care about things that undergraduates might look for in a college experience. Things such as attractive classmates, placement services, parties, alumni networks, and having fun things to do nearby.
What you DO care about in this context is a) Can you fit this into your schedule? b) Can you afford it? c) Will it be beneficial?
As Clay wrote here, “Convenience, customer service, credentials, and speedy completion times” were everything. Anxieties about financial aid, whether the students will find the time etc. were the blockers. There was a lot of opportunity waiting to be uncovered; this was the classic non-consumption case.
SNHU re-oriented themselves to address this JTBD. As an example, they made sure that a person knowledgable with the needs of such students made a call within minutes of any web form submission.
Now once SNHU created the right experience, the next thing that happened was what happens in most cases when you create the right experience to solve a JTBD.
You become so much harder to imitate.
That’s because you have had to orient and perfect all activities that contribute to the JTBD. Or in Michael Porter’s words, you’ve got to gear your entire value chain to provide the value proposition just right,
Features can be copied. Technology can be matched. But recreating experiences that are tailored to solve the JTBD is much harder.
Three dimensions of Jobs to be Done
Fundamentally, there are three dimensions of Jobs to be Done that you should consider:
- Functional dimensions
- Social dimensions
- Emotional dimensions
Most people miss the social and emotional dimensions. That’s because they are not visible on the surface, like the features and functional dimensions are. They require customer intimacy, deep understanding of the job, the progress, the context in which it occurs. But also because consumers are not good at expressing these. You have to observe these, draw these out.
One of the areas where this is least understood is the area of online learning. In this era where Google can give you any information very fast, you might assume that online learning is ….well not really required, right? Just find the info, its there for free, and do what you want to do with it.
That was the functional dimension.
But learning something new is more complicated.
There are emotional dimensions:
- You need to believe that you can learn it.
- You need to believe that learning it will be worth it
- You need constant reinforcement that you are doing a great job.
And there are social dimensions:
- You need to understand and feel that you are not alone in this journey. That others are going through the same struggle
- If possible, you want to learn from the peers
- You want to compare how you are doing with others and make sure you are not falling behind
That is why there are courses that I have personally spent thousands of dollars on. They nail the job not just in a functional sense, no doubt. But they also get into the right emotional state for learning. They give me the confidence that I can overcome the initial obstacles and apply these skills. The courses also provide options for learning with other students in a way that helps reinforce what I learned.
Job hunting
Where do you find these jobs? Everywhere! There are five main areas:
- Your own life: Where you feel that no product or service had nailed the experience
- Non-consumption: An example is Airbnb. Airbnb did not compete with hotels; it competed with people just not making the trip because of stay being too expensive because nothing was available. Fighting with non-consumption takes imagination and courage because you have to think beyond the established industry and category boundaries, and think from first principles on what the underlying job is in the first place.
- Workarounds and compensatory behavior: Customers are often so unhappy with available solutions that they are more than willing to create their own, imperfect alternatives. You have a clear opportunity there!
- Negative jobs: People will pay to avoid pain. Meal planning services fall in this category. The job I am looking to avoid is to prep, plan, and figure out what I should eat during the week while maintaining my health. Instead, food that I can prepare quickly is delivered right to my doorstep!
- Unusual uses: When you notice customers are using your product in a way that you did not intend them to use, you have an opportunity to find another JTBD. I have personally seen cases where some of the products I managed had customers using it obsessively for a short period every few weeks. Digging into it provided an opportunity to solve a different JTBD.
The forces at play
If you want to charge a premium price for your product, you must account for benefit in terms of the total real cost to the customer.
Total cost to customer = Price of product + Effort + Risk
If you can reduce the risk by being so good at nailing the job, you can charge a premium price.
If you can reduce the effort required by the customer, they will likely pay a premium.
But to do that you need to do two things:
- You need to understand the forces that oppose change and those that facilitate change.
- You need to work towards building a purpose brand that speaks to the job so tightly that it is an obvious choice for it.
Purpose brands play the role of communicating externally how the “enclosed attributes” are designed to deliver a very complete and specific experience. A purpose brand is positioned on the mechanism that causes people to purchase a product: they nail the job. A purpose brand tells them to hire you for their job. — Clay Christensen, Competing against Luck
An example of this is TurboTax. It’s clear what it is for, and the product experience nails the JTBD: file my taxes when it is tax time.
But because they are so good at the JTBD that customers don’t bother looking at alternatives!
How to interview for JTBD
Interviewing for JTBD is the hardest to master, aspect of JTBD.
You have to re-think how you interview entirely. You cannot just ask people what problems they have.
Instead, you should view interviewing for JTBD as a process of building a documentary of the moments that led to customers buying and using your product.
You have to think in terms of storyboards — and not written documents — as a way to express the customer’s journey.
You have to be willing to work with messy customer data, and not neatly formatted pivot tables.
It’s all about seeing patterns and synthesizing insights.
One of the most magical interviews I have seen in my life has been from Bob Moesta at Business of Software Conference. Here is a similar interview he did at the same conference in 2013
I hope you watch it. It is so unlike most customer interviews you will see. This interview is all about digging deep into the forces that oppose change and those that facilitate change.
It’s about finding the social and emotional dimensions of the struggle.
It’s about getting into the brain of the customer.
It’s about going way beyond the reasons customers justify their decisions by and finding what made them act.
If you can master this skill, you can nail Jobs to be Done.
Summary
A Job to be Done is the progress a customer wants to make in a given context. Ultimately, JTBD gives you the right vocabulary to understand customer “needs,” and design and deliver the right experience that customers will pay a premium price for it. To nail this, though, you must be willing to uncover forces that caused customer behavior, and not just take their word for it.
If you liked the blog post, you would love my free workshop, “5 Steps our Product Manager Clients Take to Land Their Dream Job, Increase Their Salary by 200%+, and Accelerate Their Career.” Go ahead, enroll now!
