9a. Jobs To Be Done Introduction

What could be left to talk about concerning customer needs and the problem space?!

Feels like beating a dead horse, right?

Well, there is actually an entire school of thought we have to cover: Jobs To Be Done.

You see, understanding customer needs is absolutely vital to good product development processes and good product development life cycles. It’s also universal to all NPD methods and matters in every for all companies in all industries. As a result, customer needs are probably the most discussed and written-about topic in all product development. It cannot be over-analyzed.

So here we go. Jobs To Be Done. JTBD.

Intro to JTBD

Here’s the theory: People don’t buy products because they have a need. People “hire” products to do “jobs” for them.

“There is a simple, but powerful, insight at the core of our theory: customers don’t buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress. We call this progress the “job” they are trying to get done, and in our metaphor, we say that customers “hire” products or services to solve these jobs.” — Clayton Christensen, Competing Against Luck

You might consider “a job” and “a need” to be the same thing, but the more we explore this “job” construct, the more I think you’ll see how it unlocks a new approach to framing the problem space.

A “job” is something more complicated than a “need.”

“…Confusion has permeated product development because companies continue to define “requirements” as any kind of customer input: customer wants, needs, benefits, solutions, ideas, desires, demands, specifications, and so on. But really, those are all different types of inputs, none of which can be used predictably to ensure success.” — Tony Ulwick, What Customers Want

Focusing on customer needs cannot predictably ensure successful products?!

(This would be a good time for a gif of someone’s head exploding, or of someone being like “whaaaaaat?”)

That’s a pretty radical statement. Nearly all product development books will tell you that successful products come from MEETING CUSTOMERS NEEDS. Period, end of a sentence.

Jobs, Not Needs

Instead of focusing on customer needs, Christensen and Ulwick, and other JTBD advocates state that you need to focus on the job the customer is trying to accomplish.

“When companies focus on helping the customer get a job done faster, more conveniently, and less expensively than before, they are more likely to create products and services that the customer wants. Only after a company chooses to focus on the job, not the customer, are they capable of reliably creating customer value.” — Tony Ulwick

This theory is a whole new take on the problem space.

JTBD Theory defines the problem space as “What job is the customer trying to accomplish?”

9b. Jobs To Be Done

JTBD Theory: The problem space = “What job is the customer trying to accomplish?”

“We define a “job” as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. This definition of a job is not simply a new way of categorizing customers or their problems. It’s key to understanding why they make the choices they make. The choice of the word “progress” is deliberate. It represents movement toward a goal or aspiration. A job is always a process to make progress, it’s rarely a discrete event. A job is not necessarily just a “problem” that arises, though one form the progress can take is the resolution of a specific problem and the struggle it entails.” — Clayton Christensen

There was a famous* study done on how to sell more milkshakes, and this study helps to illuminate the JTBD concept further. (*Note that I use the term “famous” quite liberally here.)

Let’s explore this totally famous, can’t-believe-you’ve-never-heard-of-it study.

Selling More Milkshakes

A team was tasked with helping a fast food joint sell more milkshakes. The team started with the fundamentals of product development: understanding the problem space, hearing the voice of the customer, and truly learning the customer’s needs.

The research team “got out of the building” (genchi genbutsu) and talked to customers. They stopped people on the way out of the drive-thru. They observed the people who were ordering milkshakes.

Once the team was able to synthesize the observations, their insight was that people were “hiring” milkshakes to do a variety of jobs for them: to entertain them during a commute, to give them a win with their children, to bring all the boys to the yard (that last one is not real it’s just a hilarious joke).

These insights might have been missed had they just focused on “needs” in a narrow sense.

If customers were merely surveyed about their milkshake needs, they might talk about preferences: low-fat, sweet, delicious, stays cold, easy to drink, inexpensive.

Averaging those preferences together could lead to a product that doesn’t particularly solve anyone’s needs effectively, since different people are hiring the milkshake for different purposes, and thus have distinctly different preferences and circumstances.

Tony Ulwick (author of another JTBD book called What Customers Want) argues that this focus on jobs is much more informative than simply trying to capture these customer needs or preferences.

According to him, focusing on customer needs leads to ambiguous understanding and ambiguous language and imprecise insight.

The job is more definitive. The job should be the focus.

“Needs are analogous to trends — directionally useful, but totally insufficient for defining exactly what will cause a customer to choose one product or service over another. Simply needing to eat isn’t going to cause me to pick one solution over another — or even pull any solution into my life at all. I might skip a meal. And needs, by themselves, don’t explain all behavior: I might eat when I’m not hungry at all for a myriad of reasons.” — Clayton Christensen

Main Source:

Milkshake Marketing — HBR article about how people hire milkshakes in different ways

Here is a good video on this topic as well — it basically summarizes the study and the book Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen.

9c. Jobs To Be Done and Who You’re Really Competing With

You might think you know what your product is competing with.

“Other products like it,” you would say.

“Wrong!” — People who think about Jobs to be Done would yell in your face.

If you’re not thinking about “jobs” when considering why people might need your product, you might miss the bigger picture.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

If you’re not thinking about JTBD, you might consider the competitor products to a milkshake to be things like snacks, sports drinks, smoothies, breakfast sandwiches, etc.

But if someone is hiring the milkshake to keep them entertained during the morning commute, the milkshake is also competing with alternative forms of entertainment: podcasts, apps, bananas, or playing chess on a small table balanced on your lap while you drive.

Christensen cites other examples where it’s enlightening to consider a wider range of competitors for a given product:

• An online college may be competing not most directly with other schools, but instead with someone simply not enrolling.
• When selling a condo, your product is actually about helping someone move their life. That’s a bit of a different “job” than just competing against condos with slightly different specs.

Knowing what alternatives your product is truly competing against is critical to know how best to position it and differentiate it and make it appealing to the potential consumer.

This gets to the topic of circumstances. We’ll cover that next.

9d. Circumstances

In the last section, we talked about clarifying what alternatives your product actually competes with. Thinking about this question too narrowly may hinder your ability to truly understand your customer’s needs or circumstances.

Back to Milkshakes and Circumstances

If you’re just buying a milkshake as a guilty morning pleasure, the circumstance of whether a drive-thru exists may be a pretty big factor in your purchase decision.

Or maybe whether you can order ahead on an app is a big deal to you because every minute is precious on your morning commute.

If you’re buying a milkshake to make your kids happy and to make you feel like a dad who doesn’t say “no” to everything, then nutritional value or sugar content may be a larger factor (after all, you’re just trying to give your kid a treat, not type-2 diabetes).

Clearly, the circumstances in which you’re trying to make progress play a major role in how you evaluate a purchase decision.

Circumstances help you further define the job and put it into context. They are clearly different than “needs,” so they offer more insight into the Problem Space.

Christensen says that these circumstances are “intrinsic” to the definition of a job. Circumstances deal with things like:

• Where are you?
• What are you doing?
• Are you a commuter in a rush?
• What pressure are you under? (Maybe a spouse?)

JTBD requires critical thought about a customer’s circumstances in trying to accomplish a job.

“The circumstance is fundamental to defining the job (and finding a solution for it), because the nature of the progress desired will always be strongly influenced by the circumstance.” — Christensen, Clayton M. Competing Against Luck

Understanding these circumstances may drive how you spec your product. And these circumstances also very often tend to be implicit customer needs — as in, they are not often things that customers will come out and say.

Thinking hard about the circumstances, and understanding them fully, will lead to greater insights about the problem space, and therefore greater potential for innovation.

Main Source:

Competing Against Luck — Clayton Christensen

9e. Types of Jobs and JTBD Recap

Hopefully, you’re sold on this concept of JTBD. If not, hopefully, you’re at least sold to do some more reading. If you’re not in either camp, well then, that’s a pretty bold stance, but OK, you’ve made up your mind.

Before we do a quick recap and list all the resources, just one last new nugget.

Types of Jobs

Tony Ulwick, in the book What Customers Want, says that there are two fundamental categories: functional jobs and emotional jobs.

Functional job — describes the tasks or progress that a customer wants to accomplish

Emotional job — describes the feelings and perceptions people want to feel or achieve

And to further break down the emotional jobs, Ulwick says that there are personal and social-emotional jobs.

Emotional job 1: Personal jobs — describes how people want to feel when buying or using a product

Emotional job 2: Social jobs — describes how people want to be perceived.

Consider these examples.

When you buy a car, there are a large number of functional jobs you’re trying to accomplish: getting from a to b, keeping your family safe, transporting your bike.

Buying a car fulfills a functional job, but also an emotional job

But you are also trying to feel a certain way (emotional jobs): maybe you want status, or to feel like you made a socially conscious decision. And finally, you are also trying to accomplish social jobs, like keeping up with the Joneses or being perceived as trendy and cool and successful.

Recap

Jobs to be Done — A theory that helps to explain customer behavior. The theory is that customers “hire” products to do a “job.”

Contrast this with the more generic concept that customers buy products to fill needs or solve problems. We need to eat, but that doesn’t exactly inform why we choose one restaurant over another.

Job — The progress someone is trying to make in a certain set of circumstances.

Circumstances — The context or situational details in which someone makes a decision to “hire” a product.

A quote from Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon cosmetics, helps to sum up the theory of JTBD: “In the factory, we make cosmetics; in the drugstore, we sell hope.”

“A job to be done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to transform her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her.” — Alan Klement, What is JTBD?

Useful Links:

Know Your Customer’s Jobs to be Done — Clayton Christensen

The “Jobs to be Done Theory of Innovation — Clayton Christensen

Milkshake Marketing — Clayton Christensen.

Marketing Malpractice — The OG JTBD HBR Article

A quick 8-minute video summarizing Competing Against Luck.

JTBD on Medium — A collection of publicly-sourced articles.

Books:

I think there are really only two major books you need to read on the subject:

Competing Against Luck — Clayton Christensen et al. I would start here; easy to read and a very comprehensive guide to JTBD.

What Customers Want — Anthony Ulwick. Customers hire products to do jobs, and those products perform against customer expectations in various outcomes. Seek out important but underserved outcomes.