Jobs to be Done

A way of thinking and working out what the customer really wants

“The innovation journey for many companies is little more than a hopeful wandering through customer interviews, which rarely uncovers the best ideas or an exhaustive set of opportunities for growth…”

Anthony Ulwick (Creator of one of the Jobs-to-be-done methods)

Customer ‘Jobs’ are a relatively new concept where the researcher aims to uncover the desired outcome and why a customer ‘hired’ a particular product or service to achieve this result. As a thinking approach for innovation and new ideas it can be used at a more holistic level (championed by Clayton Christensen) or more detailed and specific (championed by Anthony Ulwick). Customers are doing or buying something to achieve something. Who the customer is doesn’t matter, it’s the job they are trying to do that’s important.

A good example from Christensen’s book on the subject that I enjoyed (and is relevant to this website) was a University in the US that realised they had a small group of mature older students who were looking for a University degree to help them retrain from a career in the military or perhaps unpaid caring roles. What the university discovered was that these students were looking for the university to fulfil a very different job for them than the typical 18 year old fresh out of school.

So they completely transformed their whole student recruitment process for these candidates. These students had no interest in the social setting and journey into adulthood that many institutions like this emphasise. Rather they needed a flexible environment that could work with them and their established family lives… calling them back on the phone when they enquired about a course, at a time of their choice (any time of day or night), offering support and flexible learning activities that would work around family life, being proactive on financial support packages etc… and the results were incredible. They are now the largest American University for mature students and their intake dwarfs their traditional student body. All from identifying a change in the customer job.

The difference between the two types of Jobs-to-be-Done approaches:

As mentioned above there are two subtly different views on the customer job approach. Christensen and Klement have one approach that is defined as “Jobs as Progress”.

People use products and services to progress from one thing to another, to make more productive, more effective, richer, less hungry, more fulfilled etc… Klement describes it like a computer game power up in Super Mario. Mario uses the power up (the product) to be able to do new things (the job).

Ulwick’s definition and approach on the other hand is described as “Jobs as Activity”.

People want to do things and that thing has many outcomes that need to be considered. Careful consideration of these outcomes can lead to new product opportunities because you can review where gaps and unsatisfied needs are hidden.

Let’s take an example to explain. In Theodore Levitt’s famous quote:

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.”

He inadvertently expresses a Jobs to be Done scenario, long before it’s time as a theory. Christensen and Klement (who come from a strategy standpoint of wanting to figure out the bigger issue) would, with their Jobs-as-Progress approach, view the hole as the job. Or perhaps even the picture hanging on the wall after the rawlplug and screw have been installed and the picture is hung and balanced as the Job. The bigger job to be done here might be to live in a beautiful home, the drill and the hole are just a part of the solution but there may be better ones.

Ulwick on the other hand is less interested in the strategy and more interested in creating products to do the activity better than it had been before. So for Ulwick, the act of making the hole is the Job and doing it well will have lots of outcomes that need to be investigated. He doesn’t care if the hole was the right strategic move or not. In this instance the person wanted a hole and so he wants to give them the best tool for the job.

For me I think both approaches can work alongside each other but at different stages. I’ve found Christensen’s view to be helpful when thinking of the bigger picture in order to find the underlying ambition. Whereas Ulwick is more applicable to the technical innovation of an engineering designer.

So I’m going to spend more time trying to explain his method here:

“Customers should not be trusted to come up with solutions; they aren’t expert or informed enough for that part of the innovation process. That’s what your R&D team is for. Rather, customers should be asked only for outcomes—that is, what they want a new product or service to do for them.”

Anthony Ulwick

The core tenets of Ulwick’s Jobs-to-be-Done Theory are:

  1. People buy products and services to get a “job” done

  2. Jobs are functional, with emotional and social components

  3. A Job is stable over time

  4. A Job is solution agnostic

  5. Success comes from making the “job”, rather than the product or the customer, the unit of analysis

  6. A deep understanding of the customer’s “job” makes marketing more effective and innovation far more predictable

  7. People want products and services that will help them get a job done better and/or more cheaply

  8. People seek out products and services that enable them to get the entire job done on a single platform

  9. Customer needs, when tied to the job-to-be-done, make innovation predictable

A detailed explanation of each of the core tenets can be found here. It’s well worth a read.

Ulwick has written some good books on the subject, I found “What Customers Want” to be very insightful. In it he is particularly critical of traditional methods for trying to understanding customers (principally VoC activities) describing them in a non-flattering way as “Customer-Driven Innovation” compared the his Outcome-Driven approach.

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Anatomy of an Outcome

Customers use metrics (consciously and subconsciously) called desired outcomes, to judge product performance. If all outcomes are satisfied, the job is performed perfectly.

Understanding these outcomes (their importance and if they are currently underserved) makes it possible to create new impactful products.

A job may have 100-150 outcomes…

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Lets take painting a room as an example… some examples of outcomes might be:

  • Minimise the amount of paint wasted due to over-purchase

  • Minimise the time it takes to protect adjacent surfaces

  • Minimise the amount of paint wasted when it is poured from one container to another

  • Minimise the likelihood of excessive paint dripping down and causing marks

  • Minimise the number of coats that are needed to cover the old surface colour

  • etc…

Once you have identified all the jobs and outcomes.

Prepare a survey of all the job and outcome statements and send to a representation of the target customer base (Ulwick suggests this is typically between 200-600 people, they have tried fewer and more and found this to be the most effective range).

Ask the participants to rate the importance and satisfaction on a scale of 1 (least) – 5 (most). Importance is how much they value the outcome whilst satisfaction is how well is this outcome currently dealt with. For example a high importance score coupled with a low satisfaction means the outcome is highly desirable.

The numbers in the table below are the percentage of respondents who scored the outcome a 4 or 5. “Minimise the amount of paint wasted due to over-purchase” for example had 95% of respondents gave this outcome a 4 or 5 for importance whilst only 32% gave it a 4 or 5 for satisfaction. Suggesting it was an issue to almost everyone but only a third had a satisfactory solution for it.

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Four jobs with one outcome?

I really like the Ulwick method because it achieves four useful functions;

  1. It presents an actionable method for exploring what a customer is really trying to achieve and what they really want.

  2. You can use outcomes rather than user attributes (geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioural) to divide your potential customer groups (market segmentation).

  3. It helps select which is the most valuable area to focus on through the Importance and Satisfaction criteria

  4. It provides a clear focus for subsequent idea generation.

Outcome not Customer Segmentation

In business marketing circles it is very common to try and ‘segment’ the market into different categories… users who like this or are this wealthy or drive this type of car or have this many kids etc… The problem with these divisions is they are not so useful for understanding user needs and coming up with new ideas for them. A much better way is to segment the outcomes into different groupings based on the job-to-be-done. These different segments are now aligned to specific approaches to jobs, rather than potentially irrelevant social demographics and backgrounds.

An example given in Ulwick’s book refers to a project by Motorola to understand the personal communicator radio market. They devised their 150 or so list of outcomes and were then able to group them into 3 distinct different themes around the different situations in which people use radios, each situation had a different outcome priority:

  1. Emergency situations (clear communication, easy to use whilst wearing gloves, low risk of accidentally changing settings etc…)

  2. Covert and secure operations (discreet, records the communications, low chance of interception)

  3. Administrative in nature (lots of constant radio chatter, easy to acknowledge message receipts, easy to program etc…)

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Through this method and insight they were able to split a single ‘all encompassing product’ into three distinct ones and tailor them for these specific three use cases. As a result they created a range of highly successful and market leading new products.

 
 

FAQs

In the Jobs-To-Be-Done approach, it suggests that ‘who the customer is’ is of little importance when researching new products. Does this not run the risk of excluding potential products that revolve around for instance the elderly or user-specific needs such as disabilities? Is the JBTD theory mutually exclusive to User-Centred Design?

I don’t believe so.

Jobs-To-Be-Done is a response to the inherent challenges and ingrained bias found in many VoC or ‘expert’ led approaches. A product designer, for instance, might assume that an elderly person wants certain features just because they are elderly… Whilst this may be the case for some, it’s condescending to others. Why can’t they have a product that does what they want without a built in bias?

By leading with the job and an unbiased and exhaustive list of outcomes first, we can then accurately review which people prioritise different outcomes and form a segmentation analysis around this.

This may reveal a popular cluster of specific outcomes from a specific user group but the results have not be pre-filtered by the designer. Once we know what a specific user group wants, we can move to a UCD approach to turn this into a reality.