Jobs Theory Blog

The latest version Apple's MacBook Pro hit the markets in late 2016, advertised as faster and more powerful than ever. One of its main selling points--the TouchBar--is said to make the device more versatile and easier to use.

We're accustomed to Apple's product enhancements being welcomed with open arms. But sales and reviews of the latest MacBook Pro buck that trend:

Apple sold nearly 4.9 million Macs in Q4 2016 for a revenue of $5.74 billion--a 14% decrease from the previous year (5.7 million Macs for a revenue of $6.88 billion).

Users of the MacBook Pro, like Alexey Semeney (CEO of DevTeam.Space), are claiming that Apple's newest Macbook Pro isn't a computer suitable for developers anymore.

Apple's main changes to the Mac relate to the interface, such as TouchBar and Force Touch. They have focused on consumption jobs (making something easier to interface with), rather than functional jobs (helping users meet their goals, e.g. optimize health). Improving an interface can certainly be a worthwhile endeavor, but it's unlikely that MacBook customers' biggest struggles are in interfacing with the computer.

Meanwhile, Apple's fastest growing products have made major advancements with regard to functional jobs: the iPod made it far easier to curate music, the iPhone and the app store serve dozens of jobs.

The sluggish sales of the newest MacBook Pro (and the Apple Watch) lead to bigger questions: Is Apple shifting their focus to consumption jobs rather than functional jobs? If so, what does that mean for the future of the tech giant? Let's take a deeper look here.

Apple made its fortunes on products that get functional jobs done better than the competition

With Apple's profits falling for the first time in 15 years in 2016, it's worth examining how the company elevated to greatness. Because there's hundreds of billions (and arguably trillions) at stake here.

For Apple to right the path with the Mac (and other products), it needs to return to its roots. To understand this better, it's helpful to look at what its founder has said. Steve Jobs, upon his return to Apple in 1997, stated how the company should go about creating products:

"You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology - not the other way around."

So, innovation at Apple begins with the customer experience - which means not just how the user interfaces with the product (a consumption job) but how the user can achieve a goal (a functional job). Since the functional job (e.g. communicate with a team, buy a home, optimize health) is why the market exists, it needs to be the primary focus of the customer experience. A good interface that doesn't get a functional job done better than the existing solutions will not succeed in a market.

For example, if a new health app has a beautiful, easy to use interface, but does not help optimize your health in any way, you will likely stop using it. But a new app that clearly and definitively helps you optimize your health will be a market success (as long as its interface is good enough to deliver the benefits of optimizing your health). Craigslist is a classic example of a product that gets the functional job done so much better than the competition that consumers overlook the bare bones, dated visual design.

Apple's success is often mistaken as "good interface design" when its true success is the result of helping customer get functional jobs done combined with good interface design.

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who wrote Innovator's Dilemma and Competing Against Luck, expressed this idea succinctly, "Customers don't buy products; they hire them to get a job done." The reasoning for this is simple: when people struggle to get something done on their own, they'll hire a person, product or service to get it done.

In its history, Apple has built a host of products that massively improve their customers' ability to get important jobs done. When the product does not get a jobs done to a satisfactory level (or better than the competition), customers fire it. This could very well be what is happening with the MacBook Pro.

Michael Tsai, a software developer, writes in his blog, "Apple has either lost its way" or "it simply doesn't care about" developers. For Tsai (and many others), the MacBook Pro's focus on convenience, looks, and complex interface enhancements, has made it clear Apple doesn't view the jobs developers have to get done as a core focus.

Not all is lost, though. Apple might have made a mistake, but it likely isn't lethal. Focus and dedication to solving customer needs better than anyone else is how Apple can regain its former growth trajectory.

Apple must focus on the right innovations

As I noted in my post about Apple's $3 trillion valuation, no company is "organized to focus on the customer experience like Apple." The key for Apple is in not losing sight of why products should be created--to satisfy customer needs in both functional and consumption jobs.

Apple must remember failure will result if there is too much focus on consumption jobs rather than functional job. Instead, the tech giant needs to be focused again on functional jobs (like it was when Steve Jobs was there). Among Apple's recent creations, there are two good product examples to illustrate this idea.

First, consider the Apple Watch:

• It looks stylish.
• It tells the time.
• It offers faster access to notifications.

Today, the Apple Watch is mainly an interface, i.e. a consumption product, for the iPhone. Sales data shows exactly why consumption products don't succeed on their own. (Having said that, the Apple Watch as a platform can evolve to get functional jobs done on its own; it's just not there yet.)

During the week of April 10, 2016, the Apple Watch, sold an average of 200,000 units per day. By July, it was down to roughly 20,000 watches per day. Clearly, after the initial novelty wears off, consumption products don't bring sustainable success and market transformation.

Now, consider the Apple CareKit (a healthcare app for the iPhone):

• It manages medical conditions.
• It shares health information with doctors.
• It includes sections for treatment plans and updates.

Here, Apple gets it right. The CareKit is a functional product platform, because it helps complete jobs. On top of that, the CareKit has the ability to disrupt healthcare--an industry that needs to be more integrated and mobile.

Even more importantly, the CareKit makes the Apple Watch more useful. Right now, the Apple Watch is essentially a luxury item and accessory of the iPhone (e.g., a non-essential consumption job). It does not directly address a job customers need to get done, and low sales have reflected that reality. But the CareKit could make the Apple Watch relevant again. Its sensor capabilities have direct applications for health apps, and could make the Apple Watch a functional job product instead.

If Apple focuses on innovations like the CareKit, it could really extend its market and reassure the world that it hasn't lost sight of the commitment to functional jobs that made it great in the first place. After all, healthcare spending in just America totaled $3.2 trillion in 2015, accounting for 17.8% of GDP. Tech products like this that solve patient and doctor needs would certainly make Apple a major player in the sector.

Apple will stay atop the throne

Even today, Apple remains the world's most valuable company. That's largely because of the tech giant's ability to continually satisfy unmet needs in functional jobs.

Apple has had its recent "struggles" with the Apple Watch and MacBook Pro (struggles only relative to the iPhone's success). If such issues continue, the company could be in trouble. But one look at its history will tell you that the company can once again innovate and stay on top.

There are numerous examples of Apple reinventing itself. For instance, in 2001, when the iPod came out, it simply waxed the competition. That's because it was a functional product that solved customer needs much better than the competition. To this day, the iPod is the best-selling digital audio player ever.

Then, in 2007, the iPhone was released, and the world went nuts. As Horace Dediu of Asymco notes, the iPhone has been what has disrupted the Mac in many ways. It has also disrupted the iPod, since it can get listening to music jobs done much better.

Why has the iPhone been so successful? Because it's central to a platform full of apps that get many different jobs done more effectively for users from get to a destination on time to learn a foreign language to stay in touch with friends and family. The arrival of worthy competition means Apple must continue to innovate. And that innovation must center on getting functional jobs done better than anyone else.

So, it's not panic time yet. Judging by its history, Apple will once again innovate through a focus on functional jobs, and enjoy sustainable success. 

 

It's the heart of Q4. Product Managers across the land are getting requests for next year's road map as part of a company-wide "annual planning process."

Some of you have talked your way out of an annual plan, "Why bother planning for more than a quarter? Every year I've been here, we've changed everything after 2 months."

Whether you're planning for the next quarter or the next year, you're still on the hook for a plan. The pessimists among us wonder how they can reach an acceptable deliverable with minimal effort. The optimists have hope. Maybe this year we can make a plan that doesn't get overhauled before we finish the first step.

Why do product road maps change so much?

Because the inputs typically used to make a road map--customer feature requests, sales team requests, stakeholder requests, new technologies--never stop changing.

But, your customer's job-to-be-done (the goal or task that causes them to use your product) and the needs within the job do not change. You can use them as the basis for annual planning and vastly improve the stability and reliability of your road map.

Here are 7 steps to using the Jobs-to-be-Done product development method to create an annual plan that holds up throughout the year, delivers on the intended results, and satisfies customer needs better than the competition.

Step 1: Prioritize unmet customer needs
Customer Needs are the metrics customers use to judge how well the job gets done. A need is "unmet" if customers think it is important but not satisfied. Using a survey, you can assign importance and satisfaction scores to each customer need.

Here's an example of a Customer Need:

When creating a mood with music (the job-to-be-done), you need to reduce the likelihood that the criteria for the playlist is too stringent e.g. the songs are too similar or no songs fit the criteria (the Customer Need).

In the job of create a mood with music, there are approximately 100 Needs.

The first step in annual planning is to prioritize the needs by the difference between importance and satisfaction scores--the bigger the difference, the higher the priority. A large difference indicates a large portion of the market is struggling to meet the need.

The result of this prioritization is a ranked list of problems to solve throughout the coming year and strong evidence that solving them will matter a great deal to your users. This list is the cornerstone of your plan.

Step 2: Analyze the competition and generate feature ideas to serve the unmet needs
Now that you have a list of problems (unmet customer needs) your team will tackle, it's time to fill out your plan with solutions.

Look at how quickly and accurately existing solutions (i.e. the competition) meet your prioritized customer needs.

Remember our example:

When creating a mood with music, you need to reduce the likelihood that the criteria for the playlist is too stringent e.g. the songs are too similar or no songs fit the criteria.

If you've ever picked just one band to start a playlist on Pandora, you might find that the criteria is indeed too stringent and all the songs on the list are very similar. The accuracy with which Pandora meets this need is rather low.

This analysis provides the benchmark for your new ideas.

You're looking to think up features that serve the unmet needs faster and more accurately than the competition. They will lead to people hiring your product to get their job done.

To generate ideas, gather a small, diverse group of colleagues from design, engineering, marketing, etc. Write a prioritized need on the board, and ask, "What can we do to serve this need?"

Compare each suggestion to the benchmark: existing features and the competition. If the idea will not meet the need faster and more accurately, toss it.

Keep a list of the ideas that do meet the need faster and more accurately. They will likely have varying degrees of difficulty, but you'll deal with that later with cost estimates.

Think back to when Songza (now Google Music) launched playlists that were hand-curated by music experts. This idea served our example need much more accurately than Pandora. It's an idea that would meet the criteria for "good" in a jobs-to-be-done idea generation session.

Step 3: Estimate new satisfaction scores
For each idea that met the above criteria and got on the list, estimate what the new satisfaction score would be if you surveyed your customers again, after they have been using this new feature. It's a judgement of how much faster and more accurate the new feature will be.

If the existing solutions take days and your new feature only takes minutes and improves accuracy, you can imagine that satisfaction will increase quite a bit. If your new feature is only 1 second faster and the same level of accuracy, you should estimate a rather small increase in satisfaction.

Step 4: Estimate the cost of each feature
Your goal is to satisfy customer needs profitably so before you can prioritize which solutions to build first, you need a cost estimate. This is the one step that is likely not very different from what you do today. Talk with your builders--designers, engineers, etc.--and estimate the resources and time required to build the feature.

Step 5: Prioritize feature ideas by value
Feature value is a function of two factors:

1. How many more customers will be satisfied with their ability to meet the need with the new feature
2. How much the new feature contributes to improving the customer’s struggle to get the whole job done.

The first factor can be estimated using the new satisfaction score assigned in Step 3.

The second factor matters because your customers are not just trying to meet one need, they are trying to get the whole job done. If you've done the full research and collected all of the customer needs in the job (usually there are around 100), you'll be able to see what portion of the job you are improving by meeting one or multiple needs with a given feature.

You can use these two factors to calculate the value of each feature idea. It gets a little complex, so get in touch if you want to know exactly how to do it.

After calculating the value of each feature, stack rank your list of feature ideas, putting those with the highest value and lowest cost at the top.

Step 6: Present to stakeholders
Road map presentations to stakeholders are often the most feared meetings of the year.

Product Managers have spent time with each stakeholder, understanding their goals, and collecting feature ideas from them. They've discussed feature requests from customers and salespeople as well as new tech that has come on the scene.

Based on estimated impact upon KPIs and cost estimates, this long list of ideas is prioritized and presented.

The stakeholders look for their ideas and fight for them. Fierce debate ensues. Passionate speeches are given. Horse trades are made.

Hours later, the team emerges from the room, exhausted and demoralized, but the road map is finalized! Everyone is getting something and no one is getting everything.

Those who think they got the raw end of the deal are onto their next mission--destroy that road map on which none of "their" features got prioritized.

Who wants to go through that every year or quarter?

A Jobs-to-be-Done roadmap presentation is very different. Here's an agenda:

• Remind the stakeholders of the job your customers are trying to get done.
• Show the unmet needs, backed by qualitative and quantitative research.
• Unveil the plan--a set of solutions to your customer's most important and least satisfied needs.
• Demonstrate your calculation for how getting more of the job done generates customer value, drives the willingness to pay and usage of the product i.e. meets business goals.
• When someone offers a new idea that isn't on the road map, evaluate it--does it meet a high priority need? Does it do it faster and more accurately than our existing ideas? Is the cost lower?

Because you've gone through the Jobs-to-be-Done planning process, you have objective criteria for judging ideas, reducing the need for debate and mitigating the risk of building the wrong product. Since the criteria is driven by your customers instead of your colleagues, it's very difficult to argue against. Is there someone on your team who does not want to satisfy customer needs?

Step 7: Assess new ideas against prioritized needs
Plans fall apart when new information arises that undercuts the premise on which the plan was built. If the premise relies on ever-changing customer feature requests, sales requests, new technology, and stakeholder ideas, it's easy to see why the plan would also constantly need to change.

When plans are built on stable customer needs, the constant flow of new data does not alter the premise and so the plan does not need to continuously change.

Instead you have a simple way to evaluate each request, each new technology, each new idea:

"Does this meet the prioritized needs better than our existing ideas and for similar or less cost?"

If no, you don't change the plan at all. If yes, you don't need to "pivot" or rip up the whole plan. You simply refine your existing plan--solve this list of customer problems--by swapping in a new solution for an old one.

---

The end of the year can be painful and frustrating if you don't have a clear planning process that aligns your company and leads to a stable, reliable road map. I hope you find these tips for using Jobs-to-be-Done to be helpful with your annual planning.

Don't hesitate to reach out with questions so we can help you go into the holiday season with confidence and have a prosperous new year!

 

Jay Haynes, thrv's CEO, gave a talk on Building High-Growth Products with Jobs-to-be-Done at Product Tank SF, the San Francisco Meetup for Mind The Product. Below is the video of the talk.

The goal of product managers and product teams is to satisfy customer needs better than competitors in your market. This simple statement, however, begs a couple of important questions:

1. What is a customer need?

2. What is a market?

In his talk, Jay answers both of these questions, in addition to explaining why defining your market using a product is a bad idea. Products and technologies change far too rapidly. However, the "job" that customers are "hiring" the products to do never changes. The customer's job to be done is your market.

The next obvious question is, "What job is your customer hiring your product to do?"

Watch for the moment when Jay asks, "How many people work on teams where everybody agrees on what a customer need is?" Nobody raises a hand. The mission is to satisfy customer needs, and yet, we have no agreement on needs! If you've ever felt this way, you are not alone. As Jay explains in the video, there is a solution for clearly defining customer needs using the job-to-be-done.

Jobs-to-be-done can help improve the efficiency of launching products. The customer needs in the job, like the job itself, are stable. Your team can then use those needs in the job to stay ahead of your competition.

If you enjoy the video and would like to learn more about jobs-to-be-done and using it to define your customer needs to build high-growth products, contact us today and try our free online course.

 

 

 

This is Part 2 of two-part series explaining thrv's process for executing Jobs Theory. Part 1 is about customer research you can do to define the right question that will drive your product development. This part is about answering that question.

If you've read Part 1 of this series, you know about the first 5 steps to executing Jobs Theory:

1. Define your customer's jobs: functional, emotional, and consumption
2. Identify all of the unmet needs in your customer's jobs
3. Find the unmet needs
4. Segment your customers
5. Identify competitor weaknesses

This work leads to defining your question:

What can you do to serve your customer's unmet needs in the job better than the existing solutions?

The next step is to generate great product ideas that answer this question.

Step 6: Generate Ideas
You might have noticed something: in all the steps so far we haven't had any ideas. The traditional innovation process usually starts with product or solution ideas. An ideas-first process is fundamentally flawed because the goal of innovation is not to generate more ideas, it is to satisfy customer needs better than the existing solutions. Jobs Theory enables you to build a needs-first innovation process.

When I was a product manager at Microsoft in the 1990s, we had a "brainstorming" room where our team would go to spitball new ideas. Anything went. As you probably know, the only rule in brainstorming is "there are no bad ideas." This was (and is) absurd. There is a nearly infinite supply of bad ideas.

When executing Jobs Theory, you don't need to "brainstorm" because you have clear criteria to judge product ideas: the unmet customer needs in the job.

When you get your team together to generate ideas, start by writing an unmet need on the whiteboard. Then, ask the room: "What can we do to serve this need?"

It's still helpful for your team to think out of the box--perhaps your product is a website but a chatbot would serve the need much faster--but now, because you are answering a specific, measurable question, you know whether to keep the idea or move on.

If surgeons were your customers and you wanted to help them "restore artery blood flow," you'd ask about the unmet need, "Does the idea help surgeons reduce the likelihood of restenosis?"

If drivers were your customer and you wanted to help them "get to a destination on time," you'd ask "Does the idea help drivers reduce the time it takes to determine if an alternative route should be taken?"

If the ideas don't satisfy the needs, quickly move onto the next idea. If they do meet the needs, keep them on the list.

Push the team to build on the ideas and achieve step function improvements over the existing solutions. Don't let them be boxed in by the limitations of your existing product. The sky is the limit. Later, you can plan your roadmap to get there, step-by-step.

Now that you have a list of ideas that serve the unmet customer need, measure how well they do it--how much they improve the probability of achieving the goal as stated in the need.

Stack rank the ideas based on how much more reliably or faster they meet the needs than the existing solutions. If you see an idea that produces a step function improvement--reduces the time from days to hours, minutes to seconds, etc.--you may be sitting on a gold mine.

Jobs theory enables more efficient, precise, and relevant idea generation. Not only can you ensure all the ideas are relevant, but you can see if they are good enough.

Step 7: Price your product.
Pricing typically uses a combination of inputs, including the cost to make the product (or deliver the service), perceived value, and the price of substitute products in the market. Using this last input can be a fatal mistake for both pricing and market sizing.

To know why, you need to understand a pitfall of traditional market sizing: products and technologies come and go.

Traditional market sizing is based on variations of the following equation: the market = product price * the number of units sold. For example, in 2007 the iPod market was huge ($150 * 200 million iPods sold = $30 billion). Microsoft thought this was a big market and launched the Zune, an iPod competitor.

This is what the iPod market looked like at the end of 2011.

The "market" (defined by a product) went away, which means that Microsoft was looking to take a share of virtually nothing. But, of course, the true market, the customer's job-to-be-done, didn't go away. The iPod may have gone away, but people didn't stop executing the job.

Jobs Theory's definition of a market explains what happened.

There is no such thing as the "iPod" market. Customers don't want iPods anymore than they want records, cassettes, or CDs. What they want is to get a job done, i.e. create a mood with music.

"Price * units sold" is a flawed definition of a market because it can disappear from right under your feet. Defining the market based on the customer's job-to-be-done is much more helpful because the job will exist forever and therefore, the market will too.

To execute market sizing with Jobs Theory, you can look at the willingness to pay to get the job done. Willingness to pay can be measured by asking job executors (and if necessary purchase decision makers) how much it is worth to them to get the job done perfectly. The resulting data can be plotted (from high to low) on a line against the number of job executors. We call this a "need curve."

The area under the curve is the total market size. It will also identify the prices that will place your product at the high end of the market, the low end, or somewhere in between.

In Competing Against Luck, Clay Christensen says, "The reason why we are willing to pay premium prices for a product that nails the job is because the full cost of a product that fails to do the job -- wasted time, frustration, spending money on poor situations, and so on -- is significant to us."

By looking at the willingness to pay to get the job done, you can price your product to target the part of the market that will be the most profitable, and you can measure how lucrative that market will be over time, without the risk of it going away.

Step 8: Create messaging and positioning.
Positioning a product in a market and creating messaging that will resonate with customers is quicker and easier using the job-to-be-done and its customer needs.

When messaging misses the mark, it is usually because the message is focused on the product and its features. For example, Magellan messaged to potential customers that its RoadMate product has a "Wide-Angle Lens" and a "G-shock Sensor," both sophisticated technologies.

But how does a Wide-Angle Lens or a G-shock Sensor help a driver get to a destination on time? What need is it satisfying? If messaging describes the product features or technology, the customer has to figure out on their own how (and if) the features help them get the job done better.

Messaging based on satisfying the job-to-be-done is easier for customers to understand. And because the needs in the job-to-be-done are prioritized based on importance and satisfaction, you can create messages based on the most underserved customer needs in your market.

Step 9: Plan your roadmap.

"Jobs Theory enables innovators to make the myriad, detailed tradeoffs in terms of which benefits are essential and which are extraneous to a new offering."

--Clay Christensen, Competing Against Luck

The unmet needs in the job-to-be-done are your basis for making smart tradeoffs. Each job typically has about 100 customer needs. You can prioritize the needs by calculating the difference between the importance and satisfaction scores. The needs with higher importance and lower satisfaction are top priority. When you're choosing which product features to build now and which to postpone--making tradeoffs--you choose the features that meet the top priority needs.

The same mindset can be used to plan your road map. A great road map will balance cost, today's impact, and tomorrow's promise. During your idea generation, you may have come up with some brilliant ideas that will take a long time to build or be very expensive to execute. This doesn't mean you should ditch them. You just need to figure out how to increment your way to the brilliant idea while meeting customer needs better and better along the way.

This is step 1 of your road map planning: Determine the incremental improvements that will take you from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow, getting the whole job done faster and more reliably than the existing solutions. Step 2 is to determine which of those incremental improvements to tackle first. The criteria for this prioritization is the extent to which the improvements serve unmet needs. You prioritize the work that tackles the most important and least satisfied needs.

Without good customer metrics, such as needs in the job-to-be-done, companies often prioritize their roadmap based on a flimsy projection of business impact, the charisma of people lobbying for the features they like, and the "HiPPO" (the Highest Paid Person's Opinion). All of these methods are subjective and/or based on unreliable premises.

Your product roadmap (and your tradeoffs) should not be prioritized by your team. They should be prioritized by your customer's unmet needs in the job.

Step 10: Mitigate your risk.
Understanding what causes a customer to purchase ("hire") a product can help you mitigate product development risk.

Competing Against Luck points out, "In 2015... one thousand publicly held companies spent $680 billion on research and development alone." And yet, "Most people would agree that the vast majority of innovations fall far short of ambitions, a fact that has remained unchanged for decades."

Once a product enters development, companies spend an enormous amount of capital, time, and resources on building, marketing, and selling the product. Jobs theory can help you avoid product failure and ensure the roadmap will generate the revenue and profit growth needed to justify the investment.

Failure occurs when a product does not create customer value in a market. What is "customer value?"

Customer value is a measure of the difference of customer satisfaction with getting the job done between your solution and the existing solutions. Since the goal is to satisfy customer needs and needs are metrics related to speed and accuracy, you can compare the speed and accuracy of getting the job done with your solution vs. a competitive solution. That difference is the customer value you've created.

Market opportunities exist because a person is struggling to get the functional job done. Improving the speed and accuracy of getting the job done reduces struggle and anxiety, which increases customer satisfaction and the likelihood they will hire your product.

This means you can measure the value of an idea even before you build it. Consider how much faster and more accurately your idea will meet the needs in the job if your idea is executed perfectly. Compare that to the baseline--the current satisfaction levels with each need in the job. You now know if the idea adds value to the market, so you've mitigated the risk of your idea. You still have execution risk, but your situation is a lot better than the risk of executing perfectly on an idea that does not add value in your market.

Step 11: Accelerate your growth.
Steps 1 through 10 are all the preparation steps to launching your product and accelerating your revenue growth. Jobs theory gives you a different lens through which to view your market, your customer, and your competition. It gives you powerful, metric-driven, customer-centric techniques to identify unmet needs and competitor weaknesses. And it gives you the tools to generate great product ideas that customers will pay for and to create messages that will resonate with customers.

Jobs theory is not easy to practice, but it is extremely effective if you make the organizational changes required to execute it well. As Clay writes, "Organizations typically structure themselves around function or business unit or geography -- but successful growth companies optimized around the job. Competitive advantage is conferred through an organization's unique processes: the ways it integrates across functions to perform the customer's job."

If you are interested in learning more about jobs-to-be-done techniques that you can use at your company, feel free to contact me directly.

This is a two part series explaining thrv's process for executing Jobs Theory. Part 1: How to Ask the Right Question is about defining the job of your customer, identifying unmet needs, and analyzing the competition. Part 2: Answering the Right Question is about how to build a high-growth product roadmap using Jobs Theory.

Throughout my 25-year career as a Private Equity investor, as a CEO of two Silicon Valley startups backed by A-list VC's, and as a Product Manager at Microsoft, I consistently ran into the same mission critical problem: no one knew how to predict revenue growth. It was easy to predict our costs because we controlled them. However, we struggled to predict our revenue growth because we didn't know what caused people to buy our products. Without a deep understanding of purchasing causes, we couldn't accurately predict how changes to our products would accelerate our revenue growth.

Competing Against Luck

Ten years ago, I found the solution to my problem in Jobs-to-be-Done innovation theory (aka Jobs Theory), the subject of the book Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen, Jobs-to-be-Done guru and Harvard Business School professor. The central idea behind Jobs Theory is this: "Your customers are not buying your products, they are hiring them to get a job done."

If you understand what that job is, you can identify what causes customers to hire your products. As a result, you can make improvements to your products that will get the job done better. This is the key to mitigating investment risk and forecasting revenue accurately.

In the book, Clay states, "A job has an inherent complexity to it: it not only has functional dimensions, but it has social and emotional dimensions too." This is why "in practice, seeing a job clearly and fully characterizing it can be tricky."

After a decade of practicing Jobs Theory with companies ranging from $50 million to $50 billion in revenue, I couldn't agree more with Clay. Identifying the job your customers are hiring your product to do is very difficult. Yet for the companies I've worked with, it has been the difference between declining or accelerating revenue growth.

Competing Against Luck is a deep exploration of Jobs Theory, but Clay is clear about "not attempting to be comprehensive or provide a step-by-step manual." In my time working with Jobs Theory, I learned that companies need a step-by-step process to turn the theory of jobs into high-growth products. That's why I started thrv -- to provide jobs-to-be-done training, services, and software that enable executives and product development teams to execute Jobs Theory successfully.

For those of you wondering how to use Jobs Theory to launch great products, here's a step-by-step guide (in two parts) that maps a decade of practice to the theory in Competing Against Luck.

Step 1: Define Your Customer's Jobs

In Competing Against Luck, Clay Christensen and his fellow authors suggest:

...define a job as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance...a job has an inherent complexity to it: it not only has functional dimensions, but it has social and emotional dimensions too.

Rather than combine the functional, emotional and social dimensions into one complex job statement, in practice, I've found it easier to separate jobs into 3 different types:

• Functional Jobs
• Emotional Jobs
• Consumption Jobs

Let's look at each.

Functional Jobs

A functional job is the core task, goal or job that customers are trying to accomplish. The key is to define the task or goal independently from any technology, product or service. As Clay says, "We don't 'create' jobs, we discover them."

"Creating a playlist on Spotify" is not a job because it includes a product (Spotify) and a solution (creating a playlist). The question is: why do people create a playlist on Spotify? One answer is to "create a mood with music." This is a more useful articulation of the core functional job. All products evolve and fade away over time. In order to execute the job of creating a mood with music, consumers have "hired" a huge range of products: piano rolls, Victrolas, LPs, eight-track tapes, reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, CDs, MP3 players, and streaming apps. If you define the job with reference to the technologies consumers have used, you will be trying to hit a moving target. However, the job of creating a mood with music has never changed and will never change. This gives you a stable target for your business. Jobs Theory holds true in B2B and medical markets as we will demonstrate below.

In 2010, Google Ventures design partner Jake Knapp developed a process that would help product teams go from abstract idea to a testable prototype in five days flat, now known as the Google Ventures Design Sprint. Within the past five years, Knapp has led more than 100 design sprints with companies like 23andme, Slack, and Nest.

But, while some of the hottest names in the tech industry have adopted Knapp's approach, the design sprint on its own can lead to solving the wrong problem and overly subjective criteria for solutions. By pairing sprints with Jobs-to-Be-Done, product teams can define the problem from the customer's point-of-view and objectively choose solutions that satisfy customer needs. The combination of JTBD and the Google Ventures Design Sprint ensures that your work will bring value to the user and your business.

What is the Google Ventures Design Sprint?
Knapp explains the design sprint process in his book, Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days complete with step-by-step instructions on how to conduct a sprint on your own. The goal is to educate teams on how they can focus their energy on creating solutions quickly and eliminate exhausting brainstorms that go nowhere.

The sprint is broken down into five stages, each taking up one day: Understand, Diverge, Decide, Prototype, Validate. A pending deadline paired with a clear process makes the Google Ventures design sprint an easy sell for design teams. It's quick and intense.

"When we talk to startups about sprints, we encourage them to go after their most important problem," writes Knapp. Later in the book he adds, "your goal should reflect your team's principles and aspirations."

How does a team know its most "important" problem? If the sprint's focus is defined by the team's "principles and aspirations," how do you know they match users' needs?

For example, imagine a team whose product has low user engagement rates.

Improving the daily or monthly active user counts is critical to business growth and their eventual round of funding. As such, they define their most important problem as "users aren't opening our app frequently enough."

A common (although not too clever) solution is to gamify the app in hopes of increasing user activity. But users don't want to spend more time in your app, they want to solve their own problems quickly and move on with their lives.

If you define your most important problem from the perspective of your employees or business goals, you may miss solving the most important problems of the people who matter most, your customers.

Why JTBD is Critical to Your Process:
None of this is to say the design sprint is wrong. It's simply incomplete. To complete it, the team must understand what the customer need is from the beginning, without the context of their own product. To identify unmet customer needs, companies must understand what job their customers are hiring a product to do, as described in the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework popularized by Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth.

Here are the moments of a Google Ventures Design Sprint that are risky without a customer-focused product strategy method such as JTBD:

1. On Day One, the Design Sprint process relies on the intuition of the team to determine and map out the problem. There are no requirements to talk to customers until the problem has been solved and prototyped. The risk of choosing a business-driven problem instead of a user-driven problem is high.

2. On Day Three, everyone pins drawings of their solution ideas to a whiteboard. Each participant is given stickers and asked to place them on any solutions they find "interesting." This activity creates a pseudo-heat map of good solutions. However, asking participants "what is interesting?" is the easy question.

"When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution," said Daniel Kahneman, psychologist, Nobel Prize winner, and author of Thinking Fast and Slow.

The difficult question is: "Which solution serves your customer's need better than the existing solutions in the market?" Satisfying customer needs is your goal, not building features the team thinks are interesting.

3. After selecting a few "interesting" solutions, the design sprint presents yet another opportunity for subjective decision-making in the role of The Decider, often the CEO, PM or another executive. When voting for the best solution to the problem, the decider can override all other votes. In an environment where the highest paid opinion wins, it's hard to see where customer sits in all of this.

"Deciders generally understand the problem in depth, and they often have strong opinions and criteria to help them find the right solution," Knapp wrote in his book.

Although Knapp may have strong, intuitive skills that align with customer needs, not all teams are created equally. CEOs will veto group decisions. Product managers will rely too heavily on their own agenda. And teammates will get attached to ideas. Intuition-based decision making can be dangerous. It's unpredictable and ripe for customer neglect, but we can create procedural safeguards to protect against its bias.

Pairing the Google Ventures Design Sprint with Jobs-to-Be-Done
How can Design Sprints use JTBD to create clear, objective criteria for defining problems and making decisions?

Here's an idea:

• Before day one of the sprint, define the customer's job-to-be-done.
• Map the steps people take when executing the job.
• Through customer interviews, identify the metrics job executors use to judge whether or not the job is going well. These are your customer needs.
• Conduct quantitative research to determine which needs are unmet--those that are rated important but not satisfied in a customer survey.
• Now, define the problem for the sprint. Choose one highly unmet customer need to serve. Your goal is to "generate ideas that serve the need better than the existing solutions." This starts your sprint with an objective, customer-focused problem.
• When choosing a solution, change the criteria from "most interesting" to how well the solution serves the unmet need. Because each need is a metric based on time or probability, you can measure which solution will satisfy the need best. Voting and vetoing become irrelevant because you'll weed out any solution that doesn't meet the need more quickly or accurately than the existing solutions.
• On Friday, when you user test your prototype, you now have a strong hypothesis that your solution serves the customer need better. Look to confirm your hypothesis and test usability. Does the solution indeed make the job faster and more accurate? Does the user understand how to execute their task with this design?

Before your team jumps into a Google Ventures Design Sprint, consider employing the JTBD framework to make the process more effective. With JTBD, you can identify customer needs, eliminate opportunities for bias, and test different solutions objectively. If your team needs help in getting started, we'd be happy to show you how thrv helps product managers get their customers' jobs done.

 

There has been so much written about Product Management recently that NomNom Insights and DataStories did a study of Product Management Content on Medium. We've been doing our best to keep up and have found a bunch of helpful ideas, experience and insights. Today, we share a few pieces that align with how we think and communicate important concepts better than we could have ourselves.

• The 280 Group recently conducted a survey of over 850 Product Managers and Product Management team leaders about the biggest challenges faced in their Product Management organizations. You may be surprised to find how much room for improvement product teams think they have and how much that improvement can add to the bottom line. To download the survey report, you'll need to give the 280 Group your email address, but it's well worth it.

• Julie Zhou, Product Design VP at Facebook has some great thoughts on the battle of "Metrics vs. Experience." Like Spiderman, Julie knows that the power of data comes with great responsibility. Read it to find out why "framing things as 'metrics versus experience' is entirely the wrong way to start the conversation."

• Do you use Slack? Satya van Heummen of Fileboard has our favorite analysis of Slack so far and it shows the power of serving the emotional job: The Real Reason Slack Became a Billion Dollar Company.

• Becky Yelland wrote a great job advice piece for Mind the Product on how to be an Industry-agnostic product manager. We're especially keen on this advice because Jobs-to-be-Done, like Becky, has also seen success across multiple industries from software to consumer products to medical devices.

• NewCo (founded by our friend John Battelle) has a terrific and wide ranging interview with media theorist and cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff on their blog, Shift. R.U. Sirius' piece explores Rushkoff's thoughts on business and technology. Within is a nugget that elucidates the problem we're solving at thrv: "The bigger issue is that most digital businesses won't make money. Not until they learn to help their users create value."

If these links put you in the product management reading groove, you might enjoy our 4 day course on Jobs-to-be-Done, which you can find on the bottom right of this page.

 

Horace Dediu argues that in the mobile phone market, profit share is the key to creating shareholder value, not market share. This makes sense. You don't want to just sell more product than your competitors (market share); you want to make more money doing it (profit share). For example, Apple sells fewer smartphones and has less market share than Samsung but Apple makes 90% of the profits in the market. It's no surprise that Apple has the largest market cap in the world.

Samsung and Apple have similar products and operational models, but a huge disparity in profit. The Jobs-to-be-Done definition of product strategy highlights the differences between Apple and Samsung's smartphone businesses and provides a rubric for choosing strategies that lead to gaining higher profit share than your competitors.

Here's a traditional definition of strategy: "the set of coordinated actions that a company takes to achieve its goals." Shobhit Chugh's blog post and slideshare apply this definition to product management. This notion of strategy is closely related to Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter's definition from his 1996 article What is Strategy: strategic success is based on "choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in systems of activities that are much more difficult to match." (If you don't subscribe to Harvard Business Review, contact us and we can get you a complimentary copy of the article.)

The focus in both of these definitions is activities. However, it's very difficult to create a "unique and valuable position" based on activities, especially if they are operational in nature. (Porter even recognizes this in his article, stating "Constant improvement in operational effectiveness is necessary to achieve superior profitability. However, it is not usually sufficient. Few companies have competed successfully on the basis of operational effectiveness over an extended period, and staying ahead of rivals gets harder every day. The most obvious reason for that is the rapid diffusion of best practices.") Operational activities are often straightforward enough to copy and therefore don't lead to competitive differentiation over a long time horizon.

In fact, Samsung executes many of the same activities as Apple. Both companies manufacture hardware, sell direct to consumers, sell to retailers, conduct R&D, and market to the same customers via the same channels. Yet, Apple takes far more profit in the mobile phone market. Why?

With Jobs-to-be-Done, instead of defining strategy as a set of activities, we define it as a set of choices.

1. Which job-to-be-done to target
2. Which job executor to target
3. Which platform to use to satisfy unmet needs in the job.

Here are a few examples of strategies using this definition:

Now, let's look at Apple's strategy vs Samsung's strategy. Smartphones serve many, many jobs, but for the purpose of this example, let's zoom out and look at just three of them.

What do you notice?

The platform choice in Apple's product strategy has two major differences: a proprietary operating system (iOS) vs. an open source operating system (Android) and a proprietary app store vs a 3rd party app store.

Android has become a commodity. Any company can use Android to launch a mobile phone, which means it is very difficult to satisfy unmet needs in a job differently than the competition. In other words, it is very hard for Samsung to differentiate their Android phones from the competitors' Android phones.

On the other hand, iOS is proprietary, unique, and specifically designed to work with Apple's hardware and services. No other mobile phone company can use iOS, which makes it inherently differentiated, and there is a segment of customers willing to pay a premium for the satisfaction iOS delivers to them relative to Android.

Samsung's commodity OS forces them to attempt to differentiate mostly on hardware. By enhancing the hardware alone Samsung cannot add as much value to the needs in the job as Apple can by improving their hardware and software together. Samsung's investment in Tizen, an "operating system built from the ground up to address the needs of all stakeholders of the mobile and connected device ecosystem" is evidence that they too believe their platform choice is holding them back - not from market share, but from profit share.

By looking at Apple's Product Strategy choices through the lens of Jobs-to-be-Done, you see how they set themselves apart beyond simply choosing a different set of "activities."

The JTBD definition of product strategy can keep product teams focused on delivering results for the customer. It's clear, it's specific and it's easy to put on the wall and rally your team around it.

The Jobs-to-be-Done method helps you choose the strategy that will deliver higher profit share than your competitors. Here's what you do:

1. Define your customer's job-to-be-done
2. Identify the Customer Needs in the job-to-be-done
3. Quantify the importance and satisfaction of the Customer Needs
4. Segment the job executors based on unmet needs
5. Analyze how well the competition satisfies the customer needs
6. Make choices about product strategy using the following criteria:

Choose the job-to-be-done that has the most under-served needs for your customer.

Choose the job executor who will generate the highest value market based on their willingness to pay to get the job done and the number of job executors.

Choose the platform that can satisfy the unmet needs for your chosen job executor with the lowest amount of risk. The cost and risk of getting the job done for this job executor are critical. If it's too expensive and too risky, it'll eat into your profit.

These are the three choices that will lead you to a differentiated product strategy that can beat your competition. Of course, you'll also need superb execution, but that's another topic for another day.

Why not take a moment to ask your team what your product strategy is? Is your team using a definition based on operational activities or do you have a product strategy based on your customer's job-to-be-done? If you find they aren't aligned on what strategy to choose or even what a strategy is, get in touch with us here at thrv. We can help.

 

Executive Summary:

With Pokemon Go's explosive growth, product teams around the world are asking, "What are we going to do with Augmented Reality?" Jobs-to-be-Done provides a customer-centric framework for deciding if and how to invest resources in this new technology and ensure your efforts will create customer value.

1. Don't rush to build; be swift but purposeful. Flocking to new technology without a clear strategy can be counter-productive and increase your risk of failure.
2. Define your customer's job-to-be-done.
3. Identify the unmet needs in the job-to-be-done.
4. Answer these questions, "Can augmented reality help our customers meet these needs faster or more accurately? If so, how?"
5. Measure if the new ideas will meet customer needs faster or more accurately than the existing solutions.
6. Determine if you can integrate the ideas from Step 4 into your existing product or if you need to build something new.

---

If you've gone online in the past week, even for just a moment, you've no doubt heard about Pokemon Go, the Augmented Reality game that has men, women and children taking to the streets, parks and museums in a fevered effort to catch 'em all. The game's success has sent Nintendo's stock soaring and Product Managers across the country are being asked: What's our AR strategy?

As recently as last year, Augmented Reality was firmly ensconced in the Trough of Disillusionment on the Gartner Hype Cycle. However, Pokemon Go's success coupled with reports of it driving real in-store traffic and revenue, shows the technology is realizing its commercial potential. The distant, sci-fi promise of AR is here, now.

If you're a Product Manager, you may have colleagues running rampant with "shiny new toy syndrome," asking when you'll have an AR solution ready to launch. Someone may have even written a press release already. The temptation to build first and ask questions later is strong, but it doesn't feel right to you. Prioritizing your existing road map was agonizing and re-allocating resources to the dream of AR will take away from key projects already underway. But, you don't want to appear staid, lacking in agility and dynamism, and, above all, you're a team player. Shouting down your better angels, you say, "OK, let's do a brainstorming session."

Famous last words.

The company's best minds are assembled. The room is full of energy. BD talks about partnerships. The UX team argues the finer points of distinguishing reality from augmentation. Someone's telling a story about their neighbor's nephew's crazy antics hunting down Pokemons. Ideas flow like water from a firehose--plenty of volume, but little precision. Two hours later you've got four walls filled with sticky notes, divergent ideas, and a vague direction set by the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion).

Back at your desk, trying to piece the ideas into a project plan, you wonder how you could've done things differently.

Here's an idea: turn your generic brainstorming session into a Jobs-to-be-Done idea generation session. It focuses your team on the most important issue: how to address the unmet needs in our customer's job-to-be-done. This approach ensures that what you do with Augmented Reality, if anything at all, will be of real value to your users and not just a transparent, rudderless attempt to ride the wave of a suddenly popular technology.

In the JTBD idea generation session you'll focus on those unmet needs and continually ask, "would an AR solution help our customers accomplish their jobs-to-be-done faster or more accurately?"

Let's walk through the process as if you're a Product Manager in the field of medical imaging.

First, define your customer's job-to-be-done through research and customer interviews. For our example, let's say the JTBD is "Diagnose skin cancer."

Next, interview your customers to determine the needs within the job and then survey them to identify which needs are unmet (important and unsatisfied). For the job of "Diagnose skin cancer" unmet needs may include:

• Reduce the time it takes to detect a change in a patient's skin condition e.g. a mole has grown in size or changed in color or texture.
• Reduce the likelihood of missing a change on the patient's skin.

NB: If you have already defined your customer's JTBD and researched the needs, you don't need to do it again just because there is new tech available. You can jump straight to idea generation, using the research you already have. Incidentally, thrv can help you execute these steps quickly.

Now, assemble the company's great minds for an idea generation session. But, don't guide the session with "How do we add Augmented Reality to our product?" Instead, ask "How can augmented reality help our customer reduce the time it takes to identify a change in a patient's skin condition?"

After collecting ideas on how augmented reality can serve this unmet need, judge the ideas based on how well they meet the need. In other words, which solution will identify skin changes fastest? Think through the process of using the new AR solution and consider if it's actually faster than the existing solutions your customers use. If the AR solution is faster, it will create value and drive growth. If it's not, don't bother investing it.

Finally, if your idea does meet the needs in the job faster or more accurately, determine if you can integrate it into your existing product or if you need to make a new one.

Explosive growth is exciting. When it happens with a new technology or platform, it's natural for someone to catch a case of GMOOT (Give Me One Of Those). It's easy to start with the ideation process, usually in the form of an unfocused brainstorming session. Instead start with asking the right questions--what's our customers' job-to-be-done and how can the technology can help them get it done better?

 

 

 

thrv works with product teams to help them satisfy their customers' needs. Critical to this effort is alignment among the teams we work with. They need to be aligned around who their customer is, their product strategy, and, at the core of it all, the words they use to communicate with each other. What is a "product strategy"? What is a "customer need"? What's a "market"? If a team doesn't agree on the definitions of these terms or the definitions frequently change, it's very hard to gain alignment and build something that matters to customers.

Since language is so important, we work hard to keep it specific and consistent. When you and your team first embark on your Jobs-to-be-Done journey, you'll hear new terms and new definitions for old terms, and everyone needs understand them all. To help you and your team speak our language, we've created the below glossary of key JTBD terms. We'll be adding to this over time and linking to it when we use the terms in our blog posts.

Hopefully, the glossary helps your own team increase consistency with their language and avoid communication breakdowns. It may also help you translate customer feedback into actionable metrics, but if you really want to learn how to do this, reach out to us. We're happy to help.

Jobs-to-be-Done: A theory introduced by Harvard Business School Professor Clay Christensen to explain why customers buy or use products--they hire them to get a job done. Importantly, jobs enable product managers to define market from the customer's rather than the product's perspective. As a result, jobs (which are independent of any product) are stable over time.

For example, consumers have used records, cassettes, CDs, iPod, and streaming apps to execute the jobs of curating and discovering music. While products change over time, the customer's job will not.

Customer: The key customer is the person who benefits from the job getting done--the job beneficiary. This is why a market exists: because a person in either a personal or a business context struggles to achieve a goal and they look for solutions to "hire" to get the job done. The beneficiary is often different from the person who executes the job. Noting this difference is important because markets evolve to remove executors. For example, consumers benefit from 'getting to a destination on time,' a job-to-be-done. When driving themselves the consumers are both the beneficiaries and the executors. However, when using Uber or Lyft, the consumer is the beneficiary and the executor is the Uber or Lyft driver. If autonomous cars become ubiquitous, drivers (the job executors) will go away.

Functional Jobs: The most important types of jobs because they are the reason that a market exists. When we write "job" we are referring to the Functional Job. A Functional Job is the core task or goal that some person is trying to accomplish in a personal, business, or medical context. When someone has a functional job to accomplish, they look for a product or service to "hire" in order to get the job done. Check out this post for a little more info on what qualifies as a functional job.

Functional jobs begin with an action verb that describes the job. Some common job verbs include: determine, ensure, create, learn, obtain, develop, identify and optimize.

Emotional Jobs: Statements about how people want to feel about themselves or how they want to be perceived by others when they are executing a Functional Job.

Since emotions can be both positive and negative, Emotional Jobs include both how someone wants to feel and how they want to avoid feeling. For example, when consumers are selling a used car, they want to avoid feeling gullible.

Consumption Jobs: Tasks that relate to consuming and using a product or service. Consumption jobs include: install, learn-to-use, repair, maintain, interface, and dispose.

For example, if consumers hire an app to help them sell a used car (a functional job), they need to learn how to use it and to interface with it.

Job Executor: The person or entity who is doing the activities to get the job done. For example, in the job of "sell a used car" the job executor could be a consumer (an individual who owns a car and wants to sell it), a car dealership, or an auction house. In the job of "Create a mood at an occasion with music" the job executor could be a consumer, a professional DJ, a radio show host, a sync department for a tv show, etc.

Job Steps: Every functional job is a process that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Functional jobs can be broken down into different steps that fall into six main categories: define, prepare, execute, monitor, modify, and conclude.

Customer Need: An action that the customer needs to take with a variable required to get the job done successfully. Think of the variables as factors that cause the job to go well or go poorly. Because the customer wants to get the job done quickly and accurately, the action of each need must be quick and the variable must be accurate.

In order to be measurable and actionable for your product team, a customer need statement should be structured with three important elements: (i) an action, (ii) a variable, and (iii) independent of any solution.

For example, when consumers are trying to get to a destination on time and executing the step of "plan the stops," they need to determine the optimal sequence of planned stops. "Determine" is the action and "the optimal sequence" is the variable.

Importance: a measure of how important a job, job step or customer need is to the customers. Importance scores are calculated using a five point scale: not important, somewhat important, important, very important, and extremely important. An importance score is a measure of the percentage of customers who say that the need is very or extremely important.

Customer Effort Scores: The percentage of customers who say that a Job Step or Need is Very Difficult or Difficult. You can identify Customer Effort Scores with a survey.  

Unmet Need: A Customer Need in which the action is slow and the variable is inaccurate. Surveys to identify the Customer Effort Score of job steps and needs can identify what percentage of the market perceives the need as a struggle. Since the struggle causes a purchase, we prioritize needs that have high Customer Effort Scores i.e. a high percentage of customers perceive them to be difficult.

Segmentation: In Jobs-to-be-Done, customers are segmented by how satisfied they are with their ability to execute the job. To identify groups of underserved customers, thrv using the opportunity scores to group customers who all have similar needs with high importance and low satisfaction, regardless of their demographics.

Competitor: Any company that has a product or service with features that satisfy customer needs in any job step in the job and manual processes that people use to get the job done, even if they are not associated with a business. Often companies think of their competitors as those companies who offer similar products. In Jobs-to-be-Done a competitor is any company who is helping a customer get the job done, even if they only help get a few steps in the job done.

Competitor Feature: Any part of a competitor's product or service that helps a customer satisfy a need in the job-to-be-done or an activity within a manual process that a person executes in order to satisfy a need.

Competitive Analysis: An assessment of how well the customer can get the job done with the competitor's solution. The assessment is a collection of measurements of the speed and accuracy with which a customer can satisfy needs with the competition's features.

Idea Generation: The act of thinking up features that will satisfy unmet customer needs faster and more accurately than the competition.