What is Jobs-to-be-Done?

TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Personas Don’t Cause People to Buy Products

To understand your market, you need to understand your customers in depth. Who are your customers? How should you define them? Companies often use personas to define their customers. At first this seems to make sense because customers are real people. A persona is a fictional representation of a customer using some characteristics like demographics, geographics, or psychographics. In business-to-business markets, these personas can be based on characteristics like industry verticals company size. But personas can be limiting because persona characteristics don’t cause people to buy your product. Your customer’s struggle to get their job done is why they buy products, regardless of their persona characteristics. Old people, young people, large companies, small companies can all struggle in the same way to get a job done. This is why personas, while sometimes useful, can be misleading. 

Another way to define customers is to use the dictionary definition: a person who purchases a product or service. At first this seems to make sense, since getting someone to purchase your product is how you generate revenue. But this definition is also limiting because the key customer in your market might not be the person who actually makes the purchase. For example, in business-to-business markets, software is often purchased by the company for the end users, who don’t actually make the purchase decision.

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Understanding Your Market’s Three Types of Customers

The key customer in any market is the person who benefits from getting the job done. This is who we call the “job beneficiary.” The job beneficiary is the critical customer in your market because they have the greatest to gain from the job-to-be-done being satisfied by your product. The second customer to consider is the job executor. This is the person who helps execute the job on behalf of the beneficiary. For example, IT managers help employees use business software by installing it on company servers. The third customer to consider is the purchase decision maker. For example, finance executives will often decide which software to purchase based on financial and budgeting considerations. 

In consumer markets, the job beneficiary, executor, and purchase decision maker are frequently the same person. A consumer benefits from “getting to a destination on time” and they execute this job by driving themselves, and they make the decision to purchase products and services to get the job done. 

Medical markets are the most extreme example of the differences between job beneficiaries, executors and purchasers. Every medical product and service is ultimately designed to help patients. This is why medical markets exist: because patients need to get medical jobs done including optimizing their health, curing a health condition, and diagnosing a health condition. But patients rarely execute their own medical procedures and rarely purchase them on their own because they use insurance. For example, in order to obtain a blood sample to diagnose their health a patient (the job beneficiary) goes to a phlebotomist (the job executor) to get a blood sample, and the procedure is paid for by the insurance company (the purchaser). 

It is critical to distinguish between beneficiaries, executors, and purchasers when building your product roadmap because if you target the wrong customers, you put your company at risk that a competitor takes your market share. 

For example, before software-as-a-solution products, IT departments installed CRM software for salespeople. Salespeople use CRM systems to get the job done of “acquiring new customers.” Salespeople are the job beneficiaries in this market because they benefit from getting the job done with software. IT managers are the job executors who help salespeople acquire customers by installing and maintaining software. But once SaaS products were available, IT managers, the job executors, were unnecessary. 

With JTBD, you can map beneficiaries, executors, and purchasers in your market to ensure you are targeting the right customers. This means that your customer and their needs decide what should be in your roadmap, not characteristics or personal opinions. JTBD removes the subjectivity so you and your team can measure what matters to your customers.

TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Don't Use Your Product To Define Your Market

Defining your market using your product is very common. In fact, this is how it is taught in business school textbooks. But history is full of examples of product-based market definitions leading companies to build failed product roadmaps. 

For example, Blackberry thought there was a market for keyboard devices and they built a product roadmap based on keyboards. Britannica thought there was a market for encyclopedias and built a product roadmap based on content for bound volumes of books. And Kodack thought there was a market for film and built a product roadmap based on improving the quality of film. At first product-based market definitions seem to make sense, since people were buying a lot of mobile keyboard devices, encyclopedias, and film. 

But here is the flaw: products always change. This is a key concept in Jobs Theory: unlike products, your customer’s goal, their JTBD, does not change. This is why you should define your market and build your product roadmap using your customer’s job rather than your product. Because a JTBD is a stable target to hit.

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Your Market Is Your Customer's Job-To-Be-Done

Defining your market using your customer Job-to-be-Done has profound implications for your product roadmap. Think of your product not as something a customer is buying, but as something that is helping them solve a problem or achieve a goal. In other words, your product helps them get a “job” done. This has been said in lots of different ways. 

Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School, has said that “your customers are not buying your product, they are hiring it to get a job done.” Theodore Levitt, also of Harvard, was famous for saying “customer’s don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” Steve Jobs said, that teams should “start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology.” And Thomas Edison said, “Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.” 

These are all the same idea. Your customer has a goal to achieve or a problem to be solved. We now call your customer’s goal/problem a “job-to-be-done” or JTBD. Customers “hire” your product to help them achieve the goal, solve the problem, and get the job done. There are big advantages to defining your market and building your product roadmap using your customers JTBD. First and foremost, your customer’s JTDB doesn’t change over time. Second, you can prioritize where your customer’s struggle the most to ensure you launch features that help them overcome their struggle. And third, your team doesn’t have to use opinions about product ideas in your roadmap. You can objectively quantify how each idea helps your customers get the job done.

TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Don’t use your product price to size your market

Almost all traditional market sizing equations use the price of your product as a key variable. For example, the Total Addressable Market (“TAM”) is often defined as the number of buyers times the price of a product. Why is this a mistake? Because your customers are not actually “buying” your product, they are “hiring” it to get a job done. As a result, the size of your market opportunity is based on your customer’s willingness to pay to get their job done better, regardless of the price of your product. This is why companies like BlackBerry, Britannica, and Kodak failed when they invested in the wrong product roadmaps. They sized their markets (and thus projected their revenue from their roadmaps) based on the price of their products. How much are you willing to pay for a roll of film or a set of 26 encyclopedias today? Probably $0 because these are both obsolete products.

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Your customer’s willingness to pay is your market size

Remember a critical insight from Jobs Theory: your customers are not buying your product, they are hiring it to get a job done. Every product in history has been replaced by a new product that got the customer’s job done better. Yours will be too. Defining your market based on your customer's JTBD lowers the risk that your product roadmap fails to generate the revenue growth you need.

To size a market opportunity, don’t analyze the products currently in the market. Instead, define your market as a goal customers are trying to achieve (a job-to-be-done). You can identify the range of your customers’ willingness to pay to get that job done using a quantitative survey. This range of willingness-to-pay can be plotted on a graph from low to high. We call this the Need Curve because it looks like a traditional economics demand curve, but instead of plotting price and quantity of product, it plots the number of customers willing to pay to get their job done. The area under the Need Curve is the size of your market.

If you use Jobs-to-be-Done to size your market, you will be able to justify investments in your product roadmap to ensure that you exceed revenue growth goals. Instead of launching products into markets that are about to disappear, you will be focused on stable markets and where you can win. And you can feel confident that your product roadmap investments will accelerate your company’s growth.

TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Don’t ask your customers what product they want

Does everyone on your team agree on how to define a customer need? If you don’t agree, you are not alone. Research has shown that 95% of all companies do not have an agreed-upon definition of a customer need. Without an agreement on customer needs, teams often ask customers about what products they want. This is a mistake. Why? Because your customer’s can’t envision what great product should result from your roadmap. But they can absolutely tell you what problem they need to you to solve, in other words, how they struggle to get their job done.

For example, you could ask 1,000 consumers what products they want and they would likely never come up with the microwave. They don’t have the technical expertise to understand what makes a microwave work. But they can tell you everything about preparing a meal (a JTBD) and how they struggle. This is true in your market too: your customers can explain their struggles, if you know how to frame the conversation.

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A customer need is an action and a variable in the job

In Jobs Theory, a customer need is clearly defined, allowing your entire company to communicate in the same way, using the same language when you are building your product roadmap.

A customer JTBD is a goal they need to achieve, independent of any product. For example consumers don’t “want” records, cassettes, or iPods. They want to “create a mood with music.” This is the job-to-be-done. In every JTBD, there are a set of steps that a customer has to take in order to complete that job and achieve the goal. And within each job step, there are actions a customer has to take using variables in the job.

These actions and variables are the customer needs, and like the JTBD they are independent of any solutions. The customer actions in a need are defined by action verbs (e.g. determine, identify, gather, calculate, reduce, ensure, etc.) and the variables are defined by job. For example, in the job of “getting to a destination on time” the variables include, arrival time, departure time, travel time, the route, alternative routes, traffic, weather, errands, stops along the way (e.g. errands or fuel), etc.

Most JTBDs have 10 to 20 steps and 50 to 100 customer needs. In other words, while your customer’s JTBD is complex, it is knowable. And because the JTBD and the customer needs are independent of any product or service, your customer’s needs are stable over time and will not change. This is the power of JTBD and Jobs Theory: when you are building your product roadmap, your team will have a stable target to hit.

TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Don’t research NPS scores, opinions or trends

Companies often do research to figure out what customers want. These methods include NPS (net promoter scores), customer opinions about product features, or trends like emerging technologies (e.g blockchain). But there are critical flaws in these methods: they don’t focus on your customer’s struggle to get their job done independent of any product, service, or technology. The iPod had very high NPS scores, but this didn’t help Microsoft launch a successful competitor because it didn’t show them where customers were struggling to “create a mood with music” (the JTBD).

If you ask customers about products, they will give you answers about products. This is what Henry Ford meant when he famously said “If I asked customers what [product] they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Instead of asking customers about your product (or your competitor’s) ask them about their struggle to get their job done. This is how you can identify unmet customer needs that are the key to your product roadmap’s success.

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Quantify your customer’s unmet needs with a survey

Customer needs are powerful because they are quantifiable. Every customer need in your customer’s JTBD has an action and a variable that are independent of any product. For example, no one needs the “Add a stop” feature in Google Maps. What they need is to “determine the optimal sequence of stops.” In this example, “determine” is the action and “optimal sequence” is the variable. And in every JTBD, your customers want to get their job done as fast and as accurately as possible. As a result, you can measure the speed of your customer’s action and the accuracy of the variable in every need.

In order to determine which customer needs are unmet, you should conduct a customer survey and ask customers if it is difficult for them to satisfy the need today. For example, how difficult is it for consumers to determine the optimal sequence of stops in their day? If it is difficult, consumers will tell you in the survey. And if a high enough percentage of customers say the need is difficult to satisfy, then the need is an unmet customer need. This makes sense because customers who struggle (i.e. who say it is difficult to satisfy the need) are the ones most likely to buy the features you build in your product roadmap that satisfy the need faster and more accurately (i.e. with less customer difficulty). You can think of your survey results (i.e. the percentage of customers who struggle) as the probability that customers buy what you are building in your product roadmap.