To understand your market, you need to understand your customers in depth. Who are your customers? How should you define them?

Many tech companies define the customer as a "user" i.e. the person who uses their product. This seems to make sense because that's who you're designing the experience for--the person who will actually interact with your product.

Another way to define customers is to use the dictionary definition: a person who purchases a product or service. This also seems logical, since getting someone to purchase your product is how you generate revenue.

But the person who uses your product may not be the person who purchases it.

For example, an ultrasound tech in a healthcare facility is the user of an ultrasound machine, but they don't decide to purchase it. The purchasing responsibility belongs to a hospital administrator. Meanwhile, were ultrasound machines invented so techs could be employed? Probably not. They were probably invented because doctors needed to better understand patients' conditions.

So who is the key customer?

Knowing who your target customers are and understanding them in-depth is key to determining the Jobs To Be Done in a specific market.

The ultrasound tech using the machine, the hospital administrator who decided to purchase it, the doctor who uses the ultrasound images to learn about the patient's condition, or the patient?

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 most 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”, 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.

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 Kodak 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.

Defining your market using your customer Jobs-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. Using your customer's JTBD, you can objectively quantify how each idea helps your customers get the job done.

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 marketopportunity 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.

Remember a critical insight from Jobs Theory: your customers are not buying your product, they are hiring a product 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 that asks the right market sizing questions. 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 the Jobs-to-be-Done framework 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.

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.

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 Job To Be Done — 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.

Companies often do market 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, and segment customers based on their unmet needs. This is the key to your product roadmap’s success.

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.

A product strategy is a plan to beat your competitors. How do you create a strategy? In 1996, Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter wrote a famous paper called “What is Strategy?” Companies often use Michael Porter's definition of strategy, since he was a pioneering academic in the field, famous for analyzing industries to determine competitive strategy. In Porter's view, “The essence of strategy is choosing to perform activities differently than rivals do.” Activities can include manufacturing, engineering, distribution, marketing, and selling.

What is missing from these “activities” is your customer. This is why Porter’s definition is outdated: he didn’t include your customer’s job-to-be-done in his definition of strategy. Your customer’s needs, not your activities, should be the focus of your product strategy. Your customer does not care about your activities. They care about getting their job done.

Creating a successful product strategy includes making four choices.

First, which customer are you going to target? As we said above, markets evolve to remove Job Executors as Job Beneficiaries can get more of the job done without their help. Targeting the Job Beneficiary with your product strategy is a stable, long-term choice. In some markets, Job Executors are still critical to getting the job done because the technology cannot yet get the job done without them. In this case, you might choose to target the Job Executor to create short-term growth. The key is to understand the risks of your customer target decision and align your team with a clear target customer to create focus.     

Second, which job-to-be-done are you going to target? Your customer’s job is your market. Choosing an underserved job that customers are willing to pay to get done better is the foundation of your success.

Third, which customer segment will your focus on? You want to focus on a group of people who struggle significantly with the job, have unmet needs you can satisfy, and are willing to pay enough to overcome them that you can achieve your growth goals by only focusing on this segment.

Fourth, which unmet needs will you focus on? Prioritize the unmet needs that the most people in the segment struggle with, where competitors have done the least to satisfy the needs, and where your company is well-positioned to satisfy the needs much faster and more accurately than the existing solutions available to customers. This last point is the least important. You will be surprised by how much you can achieve when you are tightly focused on an underserved segment and a small number of unmet needs.

In traditional competitive analysis, product teams often compare their own product's features to a competitor's features. If Product A has all of the features of Product B plus a few more, then Product A has the advantage. More features equals more competitive advantage.

Focusing on feature-to-feature comparison is the wrong way to think about competitive differentiation. Why? Because your customers don’t want more features, they want your product to help them get their job done faster and more accurately. Microsoft’s Zune had more features than Apple’s iPod, yet it failed to take any meaningful share of the market because it didn’t get the job done faster or more accurately. Streaming services (like Pandora and Spotify) actually had fewer features, but they got the job of “creating a mood with music” done much faster. Pandora only had one end-user feature: click play to listen to music for the mood. Pandora’s algorithms did the rest.

If you've ever been on a team that is playing feature catch-up, you know it's like bailing water out of a leaky boat: every time you release a feature and think your work is done, your competition releases something new, racing ahead of you yet again. You will always be a step behind.

Your customers are analyzing your competitors every day. When they struggle to get their job done, they’ll look for new competitive solutions to get their job done faster and more accurately. In Jobs Theory, a competitor is any solution that helps get a job step done. This approach can help you identify your real competitors in each job step, as opposed to relying on industry-based competitors.

Competitive weakness is satisfying a need slowly or inaccurately. Since needs are structured with an action and a variable, you can measure the speed of the action and the accuracy of the variable when customers use your competitor’s solution. You can use the JTBD analysis to analyze not only your competition, but also your existing product in order to identify where it needs to be improved. As a result, you can add those improvements to your roadmap before a competitor attacks your product and takes your market share by getting the customer's job done faster and more accurately.

You have probably used traditional segmentation characteristics like demographics (age, zip code, gender, etc.), psychographics, purchase patterns, or industry verticals (in B2B markets). But this almost never works because characteristics like age and zip code do not determine if your customers struggle to get a job done. In JTBD segmentation, you use your customer’s unmet needs to identify the most valuable segment, regardless of their characteristics.

For example, “getting to a destination on time” is a JTBD (it is a goal consumers need to achieve independent of any products). Could an urban woman with a Ph.D. struggle to get to a destination on time the same way a younger, rural man with a high school education? Yes, of course. And the reason they both struggle is not because of their demographics or characteristics, it is because they both struggle with something specific, like making frequent and unfamiliar stops.

The core idea in Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) is that your customer’s struggle to get their job done is what causes them to make a purchase. The most valuable customer segment is the group of customers who struggle the most and are willing to pay the most to get their job done better.

Customers buy new products because they struggle to get a job done at a price they are willing to pay, regardless of their characteristics like demographics, geography or psychographics. JTBD segmentation identifies the group of customers in your market who struggle the most and who are willing to pay the most to get the job done better. This ensures that your product will be a success because you will be targeting the customers who need it the most.

Most importantly, with JTBD you can collect data to guide your segmentation. In a Jobs-to-be-Done survey, you can get quantitative insights into which customer segments struggle the most, how many customers are in the segment, and how much they are willing to pay to get the job done. Using profiling questions, you can segment customers by profiling characteristics and find out for yourself if Jobs Theory holds up. Or perhaps you’ll get lucky and find a profile-based segment that struggles more than others and represents a big enough market size. Most often though, you’ll find that the struggle is not different across profile-based segments. The good news is that because of the survey, you have data to prove this to your team and to help you find a struggling segment, independent of profiling characteristics.

To facilitate the generation of new ideas, product teams often rely on brainstorming. And in those brainstorming sessions, there is often only one rule - there are no bad ideas. In other words, your team is not supposed to use any criteria to judge new ideas on the assumption that this will enhance creativity. 

Often these ideas can come from customer requests, sales team requests, stakeholders, or new technologies. The possibilities are endless, which is the problem. The reason brainstorming is inefficient is because there are no objective criteria to quickly and efficiently judge new product ideas. And those criteria are the unmet customer needs in the job.

When generating ideas, you can use your customer's unmet needs to quickly evaluate competing ideas using speed and accuracy. If you have aligned with your team on a high-growth product strategy, then you have a key customer, target segment, and unmet needs in the job in focus. Your goal with new ideas is to satisfy the target unmet needs faster and more accurately than competitors in the market.

Once you have a need in focus, you can assess the speed and accuracy of competitor solutions to set the benchmark your new idea should beat to get customers to switch from their current solution to yours.

You can then assess the speed and accuracy with which your new ideas will help customers satisfy the target needs. If a new idea is faster and more accurate in concept, you know it’s worth further examination: assessing the cost and risk, testing prototypes with customers to confirm they perceive the value, etc.

In traditional methods, companies use Net Promoter Scores (NPS), satisfaction, and other metrics to help determine the customer value of the product. While NPS and satisfaction may give your team data about your customers’ view of your product, they don’t identify where your customer is currently struggling. In other words, because NPS are focused on your product, they don’t identify your customer’s unmet needs. The iPod, for example, had extremely high NPS and satisfaction scores, but that did not help identify the opportunity for streaming services, which now dominate the industry and ultimately killed the iPod as a platform for creating a mood with music (the job-to-be-done).

Traditional methods don’t give your team insight into why customers are dissatisfied or how you can add more value. In addition, if you’re launching a new product that hasn’t been used by customers, how can you determine if it will provide value to customers?

Your ultimate goal as a company is to satisfy your customer’s needs better than competitors in your market. Your customer’s struggle to get their job done (i.e. their struggle to achieve their goal independent of your product) is what causes them to purchase a new solution. So customer value is providing your customers with a solution to overcome their struggle faster and more accurately than your competitors.

The ultimate customer value is provided when you help your customers get their job done with less effort. To mitigate the risk of product failure, you can measure customer effort and customer value before investing in product development. Your product will create customer value if it gets the job done faster and more accurately. And speed and accuracy are metrics you can measure even before you invest in product development. If your new product idea is not significantly faster and more accurate, your team should keep iterating the idea. You want to help your customers get the jobs done in their life easier. Life is hard enough already. Make life easier for your customers. This is your goal. Once you have created product ideas with significant customer value, you should prioritize these in your roadmap.

Traditionally when product teams “own the roadmap,” they aggregate feature ideas from your company’s stakeholders. Prioritization of features can become a political battle between personalities on your team because there are no objective customer criteria to serve as the basis for your team’s decisions. In short, your team should not prioritize your roadmap, your customers should. Blackberry failed because they did not understand the unmet customer needs in their market, and as a result, they prioritized their product ideas (about improving a keyboard-based device), rather than prioritizing feature ideas that would satisfy unmet needs faster and more accurately.

To prioritize your roadmap, your team first needs to agree on your product strategy, making clear choices about:

• Your target customer
• The job-to-be-done you help the customer get done
• An attractive target customer segment
• The size of the customer segment
• The probability of generating the revenue growth you need
• The unmet needs you satisfy to get the job done better than competitors

Having the strategy in focus gives your team objective criteria to judge the ideas on the roadmap.

Next, you need to assess everything on your roadmap in light of your product strategy.

Categorize backlog items as follows:

• Tech Debt
• Customer Commits
• Maintenance/Bug Fixes
• On Strategy Product Ideas
• Off Strategy Product Ideas

Different teams have different names for each of these categories but every roadmap has some version of them. The goal in this assessment is to determine what percentage of your resources are allocated to each category and if that allocation will achieve your growth goals.

The more aggressive your growth goals, the larger percentage of your resources should be allocated to On Strategy Product Ideas. To determine if an idea is on strategy, you need to answer the following questions related to your strategy:

• Does the idea help our target customer segment get the job done?
• Does the idea satisfy a need for a high priority job step in your strategy?

Customer Commits and On Strategy Product Ideas are not mutually exclusive. You could have a customer request a feature that fits well with your strategy.

But, you need to be aware of those customer feature requests that are off strategy. They can help you get short-term revenue, but they can throw you far from your strategy and cause you to miss the biggest opportunities in your market.

When companies come up with a positioning strategy, traditional methods (for example as explained by Harvard’s Michael Porter) are often driven by cost or feature differentiation and broad or narrow customer focus. Accordingly, you can choose to be the low cost solution or a feature differentiated solution. If you are focused on being the low cost solution, competitors can copy your operational effectiveness as best practices disseminate in your industry. If you position your product based on the feature differentiation, it will supposedly help differentiate your product enough so that customers are more likely to buy it. However, what happens when a competitor comes along and highlights the same set of features and benefits? You’ll constantly be playing catch up, trying to compete with similar products.

It can be a struggle to come up with a unique position in a crowded market. However, Jobs-to-be-Done can help you create a positioning plan that connects with customers quickly. The key difference in JTBD positioning is that you don't use the product features to position the brand or product. Instead, you look at the steps a customer takes to get a job done and you focus on those steps that are the biggest struggle for customers. In other words, those steps that have unmet customer needs.

Comparing features and specs across competitors is everywhere. We’ve all seen the table that shows a bunch of features down the left and then checkmarks for each competitor who has each feature. More features=better, right? The problem is customers don’t know what features they want, they know what problems they want to solve. As Henry Ford put it, “If I asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” The horse riders know they want to get to their destination faster but they don’t know what features and technologies will make it happen. This is also true today. Telling your customers that your product has AI does not help them understand why that’s valuable.

Empathizing with your customers means recognizing that your customers don't want to use your product features, they want to get the job done so they can get back to their lives.

The trick is to include 3 elements:

In other words, let your customers know that you understand their problem and show how your product helps them solve it.

We have seen this messaging technique improve marketing effectiveness 10x over product and feature-based messaging.