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1-Page Summary of Jobs to Be Done
The “Jobs Roadmap”
Companies can use the Jobs Roadmap to develop new products and services that consumers will love. The concept is rooted in revolutionary work by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, which concerns tasks people must get done to lead their lives. The Jobs Roadmap and the Jobs-to-be-done approach enable companies to learn why people buy certain items instead of others.
Understanding what consumers need is more important to business than the products they buy. The Jobs to be Done approach combines marketing data with understanding how and why consumers act. It helps you understand your customers better, which will help you create profitable new offerings that are popular among your target audience. Marketers, product planners, product designers and related professionals should focus on the jobs consumers must do in their lives.
The Peter Drucker Perspective
Management guru Peter Drucker said that the customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells. The reason for this is that nobody pays for a product; they pay for satisfaction. Customers want to satisfy their needs, and they do so by using products or services to get them done. Although you can’t sell satisfaction directly, you can provide customers with tools to help them feel satisfied with your product or service.
Companies should know how their customers behave and what they need. To do this, companies hire experts to observe people in their natural habitat and learn about them. This is why Procter & Gamble, Dell, General Motors and Microsoft have ethnography teams on staff because they understand that an investment in research will pay off when you know more about your customer base.
Traditional Brainstorming
The Jobs to be Done approach is different from how most companies create new products. They brainstorm ideas for their products and try to predict what the customers want.
Brainstorming is rarely effective and often leads to poor outcomes. It usually consists of information about the company, its current events, what stakeholders like or don’t like, and so on. This approach limits innovation and leads to bad results:
More than half of the new products that are launched by companies fail. Only one in every 100 new products meets its development costs.
Of 300 new products, only one is successful. The approach you use to develop innovative ideas is as important as the idea itself. If you don’t get “the ‘how’ of innovations right,” your chances of getting the “what” right will diminish.
“Jobs Atlas”
It’s important to focus your strategy on “customer insight.” This is achieved by outlining a step-by-step process in the Jobs Roadmap and tracking relevant customer insights in a Jobs Atlas. The atlas has three parts:
You should know where you are starting from. Your customers want to get jobs done, and they will define what success means for them.
“Make the trip worthwhile” – Outline what’s at stake for your company and how you can use it to its advantage.
“Job Drivers”
Best Buy spent $50 million to renovate its 110 stores in 2009. This was after developing two different prototype consumer personas – a young tech enthusiast named “Buzz” and a suburban soccer mom named “Jill.” Best Buy redesigned everything in its stores to serve these two personas, which incorporated their job drivers.
Jill’s job is to get her children to soccer practice and other activities. She wants good nutrition for her family, so she tries to prepare meals quickly. When Jill goes shopping at Best Buy for a microwave oven, the retailer might also show her another smart appliance that preserves nutrients better than a microwave.
