What is job-to-do thinking, and how does it work?

Concept

This systematic approach focuses on understanding the jobs that customers try to do before creating solutions. This approach involves collective efforts like studying customer profiles, their job-to-do, pains related to job-to-do desired gains, and professional, social and emotional objectives customers ought to achieve. Job-to-do thinking is likewise a design-thinking approach, putting customers at the centre of thinking to innovate solutions for unmet needs. This approach assumes that any customer, while buying a product, eventually hires a product to do a particular job. Thus, innovators must first understand the jobs customers try to achieve before they search for any solution. In understanding any job-to-do, you need to dig for more details on the customer’s profile, critical stories and patterns to do the job, behaviours, motivation and demotivation, pains, gains and values perception, and professional, social and emotional objectives.

Background

The jobs-to-be-done framework was first developed by Tony Ulwick in his book ‘Jobs to be done’ in 1991, focusing on identifying the outcomes customers seek, as opposed to the products they want. Christensen Clays also wrote about the Jobs-to-be-done in his book ‘Competing against luck’ in 2015. Christensen identified three components of defining any customer job: (1) identifying the problem and struggles, (2) understanding the circumstance relative to the specific context in which arises like your age, marital status or financial status, and (3) figuring out the functional, social and emotional complexity of any job doing.

How does it work?

In Christensen’s book ‘Competing against luck’, the author identified steps and tips to identify jobs-to-be-done and innovative products customers want (Christensen, Hall, Dillon, and Duncan, 2015)¹:

Defining the job

In our metaphor, we say customers hire products or services to solve jobs. To define the customer job, you need to identify the following factors:

Progress: a job is always a process to make progress and is not just a problem, but a job is a specific problem and the struggle it entails.
Circumstance: a job can only be defined, and a successful solution is created relative to a specific context like your age, marital status, financial status, and behaviours to get products.
Functional, social, and emotional complexity: any job involves professional, social and emotional dimensions.

Ways to discover jobs

Tools include creating a customer persona, research, focus groups, customer panels, competitive analysis, etc.
Capturing the story of customers in their moments of struggle or desire to progress.
Seeing jobs in your own life: understanding the unresolved jobs in your life can provide fertile territory for innovation.
Finding opportunity in non-consumption: you can learn as much about the job to be done by people who aren’t hiring any product or service as you can from those who are. We call this non-consumption. Great opportunities are about spotting untapped needs.
Identifying workarounds: as an innovator, spotting consumers struggling to resolve a job to be done by cobbling workarounds or compensating behaviours. For example, offering babysitting services to house-wife employees or a restaurant providing babysitting services to their clients.
Zoning-in things we don’t want to do: negative jobs are often the best innovation opportunities. For example, cleaning the window or gutters of your house, so instead, you outsource these services to get them done.

The emotional score

It means, not only do you collect functional details of the job to be done, but also you gather insights into this job’s social and emotional dimensions your customers are trying to make. For example, Procter & Gamble learned this the hard way with its launching of disposable diapers in China. P&G knows how to sell baby diapers in Europe but doing the same business in China was different as people didn’t use diapers at all.

Building customer stories

Your customers may not tell you what they want, but they can tell you about their struggles. What are they trying to accomplish? Why isn’t what they’re doing now working? What is causing their desire for something new? One simple way to think about these questions is through storytelling. You’re building their story because, through that, you can understand how the competing forces and context of the job play out for them.

Developing an innovative product

Here are some steps to build up innovative products that customers want to hire:

Uncovering the job: understanding the job, which is the progress (struggle and steps to improve) an individual seeks in a circumstance.
Creating the desired experiences: is the differentiated experience (functional, social and emotional) that we enable customers to purchase and use a product.
Integrating around the job: aligning our internal processes with the job in order to provide the desired experiences.
Removing obstacles: creating and experimenting with solutions to central problematic issues.
Products: products that solve customers’ jobs will help them overcome the obstacles that get in their way of making the progress they seek. Creating experiences and overcoming obstacles is how a product becomes a service to the customer rather than simply a product with better features and benefits.

This post is sourced from my new book- Your Guide To Reach Innovation.
For more information about the book: https://growenterprise.co.uk/your-guide-to-reach-innovation/
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Final note: the book- Your Guide To Reach Innovation, is an actionable guide to innovation from beginning to end. Enjoy reading the book, and I look forward to your reviews.

Author: Munther Al Dawood

www.growenterprise.co.uk

maldawood@growenterprise.co.uk

References:

Christensen, C. Hall, T., Dillon, K., and Duncan, D., 2015. Competing against luck, HarperCollins Publishers.