Jobs to Be Done

Stephen Wunker, Jessica Wattman, David Farber

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780814438084
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: R&D

In a challenging economy filled with multiple competitors, no one can afford to stagnate. Yet, innovation is notoriously difficult. How do you pinpoint the winning ideas that customers will love?

Sifting through purchasing data for clues about what might sell or haphazardly brainstorming ideas are typical strategies. However, innovation expert Stephen Wunker offers the effective Jobs method: determining the drivers of customer behavior--those functional and emotional goals that people want to achieve.

This simple shift in perspective opens up new insights about your customers and a wealth of hidden opportunities. For example, social media newcomer Snapchat used the Jobs process to capture the millennial demographic. By reducing functionality, the company satisfied its users' unmet need to document real life in the moment, without filters and "like" buttons.

Packed with similar examples from every industry, this complete innovation guide explains both foundational concepts and a detailed action plan developed by Wunker and his team.

In Jobs to Be Done, the groundbreaking Jobs Roadmap takes you step-by-step through the innovation process and reveals how to:

• Gather valuable customer insights
• Turn those insights into new product ideas
• Test and iterate until you find original profitable solutions
• And much more!

Jobs to Be Done gives you a clear-cut framework for thinking about your business, outlines a roadmap for discovering new markets, new products and services, and helps you generate creative opportunities to innovate your way to success.

PART I

UNDERSTANDING
JOBS TO BE DONE

FINDING HIGH-
POTENTIAL
AVENUES FOR
GROWTH

KNOW WHERE YOU’RE
STARTING FROM

1

JOBS

WHAT CUSTOMERS ARE
TRYING TO GET DONE

IN THE LATE 1990s, Stephen led one of the world’s first smartphone development projects. His team at Psion PLC combined the innards of the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), which Psion had originally invented in the 1980s, with telephony components from Motorola to create a device with a long list of features. The team was incredibly excited about all of the things the new device could do. You could even send a fax from your phone! But customers were confused, the technical complexity was overwhelming, and the device was quite costly.

Around the same time, a Canadian company called Research in Motion was taking a different approach, focusing on a simple hierarchy of jobs that people wanted to get done with a smartphone. Their product—the Blackberry—did far fewer things and was much less stylish. But it dominated the field for the next seven years—an eon in that industry.

The key to the Blackberry’s success wasn’t great technology or clever advertisements. It wasn’t about getting the priorities of the customer right; Stephen’s team had been diligent about asking people what they wanted (“Maps!” “Games!”). Rather, the Research in Motion effort triumphed because it looked at customers the right way, focusing on a single critical job to be done: keeping in touch through email.

Throwing in everything but the kitchen sink—then adding the kitchen sink—makes your product bloated, not better.

Jobs help you to focus on what really matters, rather than trying to add on cool features that muddle the customer experience and make the product less compelling. It is a concept that Stephen really wished he had known about when he designed that device.

IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU WILL LEARN:

Why to focus on jobs over past purchase behavior.

How to win on both the functional and emotional levels.

How understanding jobs can lead to the better design of products, services, and business models.

USING JOBS TO REDEFINE MARKETS AND CREATE OPPORTUNITIES

When thinking about how to launch a new product or bring in new customers, too many companies focus on what people are currently buying. They use existing purchase data to define their markets quite narrowly. They begin to think of themselves as booksellers and PC companies. Then when sales dip or management makes aggressive growth demands, they end up asking the wrong questions. How can we sell more books? How can we build a better PC? This tunnel-visioned approach to market definition creates a very small solution space, and it can blind companies to threats from untraditional sources.

Customers’ jobs exist independently from what people are buying, making it essential to see the world from the customer’s perspective rather than from the vantage of a company that happens to be selling something. As the late Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt famously told his students, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

Snapchat gives us a good example of a company that has eschewed industry trends in favor of a customer-centric perspective. Snapchat is particularly interesting because it shows how a company is attracting the notoriously fickle millennial demographic to steal market share in the social media/mobile messaging sphere—an arena that’s barely old enough to be disrupted. To a casual observer familiar with the general direction of the industry, Snapchat shouldn’t be successful. While Facebook is focusing on delivering enhanced search functionality that allows you to find fond memories among old posts, the ephemeral nature of Snapchat’s messages makes that impossible. Instagram continues to add new filters and photo-editing capabilities, but Snapchat offers just a handful of filters and tools that are on par with the earliest versions of Microsoft Paint. Twitter opened a world where you can follow the musings of virtually anyone, yet Snapchat restricts you to the posts of added friends and a few preselected organizations.

Despite its apparent inferiority, Snapchat has already grown to reach 6 billion video views per day (just trailing Facebook’s 8 billion), and it has a valuation of $16 billion.¹ So what explains Snapchat’s success? Rather than cramming its app with all of the features of its closest competitors, Snapchat has focused on satisfying a handful of emotional jobs that are important to its target users. Other social media apps have been criticized for creating an atmosphere of yearning in which users are bombarded with images of fun adventures and expensive vacations. Instead, Snapchat offers a way to document something closer to real life, allowing users to share moments and feelings without an expectation that their posts will be glamorous or that they’ll look their best. Framed in this light, the lack of a “Like” button, the inability to search old photos, and the lack of ways to enhance what you’re sharing all become advantages rather than drawbacks. Importantly for the company’s target demographic, Snapchat also lets users feel like they’re part of a chosen community that they helped build. With a younger user base and the ability to share with only selected friends, Snapchat offers a way for millennials to engage with a platform that isn’t shared with their parents, extended family members, and employers. Snapchat isn’t for everyone, and it doesn’t try to be. Instead, its founders resisted the temptation to copy the competition, building an app that helps an identifiable user base satisfy a handful of important jobs really well.

WINNING ON THE FUNCTIONAL AND EMOTIONAL LEVELS

Customers have jobs that are both functional and emotional in nature, and companies need to design offerings that win on both levels. First consider the functional jobs. Although these can be more straightforward to satisfy than emotional ones, many companies get so excited about adding new functionality that they overlook the underlying jobs. In general, satisfying a customer’s functional jobs requires pulling three levers: focusing on real jobs, satisfying those jobs for particular customers or occasions, and designing solutions that prioritize jobs over features.

Critically, it is important to satisfy real jobs. Although this sounds simple, too many companies start with a new idea and then hope that people will realize its inherent appeal. The end result is often a product that solves low-priority jobs or jobs that people don’t really have. Reading glasses, for example, were a great idea. Yet for several hundred years after their invention in the thirteenth century, there was virtually no demand for them. Because there was little need to read things up close, most farsighted people didn’t even realize they were farsighted. It wasn’t until the mid-fifteenth century, when Gutenberg’s printing press catalyzed the widespread printing of books, that people began seeking out a way to ease the strain as they tried to read.² Once reading books became a high-priority job, demand for curing farsightedness soared.

Jobs are different from success criteria or metrics that determine whether a job has been achieved. Brookwood, an independent school for young children in Massachusetts that we’ve worked with, used to advertise itself to prospective parents as a “community of exuberant learners.” That phrasing was evocative, but unfortunately it placed a lot of emphasis on the idea of community. Finding a community for their children was not a job many parents rated as important, and there were many other ways to accomplish that objective such as soccer teams and neighborhood organizations. Community was, however, a means of determining whether children felt comfortable learning and were valued for their individual personalities and talents, not just for their test scores. As part of its rebranding efforts, Brookwood has reframed its messaging around real jobs to be done in order to drive an increase in applications.

Propositions also need to be designed with particular customers and occasions in mind. Designing for some theoretical average user can undermine the potential gains you may get from understanding distinct types of customers’ jobs to be done. When we introduce the Jobs concept to new audiences, we sometimes run a mock focus group, pretending that we’re working for an ice cream company. At first, we tell people we need to sell more ice cream. They usually think about customers on average and respond that we need more flavors, more sales outlets, fewer calories, and lower prices. That’s not very practical, nor does it respond directly to jobs to be done. So we then ask people a different question: Thinking about the last time that you had ice cream, why did you do that, and if you hadn’t had ice cream, what would you have done otherwise? The answers are completely different. People were celebrating an occasion, and they decided to have ice cream to spend more time together after dinner. They were trying to cool down at the beach, and ice cream competed against water. They were taking a stroll and saw a new shop, and they wanted a new experience rather than just following an old routine. Focusing on particular people in specific contexts creates far richer and more useful detail than thinking about things on average.

Once you have identified a few high-priority jobs, it is important to make sure that you satisfy those jobs well. Companies often spread their resources too thinly, adding extra features that sound good in advertisements. Yet those features rarely drive decision making. Microsoft can boast that upgrading to Excel 2007 increased the limit on unique colors per workbook from 56 to 4.3 billion, but will that really matter? Even worse, the payoff from new features is often short-lived, inasmuch as features generally prove easy for competitors to replicate. Why couldn’t Excel boast a template that helps people balance their checkbooks? That’s a job that, according to our research, a significant proportion of banking customers accomplish using Excel, but in a currently awkward and error-prone way.

Focusing on features makes you lose sight of important jobs. As the mobility trend further embedded itself in the PC world, Blackberry rushed to get on the tablet train. It quickly got out the PlayBook, which had a touch screen and an icon-based display. It boasted a great list of features and was actually quite slick in a number of ways. On the other hand, the PlayBook failed to take advantage of the company’s biggest strength: It launched without native email support! In doing so, the PlayBook glossed over key mobile communication jobs just so that Blackberry could have a competing tablet in the marketplace.

As much as companies may struggle with functional jobs, they typically get more attention than emotional jobs. Emotional jobs tend to be neglected in business, especially outside the realm of consumer packaged goods such as food and cleaning products. Emotional jobs can be difficult to articulate, and solution-oriented managers have a hard time dwelling on how their products can satisfy emotional jobs. Enterprise software companies, for instance, are fond of saying how their worlds are intensely rational, and then they struggle to explain why great products are never broadly adopted or why companies stick with long-term vendors even though their offerings are outmoded. As competitors find ways to satisfy the same functional jobs at a lower price point, emotional elements can provide a vital way to differentiate your product.

Sennheiser, Bose, and JBL have figured out how to make high-quality audio products. When Apple paid $3.2 billion to buy Beats Electronics in 2014, countless critics and music enthusiasts came out ranting about the inferior quality of Beats’ headphones.³ But despite competing against technically superior products, Beats had a 40 percent market share four years after entering the market. So why are people so excited about Beats? The company hits on emotional jobs. Put simply, the $300 price tag for a set of Beats headphones is the cost of a seat at the lunchroom’s cool table. From the beginning, Beats focused on getting its headphones into as many music videos, locker rooms, and runway shoots as possible, ensuring that they were associated with celebrity glamor and status. Going a step further, Beats offers a wealth of limited editions for movies and sports leagues, creating more opportunities for users to stand out and express themselves. Although the headphones have to perform at a certain functional threshold, their ability to satisfy emotional jobs allows them to command a premium in the market. Much like Beats, companies with products that excel along emotional dimensions can...