The jobs-to-be-done theory is a framework that helps companies and businesses to understand the needs of their customers. Today, most companies focus on the product or customer without worrying too much about the customer’s job or the needs they want to fulfill with the product.
Using the framework, businesses can innovate how they think of markets, needs, opportunities, and customer segments. It helps companies categorize, define, capture, and organize the customer needs to please the customer the more and thus win loyalty and more sales and profits.
Understanding the Jobs-to-Be-Done-Framework
According to innovators of this framework, a product or service becomes a winning product or service when and if it helps the customer to accomplish what they intend to, and in a better, cheaper, and faster way – all depending on how they want it done. The theory derives from this ideology.
The Jobs-to-be-Done Growth Strategy MatrixTM is a model that helps companies to understand how to use the framework. It explains how a company can strategize its businesses in terms of serving customer needs with its products.
It helps companies to understand and strategize on winning underserved customers, over-served customers, customers with limited options, and non-customers.
Innovating a business strategy based on the jobs-to-be-done framework
A business can use the jobs-to-be-done framework to design a strategy based on the customer’s desired outcome. The outcomes are the metrics customers use to evaluate success, obviously using the product or service. The company must determine those metrics and then use them to discover opportunities for completing the customer’s job in quicker, better, or more cheaply.
A company should then use these metrics as a guide to minimizing risks when designing new products and services. Given that it can be very costly to innovate a product, it pays to innovate something a customer want. Additionally, they should align the marketing, sales, planning, development, and R&D with the metrics.
All the above will help the company to create value for its products and services.
As such, customers should understand first the jobs the customers are trying to accomplish with the products, and second, how customers measure value driven from the products and services.
But how can a company determine the customer’s job-to-be-done? Consider that getting it wrong will be a big cause of failure. Plus, you must not define the job too narrowly, limiting you when trying to discover growth opportunities. Nevertheless, defining it too broadly means a lack of focus when it comes to performing actual actions.
This is because the innovators could not work with the customer in defining what products they need, why they buy the product, and how it fits in the things they are trying to accomplish.
While research plays a significant role in discovering the customer’s jobs, innovators should ensure they unravel all these issues. Of course, the company will need to have asked the fundamental questions of who the client is, the client’s goals, and what their situations are like.
A researcher can use a job map to defragment the job into its parts. This enables analyzing the product outcomes. This map does not describe what the customer is doing but highlights what they are looking for. It must do so independent of the solution. The map helps the company to figure out the product market.
Once the map is constructed, a company should then discover the desired outcomes in the eye of the product or service. It can then envision the ultimate, breakthrough solution. Finally, it helps companies consider books and case studies done on this framework to help understand it deeper.
