What is Jobs To Be Done?

This is a question I’m asked a lot. The central of idea of Jobs To be Done is about understanding human motivations and the important outcomes people are shooting for in life.

We all have an idealised version of what we want but we are notoriously poor at articulating it. What we’re good at is sharing the annoying, time-consuming and difficult things standing in the way of our goals.

By understanding these important customer jobs, new ventures and product teams can design breakthrough propositions that create new value for customers. The increasing availability of open data, the permissioned use of customer data and widespread use of APIs is a game changer.

Product teams can now stitch together the latest technology to deliver smart contextual digital services that enable end-to-end customer experiences. We have the technology to create delightful customer propositions; the key is designing the proposition around the most important and under-served JTBD.

Products designed around the customer jobs are great for marketers too. It’s easier to make things people want to buy than make people want to buy things. The key is successfully articulating how the customer can make progress towards their goals using this product.

Showing customers how life can be less of a struggle helps remove the inertia and anxiety most have when thinking about adopting or switching to a new product or service.

Discovering Jobs To Be Done

So how do we do it? The best way to start uncovering those customer jobs is speaking to real customers. The key is to build up a better understanding of the customer’s desired outcomes by asking the right questions. Asking questions about existing product experiences is best avoided. For example, asking "How satisfied are you with your bank?" and "What can your bank do better?" will get a fairly muted response. Most customers don’t know what they want and struggle to think outside of how banking currently works.

Better questions would be:

How do you manage your money across any given month?

What big purchases have you got coming up?

How do you intend to finance that?

If I could be your financial assistant, what would you have me do?

These kind of questions will help you understand the process people go through managing their money. What solutions they hire, the DIY hacks they create, and how money fits into helping them reach their desired goals. Add in some contextual and life stage information into the mix and you can begin to build really rich customer profiles that are highly actionable when designing new propositions.

Once you’ve mapped out the qualitative JTBD framework and customer profiles, you can run a survey to measure, rank and validate your findings; to gain greater confidence in how you prioritise which jobs to focus on.