Businesses can innovate in a variety of ways, including improving quality, adding new features, lowering prices, and so on. Simply asking the customer what they would buy is ineffective. As a result, innovation is frequently regarded as a hit-or-miss proposition. You try a variety of things, some of which work.
The “Job to be Done” theory, according to Christensen, can provide a clear framework for firms to grow through innovation. The fundamental question for innovation is what motivates a customer to buy and use a particular product or service. Job Theory responds to this question by claiming that customers buy and use (or “hire”) products and services to meet the needs of jobs that arise in their lives.
What is Job To Be Done Framework
There are many frameworks available to aid in concentrating on and analysing user needs. By redefining a user’s relationship to their problem, the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework has recently gained popularity as a method for understanding a user’s needs.
If I had Asked the people what they wanted, They would answer fast horses – Henry Ford
Though there is some debate as to whether Henry Ford actually said this, it gets to the heart of why the JTBD framework is valuable. Customers frequently discuss their suggested solutions when we ask them about the issues they’re facing. But it’s your responsibility, not theirs, to find a solution. Ford recognised that in order to solve their problem effectively, you must cut through the “noise” of their proposed solution.
By recasting the need as a job that the user wants to complete, the JTBD framework reframes the relationship between a user and the user’s problem or need. The user “hires” your product to complete that task.
Framework to Document JTBD
Job Spec is one method of describing “Job to be Done.” Job Spec can be used to record pertinent job information, such as:
- Functional, psychological, and social factors that specify the desired advancement
- The customer is ready to make a trade-off.
- The entire spectrum of alternatives
- The challenges and worries that must be surmounted
The book also discusses the idea of a purpose brand, which is a company that associates itself with giving customers a job. If a business completes a project successfully, it develops over time into a brand with a clear purpose. It’s a tool that aids in preventing customers who hire for the wrong reasons from having access to your product or service.
How to use JTBD Framework
Step 1: Framing the job
Two steps are used to frame a job to be done:
- The one-sentence job statement enables us to use the voice of the customer to express all of their needs in a specific circumstance.
- The Job Map’s eight steps assist us in identifying the smaller tasks and activities customers engage in to complete their jobs.
Current job statement
The customer’s job statement describes the end result they are ultimately hoping to achieve or the challenge they want to overcome using a straightforward sentence structure and the customer’s own words.
Clarity is enhanced by the sentence structure that follows:
- The Customer Voice: The statement should be written in the customer’s words and according to their worldview. How they would introduce themselves in this situation should come first in the statement.
- The Best Way to Improve: What kind of improvement does the client want? As an illustration, an increase or a decrease?
- What’s Getting Better: For instance, safety, efficiency, taste, or health.
- Who Will Benefit from the Improvement: For instance, ordering produce, making financial plans, selecting the ideal wine, or protecting your family’s health and safety.
- Contextual explication: What terms would you use to describe the customer’s current situation?
- The job description needs to be concise and clear. It shouldn’t bias product teams in favour of one solution over another.
When drafting the job statement, be aware of some common mistakes.
8 Steps of Universal Job Mapping
Define and plan: The customer formulates an initial strategy for pursuing their objective, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Locate the required input: The customer recognizes and locates the data required for them to make a decision.
Prepare: The client groups and makes sense of the information, qualifies and filters it, develops theories, and either decides to find out more information or organizes their thoughts to decide what to do.
Confirm and verify: The customer decides to take action and verifies that decision.
Execute: The customer puts the decision’s guiding action or procedure into practice.
Monitor: The customer keeps an eye on the results and effects as the decision is being put into action.
Modify: Monitoring generates fresh data that prompts customers to evaluate their initial choices. Did they make the right choice, or do they need to reconsider and decide again in light of the new information? Do they simply finish (move on to the next stage) or do they continually review and refine their choice?
Conclude: In some jobs, the client eventually comes to the conclusion that their journey is complete. Based on their evaluation from the modification phase, they evaluate their current situation, determine whether they are happy or not, and draw lessons from it.
Step 2: Discovering Interviews
Jobs are not created; rather, they are found. Businesses use innovation processes to address friction rather than seeking it out. We must discover how this occurs.
A fundamental component of the Jobs to be Done Theory is the qualitative interview, which should be conducted by your own team. They ought to know firsthand. This is a fantastic chance to use a company’s unheard voices to gain a deeper comprehension of its methods.
Step 3: Validate the Data
We want to quantify the most crucial customer criteria so that we can pinpoint our greatest growth potential. This step will involve conducting a sizable quantitative survey that will cover the final 50–150 customer criteria. We will pose two crucial questions to our target audience for each criterion:
- On a scale of 1 to 5, how important do you rate this criterion?
- On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied are you right now with the options you have to satisfy it?
The data will be more accurate the more people we can survey. The effort put forth here will be rewarded given how crucial these insights will be.
Step 4: Identify big Opportunities
To make the team’s insights immediately available and actionable, we will now visualise the survey results. One such visualisation is the Job Journey Navigator from Vendbridge. Every Customer Criteria is presented in it as a journey that is connected to the Job Map, making it simple for the team to identify the biggest opportunities. When we start to develop products and imagine solutions, this supports prioritisation.
Step 5: Spin Towards Solutions
It is now time to begin matching tasks that need to be completed with the solutions we can offer.
We have a number of needs to narrow down to the few that are best addressed with significant investments in light of the prioritised opportunities we discovered using the Job Journey Navigator. To determine which opportunities best match our capabilities and the innovation journey we can support, we articulate a promise for each opportunity and compare them to one another in this step.
Conclusion
the more profoundly impactful innovations can be created. However, this framework is useful for more than just making strategic choices. When it is known what tasks a customer wants to be completed, even the question of which product features and functions to develop (and which not to) becomes very clear.
This results in a fresh viewpoint on the product, the user, and the competition. The strategy works well when combined with tried-and-true techniques, like those from design thinking.
Buyer personas and the JTBD framework are models that complement one another rather than standing alone. Create your personas based on the results of the JTBD exercise first.
Then, be sure to explain how your product resolves your customers’ problems in every piece of content you create.
