Jobs to Be Done

The core premise is the intuitive but not so obvious idea that by digging into the "why" of people's actions, you can uncover a set of reasons—emotional, psychological, and practical—that drive people to behave in certain ways rather than others.

Ultimately, people are just trying to get things done in their lives, whether they are making a purchase for their own use, collaborating in a business-to-business transaction, or consuming a government service.

Once you understand what jobs people are striving to do, it becomes easier to predict which products or services will take off and which will fall flat.

Jobs

Jobs are the underlying tasks that customers are trying to get done. They are customer demands that are specific to discrete customer types and occasions.

The focus is on the fundamental task, not what the customer says they want or need, or their measurable outcomes.

We're looking for jobs that are important and unsatisfied in the eyes of the customer.

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

Jobs let us focus or energy and resources where they'll make the biggest impact.

Job Drivers

Job drivers are the underlying contextual elements that make certain jobs more or less important for specific customers.

Attitudes: personality traits that affect behavior and decision-making.
Background: Long-term context that affects behavior and decision-making.
Circumstances: immediate or near-term factors that affect behavior and decision-making.

Customers with the same jobs may make different decisions based on their job drivers.

By combining jobs and job drivers, we can create meaningful customer segments.

What we care about are the drivers that lead to key jobs to be done.

Current Approaches and Pain Points

Understanding what customers do today and how they respond to various pain points broadens the solution space for both incremental and breakthrough solutions.

The easiest way to make sure you are not missing a key stakeholder is to create a process map from the customer's perspective.

We're looking for all of the steps between when a customer starts to think about a job to when they finish it. This helps to identify key stakeholders throughout the entire process. These maps should be created for particular occasions, not generic scenarios. When interviewing customers, I should ask about a specific instance, such as the last time.

The goal is to identify pain points, which are areas where the customer experiences frustration, boredom, or inefficiency.

We need to design a solution that works with current customer behavior. Current behaviors, even strange or pointless ones, are difficult to work against. This is balanced somewhat by customers' desires to alleviate pain points.

The key is to solve for real pain points that your customers experience, not perceived pain points that come from you.

Making a "better" product is the easy part of innovation. The hard part is ensuring that your new product is better for the right people in the right ways.