Jobs to be done

When we buy a product we essentially hire it to help us do a job. It if does well, we’ll hire it again.

The Harvard Business Review article starts with the premise that innovation is super important - so why does it always fall short? It doesn’t make sense, as businesses have never known more about their customers (in terms of the data they collect on them).

The problem is that most customer data is structured to show correlations.[Customer A looks like customer B, or x% say they prefer version P vs version Q].Of course, correlation doesn’t mean causality - yet the article claims that many managers have grown comfortable basing decisions on data correlations.

Here’s an interesting example about one of the articles coauthors - Name: Clayton Christensen. Age: 64 years old. Height: 6 ft 8 inches. Shoe size: 16. Married. Sent all kids to college. Drives Honda minivan.

Lots of characteristics - none of which will tell us why he bought the New York Times. Maybe he bought it because he wanted something to read on the plane, or because he’s a fan of a sports team that played yesterday. It’s a near pointless exercise to massage demographic or psychographic data about him and look for correlations with other buyer segments. With this in mind, the focus should instead be on what the customer hopes to accomplish - or the ‘jobs to be done’.

There are many types of jobs to be done:

Small:Pass the time waiting in a queue.Big:Find a more fulfilling career.Regular:Dress for a wedding after the airline lost our suitcase.Irregular:Prepare a healthy lunch to take to work.

If the product or solution does the job well, we’ll 'hire' it again the next time we face the same job. Otherwise, we’ll 'fire' it and look for a new product.

The article then details an example of a construction company building new condos for those looking to downsize:

The company had a lot of interest but weren’t converting them into sales. They changed features and specs (adding bay windows etc), to little avail. The success came when they asked customers who had already purchased a condo what the timeline of events were that led to the purchase decision. The theory being that customers always experience conflict when considering a purchase. Conflict between the forces driving them to buy (hire a solution to solve a problem) and then elements that hold them back ( anxieties, fears etc.) They revealed that their customers were free to move as soon as they had worked out what to do with their dining room table (!) What did this mean? Well, with this insight they understood that they weren’t in the business of building houses - but moving lives. The decision as to whether someone would downsize or not actually revolved around whether they could find a family member to take over what appeared to be a clunky old dining room table - but was in fact a profound piece with deep sentimental value. The anxiety over what to do with the dining room table when they downsized was stopping people from moving, not a feature (like bay windows) that the construction company had failed to offer.

The insight into the job to be done allowed the company to build features that competitors were unlikely to copy, or even understand: A slightly bigger living room to fit the dining room table, 2 years free storage, an onsite sorting room.

Some principles to keep in mind:

“Job” is shorthand for what an individual really seeks to accomplish in a given circumstance

It’s more than a straightforward task. What experience do they want to create? For condo buyers they were seeking to transform their lives in the context of downsizing - this is a very different experience to a first time buyer.

Circumstances are far more important than product characteristics.

In the condo example, one condo is not competing against the condo of another company - rather, the idea of moving at all.

Solve problems that previously had inadequate or no solutions

Prospective condo buyers were looking for simpler lives without tending to a big house. Previously, their only solutions were a stressful move or staying put, so they went with the imperfect solution of staying put.

Jobs are not just about function, they have powerful emotional / social dimensions

Space in a condo for the dining room table reduced a very real anxiety that prospective customers had. As did 2 years of onsite storage and a sorting room so that they could slowly go through all the possessions that had an attached emotional weight.

Another example is Hershey innovating on the peanut-butter cup. Researchers worked on discovering examples where Reese’s buyers were ‘firing’ the product in its current formats: Driving, standing in a crowded subway, playing a video game - the large format was too messy and the smaller individually wrapped product was too fiddly (two hands required). Plus the trail of wrappers was guilt-inducing. So Reese’s minis have no foil wrapping and come in a resealable bag that you can put a single hand into. The innovation led to $235 million in sales in the first two years.