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September 29 - October 27, 2020
As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?
The foundation of our thinking is the Theory of Jobs to Be Done, which focuses on deeply understanding your customers’ struggle for progress and then creating the right solution and attendant set of experiences to ensure you solve your customers’ jobs well, every time.
The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness.
If you consider some of the most surprising innovation successes in recent years, I’ll wager that all of them had implicitly or explicitly identified a Job to Be Done—and offered a product or service that performed that job extremely well.
After you’ve uncovered and understood the job, you need to translate those insights into a blueprint to guide the development of products and services that customers will love. This involves creating the right set of experiences that accompany your product or service in solving the job
There is a simple, but powerful, insight at the core of our theory: customers don’t buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress. We call this progress the “job” they are trying to get done, and in our metaphor we say that customers “hire” products or services to solve these jobs.
We define a “job” as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. This definition of a job is not simply a new way of categorizing customers or their problems. It’s key to understanding why they make the choices they make.
Second, the idea of a “circumstance” is intrinsic to the definition of a job. A job can only be defined—and a successful solution created—relative to the specific context in which it arises. There are dozens of questions that could be important to answer in defining the circumstance of a job. “Where are you?” “When is it?” “Who are you with?” “While doing what?” “What were you doing half an hour ago?” “What will you be doing next?” “What social or cultural or political pressures exert influence?” And so on. Our notion of a circumstance can extend to other contextual factors as well, such as
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The circumstance is fundamental to defining the job (and finding a solution for it), because the nature of the progress desired will always be strongly influenced by the circumstance.
Finally, a job has an inherent complexity to it: it not only has functional dimensions, but it has social and emotional dimensions, too. In many innovations, the focus is often entirely on the functional or practical need. But in reality, consumers’ social and emotional needs can far outweigh any functional desires.
The jobs I am hiring for are those that help me overcome the obstacles that get in the way of making progress toward the themes of my life—in specific circumstances.
What progress is that person trying to achieve? What are the functional, social, and emotional dimensions of the desired progress?
What are the circumstances of the struggle? Who, when, where, while doing what?
What obstacles are getting in the way of the person making that progress?
Are consumers making do with imperfect solutions through some kind of compensating behavior? Are they buying and using a product that imperfectly performs the job? Are they cobbling together a workaround solution involving multiple products? Are they doing nothing to solve their dilemma at all?
How would they define what “quality” means for a better solution, and what tradeoffs are they willing to make?
perfectly satisfying someone’s job likely requires not just creating a product, but engineering and delivering a whole set of experiences that address the many dimensions of the job and then integrating those experiences into the company’s processes
For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.
Understanding the circumstance-specific hiring criteria triggers a whole series of important insights, perhaps most notably that the competitive field is likely completely different from what you might have imagined.
uncovering an unsatisfactorily resolved job is only the first step. Your organization has to build the right set of experiences in how customers find, purchase, and use your product or service—and integrate all the corresponding processes to ensure that those experiences are consistently delivered.
You’re trying to capture the story of customers in their moments of struggle or desire for progress. A jobs lens changes what you see: the priorities and tradeoffs that customers are willing to make may look completely different, the competitive landscape shifts to a surprising cast of characters, and opportunity for growth appears where none might have seemed possible. Jobs are all around us, but it helps to know where to look and how to interpret what you find. You have to have a job-hunting strategy.
You can learn as much about a Job to Be Done from people who aren’t hiring any product or service as you can from those who are. We call this “nonconsumption,” when consumers can’t find any solution that actually satisfies their job and they opt to do nothing instead.
As an innovator, spotting consumers who are struggling to resolve a Job to Be Done by cobbling together workarounds or compensating behaviors, as Kimberly-Clark did with Silhouettes, should cause your heart to beat a little faster. You’ve spotted potential customers—consumers who are so unhappy with the available solutions to a job they very deeply want to solve that they’re going to great lengths to create their own solution.
Look for What People Don’t Want to Do
Some of the biggest successes in consumer packaged goods in recent years have come not from jazzy new products, but from a job identified through unusual uses of long-established products.
you have to look all around it to understand the context of a job before you can innovate to solve it. If you are to create products and services that customers want to pull into their lives, you have to drill deep and look wide, identifying not only the functional, but also the social and emotional dimensions of the progress your customers are trying to make.
Most companies focus disproportionately on the functional dimensions of their customers’ jobs; but you should pay equally close attention to uncovering the emotional and social dimensions, as addressing all three dimensions is critical to your solution nailing the job.
No one aspires to be environmentally unfriendly, but when the actual decision to pull a product into your life has to be made, you pick the solution that best represents the values and tradeoffs you care about in those particular circumstances.
in order to hire your new solution, by definition customers must fire some current compensating behavior or suboptimal solution—including firing the solution of doing nothing at all.
Wristwatches were fired in droves as soon as people began carrying mobile phones that not only told them the time, but could sync with calendars and provide alarms and reminders. I fired my weekly Sports Illustrated when I could suddenly flip on ESPN. The people who hired Depend Silhouette incontinence products fired staying at home instead of risking going out. Companies don’t think about this enough. What has to get fired for my product to get hired? They think about making their product more and more appealing, but not what it will be replacing.
The forces opposing change: There are two unseen, yet incredibly powerful, forces at play at the same time that many companies ignore completely: the forces holding a customer back. First, “habits of the present” weigh heavily on consumers. “I’m used to doing it this way.” Or living with the problem. “I don’t love it, but I’m at least comfortable with how I deal with it now.” And potentially even more powerful than the habits of the present is, second, the “anxiety of choosing something new.” “What if it’s not better?”
the pull of the new has to be much greater than the sum of the inertia of the old and the anxieties about the new.
When we try to answer: ‘Is it good enough to help a consumer make this kind of progress in this kind of situation?’ the answers come easily. The circumstance of the progress they are trying to make is critical to understanding causality.”
What are they really trying to accomplish and why isn’t what they’re doing now working? What is causing their desire for something new? One simple way to think about these questions is through storyboarding. Talk to consumers as if you’re capturing their struggle in order to storyboard it later. Pixar has this down to a science: as you piece together your customers’ struggle, you can literally sketch out their story: Once upon a time . . . Every day . . . One day . . . Because of that, we did this . . . Because of this, we did that . . . Finally I did . . .
Airbnb’s founders clearly understood this. Before launching, the company meticulously identified and then storyboarded forty-five different emotional moments for Airbnb hosts (people willing to rent out their spare room or entire home) and guests.
The moments of struggle, nagging tradeoffs, imperfect experiences, and frustrations in peoples’ lives—those are the what you’re looking for. You’re looking for recurring episodes in which consumers seek progress but are thwarted by the limitations of available solutions. You’re looking for surprises, unexpected behaviors, compensating habits, and unusual product uses. The how—and this is a place where many marketers trip up—are ground-level, granular, extended narratives with a sample size of one. Remember, the insights that lead to successful new products look more like a story than a
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One of the fundamental mistakes that many marketers make is to collect a handful of data points from a huge sample of respondents when what they really need—and this interview illustrates—is a huge number of data points from a smaller sample size. Great innovation insights have more to do with depth than breadth.
Before a customer hires any new product, you have to understand what he’ll need to fire in order to hire yours. Companies don’t think about this enough. Something always needs to get fired.
If the forces opposing change are strong, you can often innovate the experiences you provide in a way that mitigates them, for example by creating experiences that minimize the anxiety of moving to something new.
creating the right set of experiences around a clearly defined job—and then organizing the company around delivering those experiences (which we’ll discuss in the next chapter)—almost inoculates you against disruption.
You can capture the relevant details of the job in a job spec, including the functional, emotional, and social dimensions that define the desired progress, the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make, the full set of competing solutions that must be beaten, and the obstacles and anxieties that must be overcome.
not only understanding the job, but also the right set of experiences for purchase and use of that product, and then integrating those experiences into a company’s processes. All three layers—Uncovering the Job, Creating the Desired Experiences, and Integrating around the Job—are critical.
Organizations that focus on making the product itself better and better are missing what may be the most powerful causal mechanism of all—what are the experiences that customers seek in not only purchasing, but also in using this product? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you’re probably not going to be hired.
Done perfectly, your brand can become synonymous with the job—what’s known as a purpose brand.
Purpose brands play the role of communicating externally how the “enclosed attributes” are designed to deliver a very complete and specific experience. A purpose brand is positioned on the mechanism that causes people to purchase a product: they nail the job. A purpose brand tells them to hire you for their job.
When competitors successfully enter markets that seem closed and commoditized, they do it by aligning with an important job that none of the established players has prioritized.
Purpose brand makes very clear which features and functions are relevant to the job and which potential improvements will ultimately prove irrelevant.
A clear purpose brand guides the company’s product designers, marketers, and advertisers as they develop and market improved products.
After you’ve fully understood a customer’s job, the next step is to develop a solution that perfectly solves it. And because a job has a richness and complexity to it, your solution must, too. The specific details of the job, and the corresponding details of your solution, are critically important to ensure a successful innovation.
You can capture the relevant details of the job in a job spec, which includes the functional, emotional, and social dimensions that define the desired progress; the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make; the full set of competing solutions that must be beaten; and the obstacles and anxieties that must be overcome. The job spec becomes the blueprint that translates all the richness and complexity of the job into an actionable guide for innovation.
