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“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?
What Job Did You Hire That Product to Do?
What causes us to buy products and services is the stuff that happens to us all day, every day. We all have jobs we need to do that arise in our day-to-day lives and when we do, we hire products or services to get these jobs done.
Theory of Jobs to Be Done
Jobs Theory explains why customers pull certain products and services into their lives: they do this to resolve highly important, unsatisfied jobs that arise.
What causes a customer to purchase and use a particular product or service?
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.
A job is the progress that an individual seeks in a given circumstance. Successful innovations enable
a customer’s desired progress, resolve struggles, and fulfill unmet aspirations. They perform jobs that formerly had only inadequate or nonexistent solutions. Jobs are never simply about the functional—they have important social and emotional dimensions, which can be even more powerful than functional ones. Because jobs occur in the flow of daily life, the circumstance is central to their definition and becomes the essential unit of innovation work—not customer characteristics, product attributes, new technology, or trends.
Jobs to Be Done are ongoing and recurring. They’re seldom...
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Jobs Theory answers this question by asserting that customers purchase and use (or “hire” in our jobs metaphor) products and services to satisfy jobs that arise in their lives. A job is defined as the progress that a customer desires to make in a
particular circumstance.
Do you understand the real reason why your customers choose your products or services? Or why they choose something else instead? How do your products or services help your customers to make progress in their lives? In which circumstances are they trying to make that progress? What are the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of this progress? What is competing with
your products and services to address these jobs? Are there competitors outside of those included in the traditional view of your industry? Endnotes
When you are solving a customer’s job, your products essentially become services.
Chapter Takeaways Organizations that lack clarity on what the real jobs their customers hire them to do can fall into the trap of providing one-size-fits-all solutions that ultimately satisfy no one. Deeply understanding jobs opens up new avenues for growth and innovation by bringing into focus distinct “jobs-based” segments—including groups of
“nonconsumers” for which an acceptable solution does not currently exist. They choose to hire nothing, rather than something that does the job poorly. Nonconsumption has the potential to provide a very, very big opportunity. Seeing your customers through a jobs lens highlights the real competition you face, which often extends well beyond your traditional rivals. Questions for Leaders What jobs are your customers hiring your products and services to get done? Are there segments with
distinct jobs that you are inadequately serving with a one-size-fits-none solution? Are your products—or competitors'—overshooting what customers are actually willing to pay for? What experiences do customers seek in order to make progress—and what obstacles must be removed for them to be successful? What does your understandin...
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Chapter Takeaways Jobs Theory provides a clear guide for successful innovation because it enables a full, comprehensive insight into all the information you need to create solutions that
perfectly nail the job. There are many ways to develop a deep understanding of the job, including traditional market research techniques. While it’s helpful to develop a “job hunting” strategy, what matters most is not the specific techniques you use, but the questions you ask in applying them and how you piece the resulting information together. A valuable source of jobs insights is your own life. Our lives are very articulate and our own experiences offer fertile ground for uncovering Jobs to Be Done. Some of the most successful innovations in
history have derived from the experiences and introspection of individuals. While most companies spend the bulk of their market research efforts trying to better understand their current customers, important insights about jobs can often be gathered by studying people who are not buying your products—or anyone else’s—a group we call nonconsumers. If you observe people employing a workaround or “compensating behavior” to ge...
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opportunity, because the job is so important and they are so frustrated that they are literally i...
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Closely studying how customers use your products often yields important insights into the jobs, especially if they are using ...
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Most companies focus disproportionately on the functional dimensions of their customers’ jobs; but you should pay equally close attention to uncovering the emoti...
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three dimensions is critical to your solution ...
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Go into the field and observe customers using your products. In what circumstances do they use them? What are the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of the progress they are trying to make? Are they using them in unexpected ways? If so, what does this reveal about the nature of their jobs?
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.
“Little Hire.”
What has to get fired for my product to get hired?
Once upon a time . . . Every day . . . One day . . .
Because of that, we did this . . . Because of this, we did that . . . Finally I did . . .
You are selling progress, not products.
Chapter Takeaways Deeply understanding a customer’s real Job to Be Done can be challenging in practice. Customers are often unable to articulate what they want; even when they do describe what they want, their actions often tell a completely different story. Seemingly objective
Questions for Leaders What evidence do you have that you’ve clearly understood your customers’ jobs? Do your customers’ actions correspond to what they tell you they want? Do you have evidence that your customers make the
Little Hire and the Big Hire? Can you tell a complete story about how your customers go from a circumstance of struggle, to firing their current solution, and ultimately hiring yours (both the Big and the Little Hires)? Where are there gaps in your storyboard and how can you fill them in? What are the forces that impede potential customers from hiring your product? How could you innovate the experiences surrounding your product to overcome these forces?
New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable.
“Here’s why you should hire me.”
Organizations typically structure themselves around function or business unit or geography—but successful growth companies optimize around the job. Competitive advantage is conferred through an organization’s unique processes: the ways it integrates across functions to perform the customer’s job.
Helping customers have a delightful experience using your product is made up of processes. What information do we need to have in order to decide what to do next? Who is responsible for each step? What do we prioritize over other things?
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.”
His ensuing insight enabled him to pioneer the concept of intensive care medicine as we know it, leading to the now ubiquitous intensive care unit that we’ve come to take for granted. This was only possible by the realization that the hospital’s preexisting processes were failing to deliver desired patient experiences—in this case, successful surgical recovery and survival.
How much time did we save this customer? Did we allow them to not spend time doing something they didn’t want to do? Did we improve their cash flow? Are our processes supporting the things customers are hiring us to do?
Amazon has laser-focused on three things that solve customers’ jobs—vast selection, low prices, and fast delivery—and designed processes to deliver them.
Most organizations do not have one person who is the “steward” ensuring the company consistently delivers against the customer’s job. Traditional organizational structures and siloes do have value and are likely to endure, and large-scale reorgs are not usually practical. Therefore, the best way to move toward a more jobs-centric organization is to carefully set up and integrate the right processes, measure the right things, and over time embed jobs centricity in the culture.
What new processes could you define to ensure more integrated delivery of the experiences required by your customers’ jobs?
Customers don’t want products, they want solutions to their problems.
micromanagement because employees at all levels understand and are motivated by how the work they do fits into a larger process to help customers get their jobs done.
strayed from his or her official job responsibilities to do something for the greater good of Amazon.
Inexorably, the organizing unit moves to a far more intense focus on customers and products and competitors and investors—but a less and less intense focus on the job.
