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You have to understand not only what customers want to hire, but what they’ll need to fire to make room for the new solution.
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.
additional hypotheses and perhaps the retailer discovers opportunities to include immediate delivery and free mattress removal. Perhaps there’s a ninety-day free trial period, no questions asked.
Processes can profoundly affect whether a customer chooses your product or service in the long run. And they may be a company’s best bet to ensure that the customer’s job, and not efficiency or productivity, remains the focal point for innovation in the long run.
sign. W. Edwards Deming, father of the quality movement, may have put it best: “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.”
Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes.
Unlike resources, which are easily measured, processes can’t be seen on a balance sheet. If a company has strong processes in place, managers have flexibility about which employees they put on which assignments—because the process will work regardless of who performs
We believe that most successful organizations are founded, de facto, on this perspective—essentially they identified a Job to Be Done. But after companies have successfully launched, the wisdom of Levitt and Drucker seems to fade away.2 Something shifts. Even in some of the best companies, the Job to Be Done that brought them success in the first place can somehow get lost in the shuffle of running and growing the business.
Almost overnight, the organization seemed to reorient the business by product line, competing again against other juice and drink products with a bloated product line that creates confusion, not clarity.
In other words, the railroads fell into the trap of letting the product define the market they were in, rather than the job customers were hiring them to do.
In the early stage, managers are puzzle solvers, not number crunchers.
Passive data does not broadcast itself loudly. You have to seek it out, put clues together, relentlessly ask why? But it’s critically important because it is the way to identify innovation opportunities.
We can predict, however, that, as soon as a Job to Be Done becomes a commercial product, the context-rich view of the job begins to recede as the active data of operations replaces and displaces the passive data of innovation. Once products are launched,
faucet is opened and data is created, data that didn’t exist until sales had been made and customers created. Managers feel an understandable sense of reassurance when they shift their attention from the hazy contours of a story of struggle to the crisp precision of a spreadsheet. And this switch happens organically and with little fanfare:
This data, as it turns out, is very loud. It shouts at you to focus on it and prioritize it and improve it. It’s easy to track and measure and is usually seen as a proxy for how well the manager is doing his job.
Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world. Too often, managers conveniently set this knowledge aside: data is man-made.
the first place. Companies do this, too. They manage the numbers. Think
Companies see products all around them made by other companies and decide to copy or acquire them. But in doing so, companies often end up trying to create many products for many customers—and lose focus on the job that brought them success in the first place.
Worse, trying to do many jobs for many customers can confuse customers so they hire the wrong products for the wrong jobs and end up firing them in frustration instead.
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This makes companies vulnerable to disrupters who focus on a single job—and do it well.
Data has an annoying way of conforming itself to support whatever point of view we want it to support.
Psychologists have explained that when we hold conflicting ideas or beliefs in our minds, this “dissonance” produces reactions of stress and anxiety that we naturally seek to minimize and avoid. Uncomfortable truths are just that—uncomfortable. As data comes in, it’s not that we lose objectivity—we never had it to begin with.
The healthiest mindset for innovation is that nearly all data—whether presented in the form of a large quantitative data set on one extreme, or an ethnographic description of behavior on the other—is built upon human bias and judgment.
Because terms from searches on Google are created on computers and can be stored and analyzed in many new ways, they have the appearance of a valid data set, but are not. Just because the phenomena—in this case, searches—can be computed and analyzed does not mean that they deserve the status of data. Is it directionally helpful? Yes. Is is objective reality? No.
When everyone on the team understands that the goal is “taxes are done,” they’re all pulling in the same direction.
You can’t innovate to the broad goal of helping children live, but you can innovate around the very specific circumstances of that struggle.
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The advantage of this is that it causes an organization to become self-managing. Managers don’t need to enforce the rules. They understand the “commander’s intent”—a military term that explains why soldiers up and down the ranks know how to make the right choices absent a specific order. They are clear on the commander’s goals and priorities.
Jobs, as we’ve defined them here, take work to uncover and understand properly, thus dubbing something a job shouldn’t roll off the tongue with minimal thought.
First, if you or a colleague describes a Job to Be Done in adjectives and adverbs, it is not a valid job. It might describe an experience that a customer needs to have in order to do the job, but it is not a job, as we have defined it here. For example, “convenience” is not a Job to Be Done. It might be an experience that might cause a customer to choose your product rather than a competitor’s product, but it is not a job. A well-defined Job to Be Done is expressed in verbs and nouns—such as, “I need to ‘write’ books verbally, obviating the need to type or edit by hand.” In contrast, the
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My daughter Katie recently regaled me with details of Drybar, a salon in which you can get only one service: a perfect “blowout” for your hair—along with the attendant experiences that help you prepare for a special night out and make you feel good about yourself while you’re there. (I had no idea such things were coveted, but I stand duly corrected.) In just a few years, Drybar has become a visible success in cities around the country.
There are whole industries, such as venture capital, that are currently organized around the belief that innovation is essentially a game of playing the odds.
