When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become great at making products people will buy

by Alan Klement

Instead of attaching value to what products are, value should attach to what products do for customers.

We myopically study and improve on customers’ “needs” and expectations of today; instead, we should create new systems that help customers make progress.

Very often, innovators think they are studying customers’ needs – when in fact they are studying what customers don’t like about the products they use today, or what customers currently expect from a product.

We can’t build the products of tomorrow when we limit ourselves to the needs and expectations associated with the products of today. Instead,

we should focus on what never changes for customers: their desire for progress.

A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to transform her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her.

Keep in mind that a Job to be Done describes the “better me.” It answers the question, “How are you better since you started using [product]?”and “Now that you have this product, what can you do now that you couldn’t do before?”

Customers don’t want your product or what it does; they want help making themselves better (i.e., they want to transform a life-situation, make progress).

People have Jobs; things don’t. It doesn’t make sense to ask, “What Job is your product doing?” or say, “The Job of the phone is…” or “The Job of the watch is…” Phones, watches, and dry-cleaning services don’t have Jobs. They are examples of solutions for Job.

What other solutions did you consider before trying the product? What other solutions have you actually used? If the product wasn’t available to you, what would you have done instead? What solutions have the people you know tried or used?

If your product doesn’t help customers make progress, price doesn’t matter.

They did not consider Schumpeter’s warning that competition should not be restricted to products of the same type. Competition can come from anywhere.

This price point would have made sense if consumers were spending that kind of money on comparable solutions.

Limiting my definition of competition to products that look and function similarly.

Any discomfort or frustrations they experience in making that progress should not be thought of as needs but rather descriptions of interactions between customers, their JTBD, and the product they’ve currently hired for their JTBD.

Great designers will want to understand their customer’s struggle before they design a solution for it.

A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to transform her existing life-situation into a preferred one but cannot because there are constraints that stop her.