This is article 2 / 5 in a series on Jobs to Be Done. You may wish to read this series from the beginning or view the list of articles in the series (located at the bottom of this article).
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Product managers continually look for ways to elevate and improve their offerings in the eyes of existing and potential customers. Thankfully, when it comes to the ‘hiring’ or ‘firing’ of your products and services, Jobs Theory offers a lens for discovering the ‘why’ behind these matters. JTBD is to businesses as a lighthouse is to ships: it can provide context of where you are, guidance for where you’re going, and reveal hazards that otherwise may go unseen until it is too late.
In this article, we will take a closer look at the established principles that Jobs-to-Be-Done is based upon:
- People hire products or services to get a Job done
- Jobs are stable over time and are solution agnostic
- Jobs are functional, with emotional and social components
- A deep understanding of the Job is necessary, and context is key
- Success in business is the result of making the Job the unit of analysis
Principle 1: People hire products or services to get a Job done
It is a rare case that someone will buy a product or a service because they want to be a patron of your business. The driving force for them relates to their desire for progress (towards a goal, an aspiration, a state of being, etc.) in one or more areas of their lives. The goal for businesses is to understand peoples’ problems – their barriers to making progress – before jumping to solutions.
Jobs research focuses not just on the active use of a product or service but also the before and after: what challenges/barriers were they facing? What possible solutions or workarounds have they tried before? What drove them to choose this solution? How did they use this solution? How much progress have they made with it? Do they continue to use it, or have they ‘hired’ something else?
A sub-point to this principle is that people tend to prefer products or services that get more of the job done over others. Oftentimes in desperation, people will cobble together several partial-solutions in order to hack their way towards progress. When a solution emerges that streamlines these belaboured activities, many people are all too happy to abandon their complicated work-arounds.
Intuit’s personal finance product, Quicken, was used as a workaround solution by small businesses for years; it didn’t serve all of their accounting needs, but it did a good enough job of it to be worth ‘hiring.’ When the audience-specific solution (QuickBooks) was released, its uptake was immense because it filled-in the gaps that small business owners experienced with Quicken without being as complicated as other business accounting software solutions.
Principle 2: Jobs are stable over time and are solution agnostic
While solutions to Jobs evolve alongside advancements in thinking and technology, the Jobs themselves do not change over time.
Thinking back to our Intuit case study, the Job of, “help me run my business with little to no accounting expertise” has been around for a long time. In considering this particular Job, many solutions exist: a small business owner might delegate the task to an employee, outsource the task to an accountant, use accounting software themselves, or simply choose a pen-and-paper approach while keeping old receipts in a shoebox.
Principle 3: Jobs are functional, with emotional and social components
Jobs rarely exist to serve functional needs alone. People with Jobs are driven to make progress both internally (they want to feel better, or avoid feeling bad) and externally (they want to [not] appear a certain way in the eyes of others).
Small business owners using Intuit’s software solutions sought to feel confident in their business transacting (an emotional component) while simultaneously appearing as though they are running a successful business (a social component). Many other possible emotional and social jobs may exist for them.
Principle 4: A deep understanding of the Job is necessary, and context is key
Jobs may not change over time, but the context within which a Job exists (ie. what’s going on around that Job) fluctuates from person to person. Taking a closer look at the nuances within the circumstances contains key information that is needed to make decisions when it comes to solving Jobs.
The small business owner who hired QuickBooks may have had the time to process business transactions themselves but may have lacked the funds to outsource the job. Another owner, who chose to hire a business accountant, may have had plenty of money available and little time to do the work themselves. The solutions people will choose depends heavily on the context within which they experience the Job-to-Be-Done.
Principle 5: Success in business is the result of making the Job the unit of analysis
All too often companies focus performance on marketing operations or revenue data: how many visits did the website have this past holiday season? Which pages were the most visited? How many customers followed-through to buy products? How big is our email list? How much revenue did we make this quarter? Product managers and executives can easily be seduced into thinking they have all the relevant data and reports to effectively manage performance, but this type of information lacks a certain depth and richness as to 'why' customers use the product or service and what they need and expect.
To draw a parallel: Robert F. Kennedy, a 1960’s American lawyer and politician, commented that the Gross National Product (GNP) is an insufficient measure of a country’s success because it fails to take into consideration valued aspects of a country’s runnings and its people: things like the quality of its education, the beauty of its poetry, and the devotion of its people to their country. He finishes by stating, “[the GNP] measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. It can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
What's powerful about JTBD is that, by making the Job the unit of analysis, you are able to develop customer success metrics that help to define product success in a way that is trackable over time. As a result, business success is aligned with customer success.
Why this matters
Jobs Theory’s principles provide some great points of reflection for product managers and others responsible for product strategy within their companies and organizations. Take a moment to ask yourself the following:
- What do our customers achieve by ‘hiring’ our products/services? How does our offering help them make progress in their lives?
- How well does our offering address the functional, social, and emotional aspects of that progress?
- How comprehensive is our understanding of the context within which our customers use our offering?
- What other ‘fired’ solutions are we replacing? What’s replacing us when we are the ‘fired’ solution?
- Are the metrics we judge our offering’s success by aligned with those of our customers?
Questions like the ones above are what make Jobs-to-Be-Done such a powerful tool. Using the principles of this theory, you can reframe the effectiveness of your offerings from an internal company perspective to that of an external customer perspective; doing so will shed light on areas where your products, services, and processes can be refashioned and reimagined. This strategy has been employed by many companies over decades to deliver more value to customers and, as a result, reap both greater profits and increase their brand loyalty.
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If you are interested in talking to one of our research and design consultants about how Jobs-to-be-Done can help your digital product design and strategic planning, email us at info@spatialrd.com.
Spatial Research and Design is a leader in providing human-centred design solutions to support innovation in large organizations.
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Continue learning about Jobs Theory
This is article 2 / 5 in a series on Jobs-to-Be-Done:
Article #1: A Brief Introduction to Jobs-to-Be-Done
Article #2: The Principles of Jobs Theory
Article #3: What Jobs Theory Reveals About Your Competitive Landscape
Article #4: Jobs Theory and the Four Forces of Progress
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