This is article 3 / 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 teams are always on the lookout for competing products. And often they look at their market positioning through the lens of a 'feature set comparison' across similar products within their industry.
While it's good to be aware of differentiating features and functionality across the competitive landscape, I would argue that product strategy should not be based on achieving feature parity with top competitors, but rather prioritizing and focusing on what users value the most.
In this article, we will investigate what it means to assess your competitive landscape from a Jobs-to-Be-Done perspective – and how taking the traditional approach outlined above can leave you vulnerable to being ‘fired’ in favor of unexpected competitors that emerge from different product categories.
Your competitive landscape is broader than you realize
Before jumping in, let me briefly summarize the key aspects of JTBD or Jobs Theory. Jobs Theory is based on the premise that people don’t decide to buy or use products and services in and of themselves, they use them as a means of getting a ‘job’ done. It focuses on how people make decisions to ‘hire’ or ‘fire’ a solution (product/service) based on how well it allows them to make progress and complete a job.
So using a JTBD framework, the goal is to frame ‘requirements’ as ‘jobs’ and dig into the context of user behaviour and decision-making. This provides product managers a way to view competition from a broader lens, that crosses product categories and even entire industries – and therefore tap into trends, workarounds and unmet needs that may present opportunities to innovate.
Example: competitors for home maintenance
Let’s take, for example, a common Job for homeowners: “help me manage the exterior presentation of my home.” Such a Job will have functional aspects (“I want my kids/pets to have a nice area to play”), emotional aspects (“I want to feel proud of my home”), and social aspects (“I want my neighbors to have positive regard for me”).
There are many actions a homeowner might take to complete this job, and a common obstacle that impedes progress is keeping the lawn looking good, especially in the spring and early summer when it grows vigorously.
Many homeowners address this challenge by cutting the grass themselves on a weekly basis with a manual or powered lawn mower.
If you are a product manager for, say Honda, a maker of outdoor yard products including lawn mowers, you are likely very attuned to the types of lawn mowers on the market and the models and features offered by your competitors. Your competitive strategy, product pricing and positioning is likely to be a reflection of the market for lawn mowers.
However, your approach might be different if your strategy was informed by Jobs Theory, which suggests that mowing the lawn is simply a means to an end (having a managed home exterior). Most homeowners don’t actually want to mow their lawn – they simply want the result that a mowed lawn gives them. You would recognize that there are other solutions to this challenge, including outsourcing the task to others – such as asking the kid across the street to do it for $30, hiring a professional landscaping service, or even obtaining the help of a herd of goats (yes, it’s a thing). And you would recognize that homeowners also have the option of avoiding the activity altogether – by installing AstroTurf™ or using specially engineered grass that stays short.
Each homeowner has a large number of products and services that can be solutions for this Job, but their choices will vary depending on their context: the size of the area to be maintained, their budget, whether they have the space to store a mower, and so on.
By taking a broader view of the solutions available to customers (and the context variables that affect them), you might identify and explore new opportunities to meet customer needs instead of, or in addition to, evolving the capabilities of your current line of lawn mowers.
And that’s just what Honda did. They realized that many homeowners didn’t want to mow their lawns and, working within their area of expertise, released their first robotic lawn mower, Miimo, to the US market in 2017. Coming in at a cost of $2500 USD, the Miimo is by no means a low-cost solution; however, it is a game changer. Among its various features and capabilities, it does one thing extremely well: it almost completely removes the need for human involvement. And it’s electric so it’s quiet, requires less maintenance, and it’s much smaller than most traditional mowers so it’s easier to store.
From a Jobs-to-Be-Done perspective, Honda isn’t selling customers a robotic lawn mower: they’re selling freedom. By untethering the human from the task, Honda gives the gift of time back to homeowners, allowing them to solve the challenge of keeping the lawn looking great, thus simplifying the job of managing the exterior presentation of their homes.
The unseen competitor
There is another competitor that companies can benefit from considering: non-consumption – where people decide that they want or need a solution to their problem but ultimately choose not to buy one.
Since customers measure the value of a solution based on how much and how well it satisfies their ‘Job’, it’s worth noting that any solution may itself impose additional barriers to progress depending on the customer’s context.
Since Jobs Theory focuses on the broader context around customer needs, expectations, and purchase behaviours, it’s an effective tool for uncovering the barriers that impact customer decision making around choice of solutions.
Looking again at the example of the homeowner looking for a solution to their yard maintenance: they might consider buying a lawn mower, but barriers to purchase might include limited storage space, lack of ability to maintain the mower, or even having too many choices – electric vs. gas, which brand is best, what features are important, etc.
When an available solution creates too many additional barriers for customers, the value of that solution decreases. In such cases, customers may choose not to hire a solution of any kind, opting instead for non-consumption.
Companies that do investigate non-consumption and solve for these barriers to progress, may discover significant untapped potential.
Here’s an example. In his book, “Competing Against Luck,” Clayton Christensen discusses how, in 2003, South New Hampshire University (SNHU) used Jobs Theory with a focus on non-consumption to change everything when it came to folks resuming education at a later stage of their lives.
For over a decade, the online learning program had been treated as a side-project with very few resources allocated to it because its enrollments paled in comparison to the in-person attendance of a primarily fresh-out-of-highschool crowd.
Using Jobs Theory, the SNHU team discovered that the profile and needs of older students was vastly different from those of the ‘traditional student.’ On average, they were 30 years old and trying to gain further education while raising a family and working full-time, and many still had student debts from previous educational programs. These and other challenges – such as the administrative hassle of enrolling for a program – kept them from making the decision to re-engage with higher education. The pains of making progress were too great, so many of them opted to do nothing – they opted for non-consumption.
According to Christensen, the SNHU team determined that mature students needed just four things: convenience, customer service, credentials, and speedy completion times. With this in mind, the SNHU team completely overhauled the online learning program processes to remove as many barriers as possible. As a result, SNHU’s online academic program saw staggering growth in just a short period of time; where they once saw enrollment of a few hundred online students, they now boast having over 135,000 online enrollments. Investigating non-consumption of online programs proved to be a lucrative decision for SNHU.
Summary and next steps
For product teams working on product strategy or looking to innovate, conducting competitive research using a Jobs Theory approach opens up a much broader perspective of the competitive landscape. Not only does it allow teams to see a more complete range of competing solutions, but it builds a deeper understanding of customers’ needs and usage contexts, which are valuable insights that can support decision-making and prioritization of product enhancements, and even new product development.
To get started applying Jobs Theory to your competitive analysis, here are some questions to consider:
- How do we typically identify who our competitors are?
- What Jobs do our customers ‘hire’ our product (or service) to do?
- What do we know about our customers' context(s) as they do this Job?
- To do this Job, what other solutions might our customers and non-customers turn to? Are they using any work-arounds, cobbling-together multiple solutions, or deciding to do nothing because the pain of progress is too great? What do we know about their usage context(s)?
- How do these non-customer solutions address the Job differently or better than our own product (or service)?
Once these important questions have been answered through research, you can take the learnings into next-step activities – such as creating an illustration of the broader landscape to consider impacts to current product vision and direction, identifying challenges posed by your existing product (or service) and internal processes, sharing insights with the executive team and seeking budget to explore one or more opportunity areas identified, and so on.
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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 3 / 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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