Power of the JTBD Framework
Customers don't buy products. they hire products to do a job. - Clayton Christensen
What is the Jobs To Be Done framework?
The jobs-to-be-done framework is an approach to developing products based on understanding both the customer’s specific goal or “job,” and the thought processes that would lead that customer to “hire” a product to complete the job.
When using this framework, a product team attempts to discover what its users are actually trying to accomplish or achieve when they buy a product or service.
JTBD is a framework, or lens, for viewing your products and solutions in terms of the jobs customers are trying to achieve. Instead of looking at the demographic factors of usage, JTBD focuses on what people seek to achieve in a certain circumstance (see Clayton Christensen's Milkshake video).
JTBD is about understanding the goals that people want to accomplish. Achieving those goals amounts to progress in their lives. Jobs are also the needs, motivators, and drivers of behavior: they predict why people behave the way they do. This moves beyond mere correlation and strives to find causality.
JTBD lets you step back from your business and understand the objectives of the people you serve. To innovate, don’t ask customers about their preferences, but instead understand their underlying needs and motivations.
JTBD is a framework that aims to improve collaboration and communication across disciplines and stage groups. Since JTBD isn't particular to any expertise (for example, product, UX, marketing), it can be used by all of these disciplines to focus team members on the core problem that the business aims to solve for its customers.
Why Use the Job To Be Done Framework?
If you understand the jobs your customers want done, you can gain new market insights, identify new opportunities and create viable growth strategies. Sometimes a good solution for a JTBD, or a family of JTBDs, does not exist; when this is the case, you have a great opportunity to innovate.
Articulating the JTBD also helps your organization go from an insular perspective to a customer-centric perspective. The process of understanding the customers’ jobs helps you and your teams emotionally connect and develop more empathy for the customer, gaining insight into their struggles and successes while they try to accomplish their jobs.
When should I use a JTBD?
Jobs To Be Done helps teams better understand their customers and improve any human interaction aspect related to your product or service. Beyond product development, JTBD can be used to improve business operations and how well you know your customer.
Ideally, you would have run a series of JTBD customer interviews that will give you a sample of qualitative data about the circumstances under which customers bought a product or service and their motivation.
JTBD plays well with other frameworks that your team may already use like personas or customer journey maps. Trying a “blended” approach to learning about your customer can help you make long-term strategic decisions and prioritize shipping features.
JTBD can be a useful puzzle piece for understanding:
What action-based triggers lead customers to buy your product or service
How customers make purchase decisions (or don’t follow through)
Customer doubts during the decision-making journey
JTBD can also be useful for understanding why customers leave you. The insights you uncover can help you sell and develop your product or service for the jobs your customers need to hire for the most.
Core principles of Jobs to be Done
1. People employ products and services to get their job done, not to interact with your organization.
JTBD doesn’t look at the relationship that people have to a given solution or brand, but rather how a solution fits into their world. The aim is to understand their problems before coming up with solutions.
JTBD is not about customer journeys or experiences with a product, which assume a relationship to a given provider. While customer journey investigations seek to answer questions such as:
When do people first hear about a given solution?
How did they decide to select the organization’s offerings?
What keeps them using it? JTBD focus on one key question:
What job did you hire this product to do?
JTBD focuses on the relationships that people have with reaching their own objectives. A given solution may or may not be employed in the process, but the job exists nonetheless, independent of anyone provider.
2. Jobs are stable over time, even as technology changes.
References to solutions (products, services, methods, and so on) are carefully avoided in JTBD. Consequently, JTBD research is foundational and can be applied across projects and departments over time. There is an exception around disruptive technologies, which upon introduction to the market JTBDs can change.
3. People seek services that enable them to get more of their job done quicker and easier.
"Upgrade your user, not your product. Value is less about the stuff and more about the stuff enables. Don't build better cameras - build better photographers." - Kathy Sierra
4. Making the job the unit of analysis makes innovation more predictable.
5. JTBD is shared across disciplines and throughout organizations.
JTBD detaches upfront understanding from implementation. It gives a consistent, systematic approach to understanding what motivates people, which allows various teams inside an organization to leverage JTBD:
Sales can leverage JTBD thinking in customer discovery calls to uncover the objectives and needs that prospects are trying to accomplish.
Marketing specialists can create more effective campaigns around JTBD by shifting the language from features to needs.
Customer success managers can use JTBD to understand why customers might cancel a subscription.
Support agents are able to provide better service by first understanding the customer’s job to be done.
Business development and strategy teams can use insight from JTBD to spot market opportunities.
The JTBD Framework
Job Map : All jobs have the same eight steps. To use the jobs-to-be-done framework, look for opportunities to help customers at every step:
Mapping a Customer Job
To find ways to innovate, use the jobs-to-be-done framework to deconstruct the job a customer is trying to get done. By working through the questions here, we can map a customer job in a handful of interviews with customers and internal experts.
We start by understanding the execution step, to establish context and a frame of reference. Next, we examine each step before execution and then after, to uncover the role each plays in getting the job done.
To ensure that we are mapping job steps (what the customer is trying to accomplish) rather than process solutions (what is currently being done), we ask ourselves the validating questions below at each step.
Validating Questions
As defined, does the step specify what the customer is trying to accomplish, or is it only being done to accomplish a more fundamental goal? Does the step apply universally for any customer executing the job, or does it depend on how a particular customer does the job?
Defining the execution step: what are the most central tasks that must be accomplished in getting the job done?
Defining pre-execution steps: what must happen before the core execution step to ensure the job is successfully carried out?
Defining post-execution steps: what must happen after the core execution step to ensure the job is successfully carried out?
Create your own Jobs To Be Done framework
Making your own Jobs To Be Done framework is easy. Miro’s whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas to create and share them. Get started by selecting the Jobs To Be Done template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.
1) Define the core “job to be done” function. This statement needs to identify the market, as well as how it relates to a core functional job that the customer needs to be done. An example would be “get dinner” (verb + object) “while driving home from work” (context and circumstances).
2) With the facilitator’s help, agree as a team on the reasons and tools your customers rely on. As a team, you want to share a vision about which customers to target for growth, what the job to be done is, all the steps involved in the job, related and emotional jobs, and the customer’s unmet needs concerning the job.
3) Decide on your desired outcomes and metrics as a team. What does a successful execution of the core functional job look like? An outcome can be defined as “the direction of improvement + metric + object of control + customer’s circumstances.” Take the opportunity to discuss with your team if these defined outcomes are likely to be under or overserved, appropriately served, irrelevant, or considered table stakes.
4) Turn your customer insights into actions. After you’ve filled in why your customers are hiring, firing, and facing barriers, you can start making customer-informed decisions. This can include better positioning your products and services, uncovering opportunities to innovate at job level, and coming up with ideas for complimentary products or services to get the job done.
Case Study - Zoom: Connecting Remote Workers
The number of professionals working remotely has grown exponentially over the past decade. This trend has spiked with the onset of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, as scores of businesses have transitioned to telework to limit the spread of the virus. As a result, many organizations have turned to technology to connect employees virtually.
Among remote workers in the US, videoconferencing software Zoom has emerged as the most-used collaboration tool.
In this case, the job to be done is helping remote workers manage and engage with colleagues without in-person interaction, and Zoom has proven to be an effective means of doing so. In fact, the company has seen a 354 percent increase in customer growth since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With 73 percent of teams projected to include remote employees by 2028, the job of helping professionals virtually connect is poised to persist, and Zoom has made strides to upgrade its security and privacy features to keep with that trend.
Got anything interesting to add? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.