Our Approach: Jobs to be Done

Customers don’t want your product

They want a world where their lives are improved. They want to save time, to feel better, to do more, to achieve more. Everything is competing for their attention, but their lives are already 100% full. To adopt a new way of doing things, they need to let go of the old way. In a digital world this is even more prominent; your next customer is only 3 clicks away from choosing you or something else.

To win we need to decode customer behaviour with a new approach.

Deeply understand your customers’ Jobs to Be Done

Success in the digital generation does not require more information. It requires better intelligence. It means you need to cut through the noise to understand what is most important, most insightful and most relevant so you can act quicker and make better decisions.

The root of customer motivation lies in the Job to Be Done. By identifying your customers’ jobs, and placing these at the centre of your business strategy you will create the kind of clarity and alignment that previous frameworks or models have been unable to accomplish.

You will avoid the common pitfalls of traditional customer research

Observe more

Observing how customers have behaved is more insightful and predictive than asking them what they will do.

Avoid false positives

Customer feedback on product concepts often yields false positives; liking an idea doesn’t mean a customer will buy it in the real world.

Segment better

Demographics, personas or segments are less targetable and less relevant than customer Jobs which are a better way of segmenting your users.

Inform branding

Your brand is a visual and verbal result of how you uniquely serve your customers’ Jobs to Be Done; customer informs brand development not the other way around.

Focus on recent buyers

Focus on recent buyers (of yours or competitor products) is significantly more tangible than assessing the entire addressable audience which includes distant targets that are ‘switched off’ to your market currently.

How do you identify these customer Jobs?

Stop asking for feedback. Instead have one-on-one conversations with your existing and target customers. Ask the right types of questions, dig deeper and the conversation will gradually reveal the Job to Be Done at the core of of that person’s buying decisions.

Define the competition from a customer perspective

Your competitors are not limited to other products like yours. Your competitors include anything a customer uses to solve their job today. This includes solutions that sit outside your category entirely.

People don’t want a bank 

People don’t want a fitness monitor 

Businesses don’t want an accountant 

Compete for Jobs

The first step is recognising that we are not competing for customers. We are competing to be chosen for one or more of their Jobs to Be Done.

Reinvent yourself

Many great brands of our time have become obsolete, not because their product quality declined but because customers found better ways to solve their Job to Be Done. Customer-led innovation and a relentless focus on the Job not the product can help brands avoid product failures and stay relevant for decades to come. Even if it means reinventing yourself.

Build the future

Today, there are still thousands of customer Jobs that are underserved by the existing market of products and services.

‍The future is up for grabs.

Map out the forces influencing customers in a buying journey

You have your list of your customers’ Jobs to Be Done, now what?

The Job to Be Done itself is only the beginning. The ‘Four Forces’ framework helps to unpick the buyers journey from the first trigger to final purchase. Understand what forces are influencing a customer in your market so you can understand why they chose you, or another solution.

How a customer makes progress (demand generation)

Stopping a customer from making progress (demand reduction)

Spot growth opportunities using our formula

There may be thousands of customer Jobs out there, but there are also thousands of products competing for their attention. In recent years we have seen relatively unknown brands rise to almost overnight fame by targeting underserved customer Jobs. We have started to see a shift from classic brand-led marketing to more Jobs-led product marketing.

The key to growth is in identifying the still underserved Jobs to Be Done of your customers, and building solutions and end to end experiences that serve that Job really well.

How do you identify and prioritise the growth opportunities for your business?

Customer-led growth formula

CUSTOMER JOB

MARKET CAPABILITY

CUSTOMER JOB

Size of Job + Customer motivation

MARKET CAPABILITY

Competitive coverage + Business capability

Optimise your product marketing strategy

The Jobs to Be Done framework is a great tool for product marketers. Insights from a phase of JTBD focused research can help inform audience definition, channel strategy and marketing messaging with an aim to improve conversion and acquisition to help you scale.

Spend time with customers

Watch interviews with existing and target customers so you can understand how they describe your product and what it does.

Speak in their language

Speak in your customers’ language, tie all product benefits and features back to how well they help to solve the customer Job to Be Done.

Help them overcome barriers

Identify the barriers to purchase that you can help overcome through reviews, website testimonials, FAQs or support.

Test. Test. Test.

A/B test new messaging with variations on ads or landing page copy to identify the messaging that generates the highest CTR (click through rates) and conversions in the real world.

Build products and experiences customers will love

Customer-led innovation helps us build products customers will love, instead of trying to find customers for products we have already built. We work backwards from the customer need to ideate and build prototypes that can be tested and validated through iterative customer feedback and real-world demand testing.

Find product-market fit

Predict if your proposition will achieve product-market fit by mapping out the forces to determine if you are solving a Job to Be Done, and if there is enough demand (no JTBD and no demand means no market).

Refine your propositions

Refine your propositions using iterative and quick customer research rounds that reveal remaining friction that stops a customer understanding the proposition.

Build early-stage prototypes

Take your teams through design sprints which start with the customer Job and end with an early stage prototype and proposition that has been user tested.

Test demand

Launch a phase of demand testing that drives traffic to your proposition’s landing page through google or social ads so you can measure CTR and sign ups and test real world demand before investing in development.

OUR APPROACH

If growth is the question, Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is the answer.

Customers have only one need: to make progress. The progress they are trying to make is the Job to Be Done.