The Jobs To Be Done Playbook. Jim Kalbach
I asked myself, what is the core job any business strives to get done? Peter Drucker reminds us of a good answer: “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer... the business enterprise has two—and only these two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.”
In other words, businesses exist to create value—value as perceived by customers in satisfying needs (innovation) and value for the company by staying profitable (go-to-market).
From this perspective, I organized the techniques, or plays, in this book around the five stages in providing solutions that customers find valuable:
• Discover value: Find the right problem to solve for the people you serve.
• Define value: Set the direction for addressing the problem you’ve identified.
• Design value: Create solutions that are desirable, viable, and useful.
• Deliver value: Present the solution to the market in a successful business model.
• (Re)develop value: Continue to innovate and grow the business.
Figure I.1 illustrates how these stages come together in an iterative motion.
At the center is the core objective: develop an offering that people will value. To do that, organizations have to first discover and define what they believe customers value. This includes primary research and investigation, along with modeling customer behavior and finding the right opportunities. The left side of the diagram represents the innovation imperative that Drucker mentions.
FIGURE I.1 Providing solutions that customers value is an ongoing process between innovation and go-to-market activities.
The right side represents all the activities an organization does to create solutions and introduce them to a market. This begins with the design of the offering, which then must be delivered to the consumer. It includes everything from conception to planning and marketing to selling.
The cycle repeats: generating business and customer value is about constantly redeveloping your offering. That which is differentiated today will become table stakes tomorrow, and businesses have to constantly reinvent themselves. JTBD provides a consistent way to do that throughout an organization.
Note that this model is not intended to represent a process—rather, it reflects different modes of thinking and operation. A given business will be in all stages at the same time. It’s also important to keep in mind that I’m using this model to organize the various plays of JTBD, not as a practical framework of any kind.
After the book introduces JTBD, each of these stages is handled in a separate chapter. I select several plays to illustrate how JTBD can be applied within each mode of thinking. The last chapter brings plays together in methods or “recipes” you can use in different situations.
Who This Book Is For
Most distinctions between strategy and execution are meaningless. Judgment calls happen at all levels of an organization in a cascade of decision-making. In modern knowledge-worker-based companies, strategy isn’t confined to the upper echelons only—it happens throughout the enterprise. Managers and individual contributors alike need to be aligned to the same perspective, and everyone contributes to providing solutions that customers will value. JTBD provides a North Star to follow.
The CEO of a company, for instance, could look at customer JTBD to inform strategy. The director of a product line could leverage JTBD to prioritize development. A marketer could use JTBD to help shape messages. Support agents could use JTBD to solve customer issues in a consistent way. There are few parts of an organization that wouldn’t benefit from JTBD thinking.
This book is ultimately for change makers and transformation agents inside of companies looking to shift focus toward a customer-centric perspective. It’s suited for managers and thought leaders seeking internal alignment around solving customer problems and addressing unmet needs.
More specifically, this book is for people who have limited resources and would like to use JTBD in a lightweight manner. You don’t have to hire expensive consultants or execute lengthy, costly projects to benefit from jobs thinking. The techniques presented here reflect a simple view of JTBD so that you can get started right away.
CHAPTER 1 Understanding Jobs to Be Done
IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU WILL LEARN:
• How definitions of JTBD vary
• The origins of JTBD theory and practice
• What divergent schools of thought exist
• The core principles of JTBD
I’ve done a fair number of field interviews over the years—enough that I don’t remember them all. But one stands out that I’ll never forget. It wasn’t what happened during the session that was memorable, but what happened afterward.
I went with the head of marketing for the company where I was consulting to interview a professional in our domain at her workplace. There she was, buried in a pile of folders, with calculators and calendars all around. I focused the discussion not on our product, but on understanding how she worked in general. By all accounts, it was a normal interview, or so I thought.
However, once we left the office building, the marketing person turned to me and said in a dry tone, “Our customers don’t need our product.” For all of the market research he’d done, he never had received that kind of firsthand insight. He hadn’t considered what actually happened on the other end of his offering nor asked people how they thought about their process or needs.
From one single interview, my colleague was already thinking differently. And that was just a start. Imagine what we were able to uncover after a dozen more interviews. It turned out that our offering wasn’t as important to our customers’ needs as we thought. We weren’t in their critical path. The company eventually learned that they had to find new ways to serve customers.
My experience reflects a key challenge: Had our head of marketing not witnessed the customer’s problem firsthand, he wouldn’t have had the same revelation he did about their needs. But not everyone in a company will get that chance. Indeed, most won’t. So how, then, can we consistently translate insights about human needs into actionable intelligence?
Imprecise concepts like desires and emotions are hard to measure and quantify. Seeking to gain empathy, while well intended, lacks a clear beginning or end. It’s no wonder that companies gravitate toward predictable and reliable research on market size and customer demographics. But traditional methods miss important, qualitative insight into why people act as they do.
JTBD provides a way to understand, classify, and organize otherwise irregular feedback. It not only directs you to look at your markets differently, but it also provides a clear and stable unit of analysis: the job. JTBD lets you find the patterns that matter the most, taking the fuzziness out of the fuzzy front end of innovation.
Think of JTBD as an engine of inquiry that informs capabilities across departments—from innovation and strategy to product design and development to marketing and customer support. Having a common aim—understanding the core job and its related emotions and aspirations—is a necessary precursor to having aligned teams and efforts.
Defining JTBD
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