3 Growth Strategies JTBD Makes Easy

The only hope that we can reliably create new and improved offerings that customers will want lies in first understanding what target customers are trying to accomplish and how they measure success. Everything else is a guessing game.

Before I reveal the 3 growth strategies that Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) makes easy, allow me to give a brief overview of JTBD so you can see how these 3 strategies make innovation a repeatable business process that consistently drives growth.

JTBD is based on the insight that people “hire” products and services to get their jobs done. A “job” is any problem or objective that people want to accomplish. When problems and objectives arise in our lives, we look around for a product or service to hire/buy to get the job done.

The late Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt famously said “People don’t want to buy a ¼” drill; they want a ¼” hole!” This quote captures two important truths:

1. 1. Customer needs are separate and distinct from product or service solutions
   2. At a high level, customer needs are the jobs customers are trying to get done

This is true for every product and service:

• • People don’t want to buy vitamins; they want to improve their health.
  • And doctors don’t want to buy a stethoscope; they want to listen to their patients’ heart and lungs.
  • Chief Financial Officers don’t want to hire an accountant for an audit; they want to get something done with that audit, such as:
    • Ensure compliance
    • Mitigate financial risks
    • Improve financial performance
    • Etc.

“One of the most important things that came out of our work with Urko was a shift in our mentality from focusing on what we know how to do, to what the client is trying to get done. Instead of saying “Here’s the audit report,” now we ask, “What is the client trying to get done with the audit report and how can we provide good business advice along with that work product?”

– Darci Congrove, Managing Partner, GBQ Partners

• • And people don’t want to buy your products or services or mine; they want to get their functional, emotional, and social jobs done.

There are a number of benefits to thinking about customer needs, at a high level, as jobs to be done:

1. 1. People can tell us what they want if we ask them what they want to accomplish rather than asking for product or feature specifications. This shatters the myth that “customers cannot tell us what they want.” We can now consistently reveal customers’ previously thought to be “latent unarticulated” needs, needs that we thought they could not articulate.
   2. We can now obtain a comprehensive set of customer needs (their criteria for success) in virtually any market, separate and distinct from products or services, and then identify and rank the biggest opportunities – i.e., those criteria that are both important and unsatisfied.
   3. Companies are not constrained in their thinking to current products and services because we have decoupled customer needs from product or service solutions.
   4. Leadership obtains a more accurate and strategic view of the market. You’re not just competing against other companies in your category. You’re competing against anything your customers use or do to get their job done. For example, a public accounting firm isn’t just competing with other public accounting firms. They’re competing with anything CEOs and CFO use or do to get their financial and accounting-related jobs done, such as internal accountants, software, tax attorneys, etc. Hence, a focus on the customers’ job enables us to discover innovation opportunities that appeal to a broader set of potential customers – including non-customers, people who are not currently buying our offerings – but who are, nonetheless, in the market because they are trying to get the same task done that you help your customers get done.
   5. Understanding the job(s) customers are trying to get done gives you predictive power: if you can help your target customers get their jobs done significantly better than other competitive options, they will buy from you.

Hence, the 3 growth strategies that JTBD makes easy are:

1. 1. To grow a core market, help target customers get a core job done better
   2. To find and capitalize on other related markets, help customers get other related jobs done better
   3. To create a seamless and delightful customer experience, help customers obtain the value of your product or service better

JTBD offers a structured framework that helps organizations gain a comprehensive understanding of customer needs, wants, and preferences in complex markets. It provides a clear roadmap for differentiation and innovation. Companies can employ these 3 growth strategies by executing the 6-step process below. Your firm’s objectives and market situation determine which of these strategies would be most fruitful.

Want to learn more? Contact me at [email protected].