How to Differentiate and Win Using JTBD

Two articles ago, I talked about how Jeff Bezos built Amazon’s strategy on customer needs that are stable over time and pointed out how we all can do this. While products and services are constantly evolving and improving, the underlying jobs that people are trying to get done with products and services are generally stable over time. (See the link below to “The Bezos Strategy (And Yours?): Relentless Focus on Unchanging Needs”).

In my last article, I talked about how Jeff Bezos succeeded with the Kindle by making sure every design decision optimized the customers’ experience reading. The Kindle was designed to help customers get that one job done really well. (See the link below to “Differentiate to Win Market Share”).

I also shared some research that found that the one thing that the top 92 new products out of over 20,000 launched from 2012-2016 (that’s the top .46%) had in common: “Every single one of them nailed a poorly performing job to be done.”

You can employ the same two strategies that Bezos used:

1. Build your strategy around the things that don’t change, specifically, the jobs your target customers are trying to get done.
2. Build a winning new or improved product by designing it to enable customers to get an important job done better.

These are two plays right out of the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) handbook.

Today, I want to give you the actionable details you need to see how JTBD changes the game of innovation – how all the pieces fit together.

JTBD can help virtually any firm differentiate, innovate, and growth without guesswork by looking at the market with a “customer jobs lens” and thereby gaining unique insights that the competition is unlikely to know about (unless they are applying JTBD to their markets).

JTBD essentially provides instructions from target customers about where to focus and what to do to innovate with precision and statistical validity.

This enables companies to devise ideas for new and improved offerings that they know are highly likely to succeed because they address the top unmet needs in the market.

By identifying and ranking all the opportunities in a market upfront, and then evaluating which opportunities are attractive to pursue, companies can essentially achieve product/market fit at concept creation before development. This minimizes the need for product iterations, quickens time-to-money, dramatically increases success rates, and drives revenue growth as a repeatable business process.

Rather than stay at the abstract, there comes a time when it’s necessary to explain the operational details. Realizing that this time is now, I updated my white paper on how to differentiate and win using Jobs-to-Be-Done.

It’s easy to read and explains how companies are turning innovation and growth into a repeatable business process and how you can, too.

Email me with your reaction: [email protected].

Does it fill a gap in your understanding about JTBD? Or open up more questions?

Download and/or read it here: How to Differentiate and Win Using Jobs-to-Be-Done.