3 Ways the Job-to-be-Done Approach Can Help a Business Grow
More and more, I have noticed that the organizations that are most successful at innovation are attaching the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) approach to the front end of their process before Design Thinking, Lean, and Stage Gate processes. This is because JTBD identifies and ranks the biggest opportunities in the target market with statistical validity before ideation. Organizations get three important benefits from this.
First, the team can evaluate and select which opportunities (important unsatisfied needs) to pursue based on how attractive each opportunity is to the firm, e.g., based on the firm’s strategy, relative strengths, size of the market, time to market, etc. Great growth strategies are formulated by addressing big market opportunities with the firm’s strengths. This starts the process of forging a tight product/market fit even before any ideas have been generated.
Secondly, because the opportunities are pre-qualified, teams can avoid wasting time and resources generating ideas that address unimportant needs, already well-satisfied needs, or phantom needs (needs that don’t really exist). This dramatically increases success rates and shortens development times.
Lastly, because JTBD captures need statements from target customers in a form that is devoid of any solution language, you won’t be constrained by current products or services or by the assumption that a product or service is the best way to address the need. JTBD enables management to evaluate and select the most attractive opportunities in the market and then determine how to best address each one. In many cases, the best way to address a market opportunity is not with a product or service, but with a merger or acquisition, a joint venture, operational innovation, or messaging and positioning. This strategic perspective enhances creativity and delivers dramatically better results.
Consider how GBQ Partners, a regional accounting and consulting firm headquartered in Columbus OH, executed this strategy. Their target market is CEOs and CFOs in mid-sized privately held companies. After learning the basics of Jobs Theory, the senior leadership understood that their target customers don’t want to hire accountants; they want to get their financial and accounting jobs done. Hence, we interviewed CEOs and CFOs to uncover all the important and unsatisfied financial and accounting-related jobs they are trying to get done in the course of their work, independent of how they get those jobs done today. The partners were then able to decide not only which of the big market opportunities were most attractive to pursue, but how to best pursue each opportunity.
For example, when it came to helping their target customers “protect the firm from cyber-attacks,” GBQ recognized that the best solution was to acquire a cybersecurity firm. When it came to helping target customers “hire temporary accountants,” GBQ recognized that the best solution was to enter into a joint venture with a temp accounting firm. When it came to helping target customers “plan for leadership succession,” they recognized that they had the internal expertise to grow that practice organically with new and improved service offerings.
By identifying and ranking the opportunities in their market independent of solutions, JTBD gave the GBQ partners the strategic perspective they needed. It has enabled them to continue to drive revenue growth over time (download the GBQ case study). If you don’t attach JTBD to the front end of your innovation process, you may be missing some big opportunities.
(A version of this article was published in The Business Journals, 7-27-21)
