The Insight Behind JTBD

The key to innovation success is to shift your focus away from generating ideas to helping your target customers get their jobs done. If you can help your target customers get their jobs done better than other competitive options, then you can create unique value and drive growth in a reliable manner.

The JTBD was pioneered most notably by Anthony W. Ulwick, CEO and Founder of Strategyn (where Urko worked for seven years) and the late Harvard Business School Professor, Clayton M. Christensen. It’s based on the insight that people “hire” products and services to get their jobs done. By “job,” I simply mean a problem to be solved or an objective to be accomplished. When problems and objectives arise in our lives, we look around for a product of service to “hire” to get the job done. For example:

1. People hire drills to make holes.
2. Doctors hire stethoscopes to listen to their patients’ heart and lungs.
3. Chief Financial Officers hire accountants to reduce their tax liability (among other jobs)
4. And people hire your products and services to get their jobs done, too.

Notice that customer “needs” are separate and distinct from product/service solutions. The customer need is to “make a hole” while the product solution is a “drill.” Other product solutions might be a pick, a punch, a laser, or some yet-to-be-invented tool. Regardless, product/service solutions are always separate and distinct from true customer needs. Keeping this distinction in mind is foundational for innovation success. Contrary to popular opinion, customers can tell us what they want if we ask them what they want to accomplish, feel, and experience rather than asking them about product or service specifications. This makes it possible to now discover what has been previous been thought to be their “latent unarticulated” needs.

For the purpose of innovation, it’s helpful to define a customer need as “the functional, emotional, and social jobs people want to get done and the criteria they use to measure success.” Just as Stephen R. Covey taught us that the 2nd habit of highly effective people is to “keep the end in mind,” highly effective innovators must identify the target customers’ end in mind. That’s what we’re doing when we discover their jobs to be done and criteria for success. This turns innovation from a game a chance into a repeatable business process.

Defining needs as the customers’ jobs to be done and criteria for success makes it possible to obtain a comprehensive set of needs in virtually any functional market, separate and distinct from solutions. And once obtained, the need statements can be deployed in a web-based survey to ask a representative sample of target customers:

1. How important is it to you that you are able to (do X)?
2. How satisfied are you with your ability to (do X)?

Those needs that are important and unsatisfied are opportunities for innovation and growth. The more important and less satisfied a need is, the greater the opportunity for innovation and growth it presents.

Gaining this information enables organizations to identify and rank the biggest opportunities for innovation and growth in their markets with precision and statistical validity. This gives innovation teams clarity and confidence about where to focus and what to do to create unique value for target customers. It also aligns all the functions within the organization as well as management and the board around what customers want.

Reveal’s Innovation Roadmap™

1) Reveal Your Target Customers’ Unmet Needs

A customer need is “unmet” when it is both important and poorly satisfied. The more important and less satisfied a need is, the greater the opportunity for innovation and growth it presents. To innovate and grow, find and address your target customers’ unmet needs.

2) Evaluate and Select Which Opportunities to Pursue

That means evaluating each opportunity for its attractiveness according to how well you believe your organization can address it and win. That might be with new or improved offerings, mergers or acquisitions, better messaging and positioning, or realigning operations. Great new products and growth strategies are formulated by addressing important unsatisfied needs with the organization’s relative strengths. That’s what we’re doing here in a systematic manner.

3) Devise Solution Ideas to Address the Selected Opportunities

Now, because you know where to focus and what to do to create unique value, you can devise solution ideas with clarity and confidence.

This is how leading firms reduce risk, change the game, and achieve dramatically better results.