Change Your Benchmark and Change the Game

A chief reason why Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) delivers exceptional innovation results is because it identifies why people buy products and services: to get their jobs done. A “job” is simply a problem to be solved or an objective to be accomplished. Jobs come in three types: functional, emotional, and social. When problems and objectives arise in our lives, we look around for a product or service to “hire” to get those jobs done.

Knowing this gives managers a predictive theory: if you can help your target customers get their jobs done better than other competing options, then those customers will be inclined to buy from you. This is the fundamental reason why the late Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, was such a big advocate of JTBD.

“I’ve spent twenty years gathering evidence so that you can put your time, energy, and resources into creating products and services that you can predict, in advance, customers will be eager to hire. Leave relying on luck to the other guy.”

– C.M. Christensen, T. Hall, K. Dillon, and D.S. Duncan, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, p. 232.

In addition to helping us see the world as customers do based on the jobs they’re trying to get done in a specific circumstance, JTBD also asks customers to evaluate current products and services with a new, more relevant, accurate, and revealing performance metric than before. That is, instead of asking customers to evaluate a product or service according to their expectations, JTBD asks them how satisfied they are with their ability to get a specific job done.

The problem with evaluating products and services against expectations is that our expectations are limited to current products and services. We learn what is reasonable to expect based on our experience and familiarity with current products and services.

By asking customers to evaluate their level of satisfaction with a product or service based on its ability to help them get their jobs done, we change the “measuring rod” from their limited expectations to a more accurate, full and robust metric. And because we provide customers with a different standard with which to measure their satisfaction, customers can now tell us about unmet needs that never would have been discovered if they had only considered their expectations based on current products and services.

JTBD changes the game of innovation not only because we can now understand why customers buy but also because it better reveals the areas in which customers are unsatisfied with their current product or service.

Our execution of JTBD projects has enabled a wide variety of clients to turn innovation and growth into a repeatable business process:

• A private jet service created a unique business-centric service with premium pricing for C-level leaders who travel frequently on company-owned private jets
• A recreation vehicle manufacturer up-leveled their side-by-side vehicle product line across nine different platforms and over 70 models
• A funded start-up with an AI-enabled platform shortened their time to get to product/market fit
• An online university improved their doctoral programs and retention rates
• An accounting firm found and captured new market opportunities

What’s your growth objective? Perhaps understanding the jobs that your target customers are trying to get done and how they measure success can help you, too?

Schedule a call with me to explore if we can help you.