[Pt. 4] The Struggle and the Opportunity!
This is a 5 part series on understanding the different flavors of JTBD and how to decide which is most appropriate to help you meet your innovation goals.
Jobs to be Done is about a customer making progress towards a desired future.
In order to innovate, we want to understand not only the progress the customer is trying to make towards a desired future, but also the challenges he’s facing in his journey.
Here too the Jobs to be Done community have a few different ways they interpret these concepts.
Identifying the Struggle
Desired Outcome Statements
In the Outcome-Driven Innovation process (that focuses on core functional jobs), it’s believed that “customers know perfectly well how they measure success when executing a job and are very capable of communicating those metrics.”
Those metrics are described in Outcome Statements with a rigid sentence structure. It is common for between 50–150 Outcome Statements to be uncovered for a given Job to be Done.
An example of an Desired Outcome Statement would be “minimize the time it takes to place a saw back in service when the power cord is cut”.
Note: in ODI vernacular, “Desired Outcome” is synonymous with “Customer Need”
Situation Cases
In the 2007 paper “Finding the Right Job for your Product (2007)”, Christensen introduces the idea of creating “Situation Cases” as artifacts after something that strongly resembles a Switch interview.
“Situation cases generally should start where the customers signaled that they had a job-to-be-done by starting and pursuing a purchase process. The purchasing process always takes money, time and effort. And it entails risks — of not being able to find what we want, or disappointment when what we buy doesn’t perform. In organizational settings, a poor purchase can lead to embarrassment or even dismissal. We incur these costs and risks only when we have important jobs to be done. Codifying and analyzing the stories behind purchases can provide deep insights into the events, thoughts, and experiences that lead real people to spend real money on real products to deal with real circumstances in their lives. The resulting case studies — usually one to four pages — are vivid pictures of jobs-to-be-done and the situations that generate them.”
Situation cases are then categorized and a summary document comprising 5 parts can be created to describe each job (A Job Specification?). The five parts are:
- Summarize the job or ultimate result customers were trying to get done when they hired the product, and how frequently the job arises
- List the ‘hiring criteria’
- List the “job candidates” — other products that were consider to be hired
- Create a list of “Help wanted” signs: deficiencies and constraints in current solutions that need to be alleviated to grow the market.
The article didn’t actually mention what the fifth paragraph entailed. Don’t shoot the messenger!
The “Forces of Progress”
The innovators behind the Switch interview technique use the Four Forces diagram to “understand the forces that are at play when a consumer seeks to make progress (by purchasing a product or service).”
Through the interview, researchers are documenting the forces at play from the point a customer was triggered to make a change, through to his decision and first experience with the new solution.
According to Bob Moestra, “Any struggling moment is the seed for innovation.” Check the interview or transcript to hear him speak more about the ‘following the energy’ and identifying user dimensions.
Clay Christensen also dedicated significant time in his book Competing Against Luck to talk about these forces. He claims that “Consumers can’t articulate what they want. And even when they do, their actions may tell a different story”. He recommends focusing on what customers do; ‘in order to hire your new solution, by definition customers must fire some current compensatory behavior or suboptimal solution.”
Author and LeanStack Founder Ash Maurya has also introduced a related “Customer Forces Canvas” to assist innovators in capturing their learnings from customer interviews.
One thing that’s worth noting in the description of the Four Forces diagram: “when a consumer seeks to make progress (by purchasing a product or service).” This approach and tool is applied in response to an action by our customer. He’s recently switched products. We use this to signal dissatisfaction, and use this as an anchor around which the insights gathering is conducted.
This can be very effective when that’s the behavior we’re trying to model in other customers, but it also severely limits the scope of our research and application of learnings.
Segmenting Your Market
Jobs to be Done practitioners all agree that demographic-based personas are a poor way to segment a market. Instead, the customers’ Job to be Done should be considered.
Christensen devotes a fair amount of time in The Innovator’s Solution to discussing market segmentation. Specifically, he introduces what he calls “circumstance-based segmentation.”
In each case, it’s not enough to simply segment customers by their Jobs to be Done and go after each of them with equal vigor. Additional dimensions should also be considered. In the case of ODI these are the Desired Outcome Statements, in non-ODI projects other user Dimensions are likely to have surfaced through the course of the interview.
Identifying the Opportunity
Christensen recommends focusing on non-consumers; stating that “competing against non-consumption often offers the biggest source of growth in a world of one-size-fits-all products that do no jobs satisfactorily”. He advises focusing efforts on those potential consumers who are trying to get a job done but are unable to accomplish it because current solutions are too expensive or too complicated. It’s important to note that these aren’t people who don’t have this job, but rather those who are getting it done in an inconvenient, unsatisfying or expensive way.
The ODI process appears to address this by generating an “Opportunity Score” — the degree to which a specific outcome or related or emotional job is under- or over-served.
The Switch interview technique runs the risk of missing key insights about non-consumers since it explicitly focuses on engaging with those who have hired a solution.
While there’s no (publicly available) follow-on activity to turn insights from Switch interviews into strategic direction, the “Help Wanted” section described in the Situation Case Summary listed above may provide a foundation of qualitative information to start from.
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Andrea Hill is the principal consultant at Frameplay. Frameplay is an innovation consultancy that helps companies become more customer-focused and thrive in a rapidly changing world. Learn more at frameplay.co
