JTBD — What does “Struggle” and “Progress” mean?

Defining a job to be done is harder than it seems. The first step is to understand struggle and progress.

In this article, I’ll describe how you probably think about progress and struggle every day but use different terms and thoughts. This will make it much easier to find a JTBD, use JTBD principals and train others on JTBD.

Progress

In “Competing Agains Luck” Clayton Christensen says jobs-to-be done are about “the struggles we all face to make progress in our lives.” He goes on to say: “We define a job as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance.”

Alan Klement, in his book, “When Coffee and Kale Compete,” says: “A JTBD is a struggle someone has to make life better.” And, “focus on delivering emotional progress (getting a Job Done).”

What does progress mean? Do you wake up thinking about how you can make progress?

To illustrate, let’s start with this JTBD:

Help me keep the basics in life organized so I feel in control and can spend more time on meaningful things.

It’s Saturday morning. You think about what you want to get done today. What’s on your list? Pick up dry cleaning; go to the grocery store; buy some gas; pick up items at the hardware store.

When you finish something on that list, how do you feel? Gratified? Satisfied? A sense of accomplishment? Probably. I think you can call that emotional feeling “progress.” You improved your life because you feel gratified that you finished something you planned to do that helps you get that job done. The desire to achieve these feelings are the motivation to make progress.

It’s probably easier to recognize the emotional feelings and the motivation to achieve them, than it is to recognize that you are trying to make progress.

If you are standing in a long line, you want to avoid wasting time and boredom. So you take out your iPhone and start using apps. Reading, checking weather, looking at the news, Facebook, sending messages. You feel gratification (e.g. progress) because you got stuff done with apps and avoided the loss of time wasted and boredom (struggle).

So we can say the positive emotions of gratification and accomplishment are a proxy for progress.

Struggle

Why do you buy gas for your car? It’s probably to give you the freedom to go places whenever you need to without constraints…a JTBD.

Is buying gas a struggle? It’s more about avoiding a big struggle. You can think about all the struggles (i.e. costs) you will incur if you run out of gas. It directly impacts important things in your life. Getting to work. Taking the kids to practice. Driving to the store to get food. Getting stuck on the road somewhere unsafe. All possible costs/struggles you want to avoid. You want the freedom (progress) and avoid the possible costs (struggles) so you buy the gas.

Avoiding these losses is called loss aversion, something everyone practices almost daily. The feelings of losses are more painful that the pleasure of gains. So we avoid losses a lot. Losses generate emotions like anxiety, regret, stress, guilt, sadness and fear. We are motivated to take action to avoid these feelings.

Losses are struggles. It may be that you are trying to avoid the struggle so you act to get the gains and resulting progress. Or, you may have the negative emotions of loss now. You are struggling. It’s painful, emotionally, so you are trying hard to make progress now.

You are standing on the side of the road, in front of your car that ran out of gas. It is doubly painful because you caused the loss by knowing you were going to run out and not acting, hoping you would make it a little further. A struggle like this, and the associated emotions, will etch in your memory so you avoid it in the future.

So when looking for struggles, you can look for losses being experienced or losses a person wants to avoid. The feelings associated with losses are the feelings associated with struggles. Negative emotions are struggles that we often seek to avoid.

Here is another example. You are a homeowner. Your JTBD might be:

Help me live in a safe and comfortable house so that so I can enjoy other things in life.

What about cleaning the gutters on your house? How does that connect to the JTBD and the struggle?

Let’s start with the execution losses. It’s a pain to get the ladder out (or borrow one). It’s a risk that you might fall doing the cleaning. It’s a hassle when you get dirty cleaning.

The bigger loss to avoid is water backing up in the gutters and potentially into the house or around the foundation, impacting stability. Then there are big losses to deal with. Again loss aversion plays a role.

If you don’t clean the gutters you don’t get the feeling of accomplishment and gratification of getting something done and make progress on having the freedom to enjoy other things in life (the JTBD).

More importantly, if you wait, you incur another struggle and that’s regret. You had the time to do it. You didn’t. You missed out on a good feeling. Now it’s raining and you have regret for not cleaning the gutters. You are not solving for your JTBD….the house may not safe and comfortable. You have to think about spending time and money on water damage rather than other things like vacation!

The motivation to get a job done can be to avoid the regret of not doing the task….and the resulting struggle it amplifies for the JTBD. You cleaned the gutters so you gained with the gratification of getting it done but you also gained by avoiding the regret of not doing it.

Cleaning the gutters is a task. But losses and gains (and the emotions) feeds the job of wanting to live in a safe and comfortable location so that you can make progress in other parts of your life.

We can say you have struggles but your actions and motivations are often related to avoiding stuggles.

Looking For Gains and Losses

Look at all the press that came from removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7. It was all about the loss. In the resulting commentary, you could hear people talking about the struggles they perceive without a headphone jack. But it started with the loss. That is what people usually think of first when they consider switching solutions. What are the losses with switching? Then, do the gains exceed the losses? Netting out the losses against the gains determines if someone will switch solutions in order to reduce their overall struggle and achieve the JTBD progress they envision.

Progress and struggle are like gains and losses. When trying to discover a job to be done, and the associated progress and struggle, looking for gains and losses helps. It’s easier to have a conversation with someone about the gains and losses they achieved from switching solutions. From that you can determine the progress and struggle. You can get more insight into using gains and losses by reading my article about the Switch Decision Canvas.

Gains and losses are the way people make decisions. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his his gain/loss decision making research called Prospect Theory.

When you interview someone that switched to a new solution, you can extract their list of gains and losses. The emotion that comes from that decision, like accomplishment, satisfaction, happyness, avoiding regret, and reducing stress point to progress. Fear, loss aversion, regret, sadness, sunk costs point to struggles. Combined they will give you the guide posts for determining the JTBD.

To visualize this approach, here is a pictorial summary.

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