Diving into the Jobs-to-be-Done Framework
If you ask Andrea, she’ll be the first to tell you — she loves processes and frameworks. By nature, I’m far more skeptical of this kind of stuff. So when Andrea introduced me to Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD), I was ready to do what I usually do in these cases — take the parts I liked, ditch the parts I didn’t, and go from there.
We started with Clayton Christensen’s infamous milkshake story. We moved onto reading blog posts and checking out videos of JTBD interviews. We joined a JTBD Slack channel with some cool European dudes. Intercom put out a great ebook on their experience with Jobs-to-be-Done and we flew through that. We started to slowly introduce the framework to some of our colleagues in Sales to see if there was value in it for them.
There was something about JTBD that grabbed me right out of the gates. It wasn’t some new-fangled management theory or some highfalutin way to think about our products. JTBD forces you to think about your customers, and as a result, your business in a different way that feels so obvious once you’re exposed to the process.
Yeah, but what’s so great about JTBD?
Jobs-to-be-Done, as the name implies, focuses on the job that your customers are trying to accomplish when they ‘hire’ a product. JTBD was developed by Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta when they were both at the Harvard School of Business in the mid-90s. By drilling down on the job that a customer is trying to accomplish, one can more easily understand a customer’s needs and can subsequently design a product that’ll ensure a successful outcome for customers. Additionally, by walking through the process of ‘hiring’ a product with a customer, you’re able to glean insights along the way that can open up business opportunities along the universal job map.
Beyond the job map, my favorite thing about the JTBD framework is the broader view it gives you of the competitive landscape. In Christensen’s milkshake story (SPOILER ALERT), his client quickly realizes that their competitors aren’t necessarily other fast food chains and their milkshakes. They found that they’re really competing against breakfast food more generally — bananas, coffee, donuts — rather than competing head to head against anyone else.
At ReadyTalk, we’ve used a different metaphor to share the same concept. We could list out every conferencing and webinar vendor in the market today as a competitor, but all of our customers have the same job. I have information, you want that information, and I have to figure out how to share that with you. That could be a phone call or an email or hopping on a plane and flying to your office. With that in mind, we’re freed from having to worry about every individual feature competitors add and we can spend cycles thinking about how to help our customers get their jobs done better.
I’m typically too antsy to let an idea hang out in my head for a while without acting on it, so I knew I needed to give it a go. We looked at the backlog of problems we were investigating as an innovation team and settled on broadcast video as our JTBD guinea pig.
But first, let’s talk about broadcast video
So I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but broadcast video is kind of a big deal. It has many leather-bound books and its apartment smells of rich mahogany. It was just announced today that Snapchat has more daily users than Twitter. Facebook Live has gone from not existing to being the topic du jour in social media marketing circles in less than ten months. Twitter has been slowly but surely integrating Periscope into the native Twitter experience. Oh, and they signed a deal with the NFL or something. Services like Blab.im are popping up every day, making it easy to have a conversation with your friends on any topic — regardless of physical location.
As somebody working for a cloud communications organization that sells a webcasting service, the emergent broadcast video outlook is both exciting and a little scary. All the services listed above work seamlessly on mobile phones and aren’t contingent on expensive camera equipment. Put another way, these services are tapping into a market of brand new video producers and consumers — while making it drop dead simple to produce high quality video. We wanted to get a better understanding of what job folks were ‘hiring’ these broadcast video services for.
Jobs-to-be-Done and broadcast video
For our investigation into broadcast video, we started by bringing in folks from across the organization to discuss what jobs we think people hire ReadyTalk for and what free streaming services get hired for. Our Product, Account Management, Sales, and Engineering teams were all represented in our brainstorming sessions.
From there, we moved onto identifying and interviewing both ReadyTalk and non-ReadyTalk customers who were interested in using broadcast video. We specifically pinpointed Blab.im users for our experiment for a couple of reasons. When we started this process, Blab was the most mature platform from a feature standpoint. Beyond that, the features there most closely resembled our current webcasting offering. Though, our interviewees shared their views on Periscope and Facebook Live and that was incredibly helpful as well.
After wrapping up the interviews, our innovation team got together again to dig into the notes. We were able to identify opportunities for ReadyTalk in places on the job map where we already have some strength. Though we already have high levels of competency in the job stages identified, it was through this framework that we were able to recognize new options. The final outcome was a presentation to our Webinar team outlining our recommendations.
The Jobs-to-be-Done framework is great for all the reasons listed above. The biggest takeaway from our investigation for me was a renewed sense of empathy with the folks we were speaking with. In focusing on the job they were trying to accomplish, I was able to get a better understanding of why they were trying to do that thing in the first place. That sense of understanding made it even easier to feel empathetic. Once you’re steeped in that empathy, deciding where to concentrate your efforts is a breeze. You’ll be glad you took the time to get your head around your customer’s real problem, but not as glad as they’ll be that you did.
