Using Customer Jobs for Competitive Analysis

How does one know if their product is still competitive? Did Blockbuster know that they can not compete with Netflix? Does Deutsche Bank understand what it needs to go back into retail? When will Monzo and Starling become old and clunky?

We use two tools to understand existing and predict near-future competition that products have: Customer Jobs (also known as Jobs to be Done) and Value Chain Mapping.

Short Explainer — Customer Jobs

Jobs to be Done is a theory of consumer action. It describes the mechanisms that cause a consumer to adopt an innovation. The theory states that markets grow, evolve, and renew whenever customers have a Job to be Done, and then buy a product to complete it. https://jtbd.info

In other words: People don’t want to buy drills, they don’t want to drill holes, they want a picture on their wall because it makes them feel better. Thus drill makers don’t just compete with other drill makers, but they also compete with Amazon Kindle, which makes fewer people want to have bookshelves, and whoever invents magnetic walls, so that I don’t have to drill holes in my wall to stick a picture.

Love the Job not the Solution

Blockbuster optimized too much to the solution, they optimized their talent, their operations, their cash flow, and their technology towards renting business.

They were successfully helping customers with “What am I going to watch tonight” job for over ten years, but they couldn’t adapt when Netflix came — they couldn’t turn the ship fast enough, for over 7 years prior to that, they were hiring people optimized to “rent videos, and collect a late fee”. Their major profit line was “Late fees”.

The job of “What do I watch tonight?” or even more broadly “What do we do entertaining tonight?” didn’t go anywhere, but the solution was dead. The same happens now with the rise of Fintechs. If you wanted to help customers with the job “How do I save money” in:

The 1950s: You would open a bank, which would be a hell of an adventure.

The 1980s: You would use innovation of telecom, voicemail, and others build something along the lines of FirstDirect — the first bank in the UK with telephone banking only, and no branches.

2010: You would probably end up with something like Metro bank, Apple App Store and Android Play Store were still fresh, so going with Friendly — Branches was an innovation.

2015: You don’t need branches, you need an app, always with you, always secure.

Point is — at any given point of time, there are a number of innovations, that we can use to make customer’s job of “Having a safe place for their money” better. Let’s say that in 2025, we decide that we don’t really need a bank, and through Open Banking APIs and Open Finance, we would just let people store money in multiple banks, spreading them out to manage risks. Maybe Sterling will fluctuate after Brexit, and our Open Finance solution will spread money across multiple currencies to amortize the risk, we would solve additional job — “Save money not just for use in the UK but around the world”.

If you building a financial service organization, and make sure that your bank accounts are the best in class, the change I proposed would be a thorn in your back, you would be forced to fire a lot of people, and hire entirely new teams, who didn’t have chance to work with each other for multiple years. However, if you keep track of the best ways to solve your customer’s jobs, namely:

• “Having a safe place for their money”, and maybe playing with new ones, such as:
• “Save money not just for use in the UK but around the world”.

Then upcoming changes wouldn’t be a surprise, and you probably already send your team(s) for external and later internal training.

Takeaways

• Keep track of what jobs are you doing for your customer, and constantly, at least once a year, and ideally once in six months — have a session, where you try and come up with better ideas on how to do your customer’s jobs more efficiently.
• People will be attached to the current solutions, they are the fruits of their blood, sweat, sleepless nights, and tears, so invite people who have a less emotional investment, from other departments or professional facilitators, or if you are in the accelerator — try mixing up people between startups.
• Try putting people in different contexts. If you have a director of fax banking, who thinks that this is an important business function in your company, ask them — “If you invested into the company, would you suggest that they have a department of Faximily?”
• If you running a startup or just small company you probably can get away with a simple trick that I do myself — schedule meeting with myself, to go through Jobs to be Done, on the first Tuesday of August, and first Tuesday of February.

Next time we are going to talk about Wardley Mapping also known as Value Chain Maps, stay tuned!

Ping us at hi@nearshoreagile.co.uk, we are end-to-end strategy, engineering, and design studio located in Sunny London, Sunny Lisbon, and Sunny Sofia.