Why did we choose to implement Jobs to be Done in Restorando?
Part 1: What problem does 'Jobs to be Done' solve?
TL;DR; Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a customer research framework. It’s goal is to reveal what are the most important and underserved needs of your customers. By focusing on customer needs, companies may achieve a higher level of alignment and impact. These articles describe our experience implementing JTBD in Restorando. Restorando is the leading online restaurant reservation platform in Latin America.
Part 1: What problem does Jobs to be Done solve?
The problem that JTBD aims to solve is the lack of clarity that many companies have in understanding and delivering their value proposition to the end customer. A company can be considered in such state if there is no clarity on the long term strategy (visibility of six months to a year) that is agreed upon and understood by all employees. Maybe the business goals are clear (improve some KPI by X%), but how exactly they intend to achieve it is a mystery or unconvincing. Another symptom is the lack of alignment between functional areas such as Sales, Marketing, Product and Engineering. Each of these areas seem to be chasing completely different initiatives and its hard to tell how they relate to each other and support the main objective. Sometimes, even within the Product and Engineering teams it's not clear how projects connect to each other and why they are being built in the first place, impacting employee motivation and morale.
Seen from afar, it looks like the company is desperately playing roulette, hoping to strike gold with one of the initiatives and move the proverbial needle.
If this sounds familiar, please don't be discouraged! I've witnessed it in every company I've worked for. Once the organization has finished building the core parts of the business, especially when they start by copying the business model from someone else, they reach a point of stagnation where it's not clear how to proceed and keep fostering growth. Anxiety and confusion quickly ensue and promises of innovative projects that don't deliver keep coming in, to an increasingly skeptical and tired workforce.
Why does this happen?
There must be a myriad of reasons of why this happens, but I think that one in particular stands out, and it's our current misconception on innovation.
It's common to believe that innovation is the responsibility of brilliant leaders to come up with disruptive ideas that change industries and transform customers in zealot advocates. Just picture Steve Jobs imagining the iPhone and you will understand what I mean.
This way of thinking is common due to a pervasive cognitive bias called the "mental shotgun", described by Daniel Kahneman in his landmark book Thinking Fast and Slow. He explains that people intuitively jump to conclusions because they replace one problem with a simpler version of it, in order to come up with a solution that matches that problem. This happens instinctively and instantly.
For example: let's imagine a sales manager suddenly noticing a problem "Oh no, total sales this month are down by 20%!". Immediately his intuitive brain replaces that problem, with a simpler one, that may be completely wrong: "Our Sales Dashboard and Tools suck!" and then immediately comes up with the wrong solution: "We need to launch our new version of the Sales Dashboard ASAP!".
The team now receives a new deadline for a project of dubious impact, without understanding why it's so important. In the leader's defense, he doesn't understand it either, he believes it will have a positive impact, and so, the team will fall in line and believe it as well (or at least they say they will). If all goes well, the Dashboard goes to production, usually producing little to no effect on the business KPIs. As you can already guess, the leader is now thinking of a new solution and the team is left wondering what was the impact of the first project in the first place. When things don't go as well, the dashboard doesn't even make it to production because other problems, much more urgent, came along and changed the priorities 180 degrees.
This organizational behavior has been exacerbated by the online world, where products and be changed constantly and delivered immediately, and by Agile Methodologies, such as Scrum, which literally define a role responsible for coming up with solutions and ideas, the Product Owner. This leads to a vicious cycle between the Business, Product and Engineering. The Business puts pressure on the Product team to hit their KPI targets. In order to maximize its chances, Product must test as many ideas as they can, and so they disguise their ideas as MVPs, and they try to fail fast on as many as possible. The code ends up filled with incomplete and abandoned tests, making the application more difficult to change and with higher defect-rate, hurting the customer experience and the Development team's morale. This in turn, hurts the business KPIs, making Business put more pressure on Product and reinforcing the cycle one more time, only with more pain, pressure, mistrust and anxiety than the previous cycle. It's a shame that companies were so quick to implement Agile Methodologies, without really knowing how to understand customer needs better.
Complex systems of any kind are inherently chaotic, which means that it is impossible to define solutions upfront because it's impossible to predict the cause and effect of any single action.
The chaotic nature of business, coupled with our tendency to come up with flawed solutions to problems we don't fully understand, is one of the main causes for organizational ambiguity in execution and alignment.
The solution is to stop thinking of solutions
JTBD is a framework that enables us to stop thinking of solutions, and instead allows us to properly research, define and prioritize customer needs and outcomes. The most common way of explaining JTBD is that customers don't buy quarter inch drills, but quarter inch holes, in direct allusion to Theodore Levitt's famous quote. In other words, the customer wants the outcome the product can provide, not the product itself. It matters not if its a drill or a laser, whatever achieves it cheaper, faster and better will be preferred. What you have to ask yourself is, what is the Job to be Done the customer is trying to accomplish by hiring my product?
In truth, you need to take it a step further and ask, why is the customer trying to make a quarter inch hole? Maybe he is trying to hang a painting on the wall and he thinks making a hole and using a nail is the best way of getting that done.
If our mission as a company is to make drills, then we will always make drills. If we are good, maybe we end up creating the best possible drills in the market, but there will come a point where the product already satisfies most, if not all of the customer's needs and it won't be obvious how to keep innovating and adding value. If we change our focus from drills, to customer needs, the opportunities for adding value are infinitely broader. If the customer's need is to have his living space reflect his personality in a deeper way, then we can do all sorts of things: from writing a blog with advice on modern house decor to inventing the 3M large painting hanging strips that make drilling holes to hang paintings absolutely irrelevant!
Think about that for a moment. If you were in the business of making drills that were bought to hang paintings, and suddenly this competitor comes along making it irrelevant to buy drills anymore, not only will you have lost this customer, but even worse, you will have no idea who you lost it to! You will see your sales drop and frantically start modifying the product hoping to revert the situation, only to make it worse for the loyal customers were already happy with your product in the first place.
A good example of a company focusing on customer needs is Uber. Uber's mission is NOT to build an app that connects drivers with riders. Their mission is to make transportation as reliable as tap water. The current solution to that problem involves apps connecting drivers and riders, but they are also investing in self-driving, flying cars. In other words, they keep iterating the solution, while remaining completely focused on the stable customer need of having transportation as cheap and reliable as tap water!
Conclusion and next steps
I hope it becomes clear what problem JTBD aims to solve and why it's important to solve it. I also wish that you understand the change in perspective proposed by JTBD and how it differs from how we usually think about projects, execution and innovation.
The challenge now becomes translating this into concrete and actionable steps that you can take in order to move the company in this direction. This will be the focus of the next articles in the series, where we will cover:
- How does customer motivation work and how can we kickstart the JTBD process quickly with the projects we have at hand?
- How can we understand on the macro level what are the different Jobs to Be Done and which ones are most relevant for our entire business?
- How can we know how well we are solving the main Job to be Done and how do we align the entire company behind it?
If you wish to continue learning about JTBD, I strongly recommend to start with Alan Klement's book: When Coffee and Kale Compete.
