The Next Normal Demands a focus on Jobs to be Done

The Next Normal Demands a Focus on Jobs to be Done.

As industries and governments struggle to imagine and create new processes to serve the shifting demands of customers and constituents, executives around the world have started using a new vocabulary to describe their situation to investors and customers. This vocabulary has its roots in IT concepts, such as virtual, compliance, security, digital, mobile, remote, supply chain, contactless, and distributed.

Business and government heads are turning to technology to make the changes essential to survival and growth. They want their technical teams to accurately describe how the work they do aligns with these emerging business requirements. There has never been a time with more opportunity for the architect to lead, or a greater threat of failure.

We have to return to first principles and ask: What is our goal as trusted digital advisors and influencers? One primary goal is to deliver the tools that make employees successful and customers satisfied — perhaps even make them happy. In the mind of the customer, as with employees and business partners, the perception of unnecessary complexity when engaging with the business translates as a lack of empathy. It damages the brand and lowers morale.

There are many great career paths. Perhaps you are an architect with an eye on becoming the CTO or CDO. Leadership roles also include CIO, head of IT operations, or head of platform development. Whatever your aspiration, you have to make the transition toward empathy in your design thinking, as seen and experienced by the end user. It is important to grasp the urgency of this mental shift. Have in the back of your head that the C-Suite has its doubts about you. When corporate leaders are asked if they believe that their current business model is viable, 92% say, “No, not at the rate that digitization is happening today.”

Introducing Jobs to be Done

In the past, marketing teams have owned the important function of understanding customer wants and needs. They determined what the customer wants, and then would share with IT their vision of how to build systems that would enable the enterprise satisfy those wants. This equation has changed, and that is good news for architects, or anyone aspiring to the role. Today, the teams in Marketing, Customer Experience, and Customer Support are all reaching out to the architect and working together to understand customer needs and how to build the processes and make available the technologies to fulfill them.

A big, yet addressable, challenge is that most of us who are architects have never held the roles of the people for whom we design and build systems. We recommend running a Jobs to be Done (JTBD) exercise to determine the degree to which your projects result in experiences that customers and employees find positive and successful.

All of us must focus project outcomes on reducing complexity for customers and employees. This is true whether you are an architect, or head of development, or a solution designer. It is the single most important shift for you to make in your thinking. If you are not familiar with the JTBD framework, then you have been handed your first reading assignment! Read the 2016 book by the late Professor Clay Christensen, Competing Against Luck.

What exactly is that Job that the customer hires us for? If we can figure that out, if we can understand what the true value customers find in what we make, or the services that we provide, then we can innovate and direct our efforts with precision. For a business, that means the ability to command higher prices while enjoying greater customer loyalty. During a prolonged pandemic, what you work on now could mean the success or failure of your business.

As an architect, your ability to understand customers today and predict what customers will want in the future will give you a seat at the executive table. Instead of responding to the CEO, CIO, and heads of the lines of business, you come with the vision and the roadmap. You become an in-demand voice in guiding the enterprise. That has to sound exciting, so let’s get started, today!

Now is the time to absorb the principles of Jobs to be Done. When you are thinking of your career path, you need to always ask yourself and your team: Is what we are doing reducing the complexity that the customer perceives? Whether your customer is an end user or someone within your own organization, we know that simplicity and accuracy elevate the trust that they place in the enterprise. The same is true for employees. Are we hitting the mark? How do we know?

Get started with JTBD

Remember that to the CEO, the board, and investors, relevance means improved business outcomes. They expect you to show how your key technology projects fit into meeting business objectives. It is one thing to show your strengths in AI-augmented development, composable architecture, headless design, the Internet of Things, or a customer engagement hub. It is another to show how each one helps employees accelerate sales, or lowers product time-to-market, or reduces service costs, or enables new business models. These all come from good execution of JTBD.

The best place to begin is to join whichever team is running a JTBD initiative in your company. Often this is owned and run by Marketing or Sales, but just as often there are multiple initiatives. What you will learn is that every organization is working to create the means of greater resilience.

For the architect, “resilience” takes the form of showing how the systems that you are designing and deploying make the enterprise better able to anticipate and respond to change. You are making the enterprise itself more composable. You are building for any change that might lie ahead. You are listening to the business and understanding how to translate “meeting customer expectations” into specific initiatives.

At Salesforce, every major team follows the JTBD framework. We will go deeper into specific suggestions for JTBD in future posts. For now, here is a concise overview of how we might go about JTBD at Salesforce:

• Gather up impressions of what the customer wants from us. Poll them, survey them, observe them, speak with them!
• Create a “day in the life” of the customer (or customers since there are multiple personas).
• Summarize what each person or customer is trying to achieve using our products or services. Do this in a very fine-grained way. What role do they play? What is their attitude toward the task and toward us? What is their emotional state? Use a great sharing app for this whiteboard exercise!
• Pinpoint where the customer struggles and where they succeed. Do this across all engagement channels. Make a list of the top weaknesses and prioritize them.
• Analyze and understand the weaknesses and how to solve for them.
• List the obstacles to solving the JTBD issues and suggest specific solutions.
• Test that the solution will satisfy the customer. This includes verifying that the solution will reduce complexity. Check that the solution is cost-effective and the best possible approach.

Conclusion

Most of us are not great at JTBD. Find the companies that are, and imitate them! Show leadership. You are in your role as architect because you are an expert. You know the technology. You know how to lead. Now it’s time to show that you can match up technology vision and capabilities with the best business outcomes that your executives across the enterprise want. Without your expertise, vision, and leadership, your company cannot meet its challenges today or in the future. Follow the JTBD methodology, and put yourself on a great road to success.

Please take a moment to fill out this form and help us understand your role and motivations as an architect more clearly. Your input will help inform the next posts we produce on this topic.

About the Author

Michael Maoz is Senior Vice President of Innovation Strategy at Salesforce. He joined Salesforce from Gartner, Inc., where he was a founder of the CRM practice and held positions as Research Vice President, Distinguished Analyst, and Gartner Fellow. Michael is also a board member at Rutgers Center for Innovation Education, and an advisor to Just Capital. You can also find Michael on Twitter.