📓Recap: SDTO Book Club Event 9 with Jim Kalbach

For the online SDTO Book Club #9 event, we had the amazing Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at Mural, who joined us to talk about his book The Jobs To Be Done Playbook — Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs and answer our questions.

Image from Rosenfeld Media

Jim introduced JTBD with the following quote:

“People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole” — Theodore Levitt

This type of thinking about the outcome people want illustrates what JTBD is all about.

The ways to do something and the technology behind is changing through time, but the Job stays the same — like we always want to listen to music, and we keep inviting new ways of doing it. This makes JTBD approach future proof.

Image credit: The JTBD playbook — Jim Kalbach

Jim mentioned that there are many JTBD techniques and shared the rules of creating Job Statements:

DON’Ts

• Reference technology, solution or methods
• Don’t use AND or OR

DO’s

• Start with a strong verb
• Separate objectives from outcomes
• Represent individual’s perspective

Jim shared an example of identifying needs and job steps from research insights.

Image credit: Mural — SDTO book club event with Jim Kalbach

Together in very interactive activity we went through some examples of creating a Job Statement and Jim shared with us JTBD steps to follow:

1. Scope Your Target Job (Where do you want to innovate?)
2. Conduct Interviews (How do job performers understand the job?)
3. Map the Target Job (What is the process of getting the job done?)
4. Prioritize Opportunities (What are the key problems you can solve?)

The attendees had lots of questions that Jim was very kind to answer and we are happy to share here.

💡Q&A with Jim Kalbach

(Q) I’m currently beginning a JTBD analysis on my team. As our first step, we’ve identified our core functional job. When we tried to identify our core job performer, we found there really are multiple 2 core job performers. Do you suggest we really just focus on 1 going forward? If so, how do we avoid neglecting the other necessary role completely?

(A) You can focus on one. But when it’s B2B it might be many jobs and many job performances. So map and list them all out, decide where you start first, then maybe come back to others.

(Q) How might you connect the job mapping activity with a storyboarding exercise to design the experience we believe users want? (I’m working with a team who has never done user flows before)

(A) Before going to the scenario, we create a model and there might be a lot of solutions for this problem. You could create a job story that summarizes, creates a lot of focus, and becomes your proxy. You could also write a little scenario and do brainstorming.

(Q) How might you imagine someone using a Job Map together with a Journey Map?

(A) Job map is not a Customer Journey Map, because in CJM you see them as your customer. But Job map is what they try to do independently from you. Then after you have your solution — you’d have a CJM to continue with the process.

(Q) At the start of a JTBD analysis when you’re defining your core/target job, how can you tell that the job is at the correct level of granularity? (to avoid being too high-level or too low-level)

(A) There are no right or wrong answers here — you can innovate at any level. It depends where the team is, where the product is, where you are as an organization.

(Q) Can JTBD be used in evaluative research? If yes, can you please provide an example of how we might use it in evaluative research without talking about the product/technology?

(A) Yes, I think so, and the metric here could come from human needs.

(Q) Can you please tell us more about your experience with JTBD within the B2B sphere? What special considerations need to be made in your experience? (I work in enterprise products, so I am very curious!)

(A) You would need to look at all jobs that need to be done, the concept of related jobs. You will have many of them and you’ll need to map all them out. This can be very heavy, but once you do it once it is usually static. Then choose where you’re going to start and go from there.

(Q) As UX researchers we choose research methods and methodologies based on research questions and the stage of the product, among other factors. Can you please mention if JTBD is for any specific types of research questions or for particular stages of the product?

(A) We don’t care about the product in JTBD, we want to understand the job, the emotions. For this, we usually use a discussion guide.

(Q) Do you only suggest doing interviews for collecting user data or we can use other methods such as observation where we do not have “quotes” from the participants?

(A) I believe it can be done, but I think you do need to have some interviews there even during observation to understand the Job better.

(Q) Are there any other things you wish you could add to or change about your book?

(A) I would change the word ‘need’ to ‘outcomes’, and ‘main jobs’ to ‘target jobs’. I also might be more explicit about specific recipes.

We encourage everyone to read Jim’s amazing book to learn about JTBD in more detail and definitely try it out in your work!

Let us know how it goes!