When was the last time you decide to Netflix and chill? Isn’t it interesting that nowadays Netflix seems to get closer to a verb, just like Google. When we want to search something, it feels like in our head we’re just gonna say: “just Google it.”
Do you think their success is pure luck? Prof. Clayton Christensen tried to explore it differently. He is best known for his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In his book Competing Agains Luck, he worked with Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall, and David Duncan to dive in-depth The Jobs to Be Done Theory. The book invokes us to ask:
What job did you hire a product/service to do for you?
Let’s go back to Netflix for one clear example of “jobs to be done.” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings understood this point intuitively when he stated that Netflix is competing against far more than other streaming video services: “Really we compete with everything you do to relax. We compete with video games. We compete with drinking a bottle of wine…We compete with other video networks. Playing board games.” Netflix understands they are competing in the “job” market of getting people to relax. Discovering that past statement from Reed Hastings actually makes me understood why Netflix announced their plan to offer video games as part of their service.
Prof. Christensen wrote on the book:
When we buy a product, we essentially ‘hire’ something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we ‘fire’ it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.
Jobs To Be Done is a theory focused on understanding your customers and their struggle for progress to arrive at a solution that solves their problem. What I like about this theory is how Prof. Christensen proposed the idea that to understand the story of customers we need to act like a documentary film-maker. We need to see our customers daily activity, also their social and emotional consideration on the problems they face. People want to make progress in their life, and successful business help people make that progress and willing to pay.
Prof. Christensen explored the Jobs To Be Done theory more than a decade. In his book, he provided various example with details. I like most of the examples because they are from areas that I am not familiar with. For Prof. Christensen, the best example of a school that is getting Jobs To Be Done right is Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), and the fast growing non-profit online programs that president Paul LeBlanc brought to SNHU. In Competing Against Luck, Prof. Christensen tells the story of how SNHU was able to grow its online programs to meet a need in the marketplace for non-profit career focused degrees, and how the school is relentless in using data to drive continuous improvement. SNHU understands there are people out there who were probably serving in the military, raising a family, or working full-time. What they were trying to get done was very different from the job a newly minted high-school grad heading off to a four-year college was trying to do. So it stopped treating nontraditional students like traditional students. With this understanding, they provide a more focused service to help more people progress in their life and getting an accredited education.
There is also a simple anecdote told in this book. The question asked by Jobs To Be Done theory would have warmed the heart of Theodore Levitt, the Harvard Business School professor who immortalized an otherwise forgotten guy named Leo McGivena for saying:
Last year one million quarter-inch drill bits were sold — not because people wanted quarter-inch drill bits but because they wanted quarter-inch holes.
We frequently confuse or conflate the means (the drill) for the goal (the hole). Customers don’t want products, they want solutions to their problems. Companies need to take great care to define themselves by their solutions (aka the Job to Be Done) rather than the product. This somehow reminds me of Gameboy story that I wrote few weeks ago. Gunpei Yokoi understand that kids want to enjoy the games as long as they can. But, Nintendo competitor’s at that time focused too much on the high-end tech in the gadget rather than the gaming-experience the gadget has.
I know it’s not an easy task to understand customer’s problems and pain-points. But, the Jobs To Be Done is a great theory to help us to think deeper while building products or services for our customer. To really have an empathy by being a documentary film-maker and try to feel what really is the task or problem that our customer wants to overcome.
Another interesting part of this book is also on the questions that were asked to the readers by the end of every chapter. So the readers could take some time and think about how they can do better on understanding the Jobs To Be Done theory and how the theory can help them.
The Jobs To Be Done theory also helped me to think deeper in term of personal investing analysis. How well does the business I study understand their customer’s needs? I guess any business with deep understanding and execution based on Jobs To Be Done will truly have a competitive advantage, especially on the willingness to pay from their customers.
Even if it comes from business realm, I agree that the theory can also be applied into personal life. Just like Prof. Christensen mentioned by the end of the book. He emphasized that good theories are not meant to teach us what to think. Rather, they teach us how to think. He tried to use Jobs To Be Done lens to take a look on family relationship on his book How Will You Measure Your Life? He posed question like:
What is the job(s) that my wife needs to get done, for which she might hire a husband?
He wrote that he hoped that by reading Competing Against Luck the readers will also think about the jobs they are being hired in their life.
