Jobs to be Done in action: a real life example
The Jobs to be Done framework is my preferred way of mapping user needs. But the difference between a job and a need can be confusing, so here is a worked example of how I’ve used the framework to map needs to jobs in a real problem space.
The problem: Comparing nutritional value
It is natural for us to want affordable, tasty food. Our food system has become very good at providing this. However, what we want is not always what is best for us in the mid-long term.
Some people are waking up to this fact. As well as minimising price / maximising taste, people may also care about the following:
- Natural ingredients
- Nutritional value
- Environmental impact
- Allergens
- Being plant-based
There are many tools out there that help us compare price, and it is the main thing that companies compete over. But it is hard to compare many of these other aspects.
Mapping out the job to be done
We have been given a high level problem. So where do we start?! Well, my first port of call is to map out the job process.
As I’ve discussed before, the “job” is essentially the task that someone is trying to complete. It is totally agnostic to the product that they may use to complete the task. In this case, we are talking about when people are buying household items, things that they probably buy on a regular basis. So I believe the main job is:
“Buy Convenience Goods”
I define “Convenience goods” as items that are widely available and can be purchased fairly easily, for example at a supermarket. But note that this “job” does not say anything about where or how the user buys these goods (that would be the product/solution) and it doesn’t say anything about what is important to the user when they buy these goods (that would be the needs).
I like to try to map out the job process in advance of talking to users. This job map should be confirmed in your user research, but if you know a bit about the space then you can usually get it pretty much right beforehand. (Note, I’m just talking about the jobs, NOT the needs. Needs should only be uncovered in the research).
I went with the following job process:
The job process is just the main job broken down into smaller jobs. It is still agnostic of needs and solutions. It should be true whether you prioritise natural ingredients or whether you prioritise price, whether you buy your convenience goods at a corner shop or through Ocado delivery, with a written shopping list or a virtual one.
Also note, that whilst the customer problem is likely part of the “Choose which products to buy” small job, it is really important to understand the adjacent jobs too. If we are going to build a solution then it needs to seamlessly integrate into the whole job process if we want users to switch.
User research
We have our job map, now it is time to start understanding the needs. And for that, we always need to talk to users. (For the definition of a need and the JTBD syntax, see my previous post.)
I interviewed 5 people that often perform the main job, with 2 aims, firstly to uncover as many needs as possible, and secondly to get them to rank these needs.
Uncovering needs
I generally like to use “story-driven” techniques (“tell me about the last time when…”) to uncover needs. Stories often are better indicators of their actual needs. People often conflate what they actually do with what they think they should do. So if you just ask them what is important then it will often be different to what they prioritised when they perform the job.
I also asked questions about the 4 forces of product switching whenever I found a scenario where the user had used different products in the past. Product switches are always a great opportunity to understand the needs that really matter.
After 5 interviews I had uncovered 7 needs for the main job, and 24 needs for the smaller jobs (see below). By the time I got to my 4th and 5th interviews, I was barely adding any more. This is why 5 interviews is always a good number, the marginal learning gained from any more interviews is often very small.
Ranking the needs
I then went back to the same users and asked them to perform some quick sorting exercises.
For the top level needs, I just asked them to rank the needs in order of importance. I actually split them into 2: Needs for cleaning and cosmetics products and needs for food items, as I had noticed in the interviews that people seemed to behave differently for different items.
For the lower level needs, I took the full list and asked the interviewees to tell me how important these needs were to them when doing their shop. I gave them 3 buckets: high, medium or low importance. Note, I was not asking whether their needs were unmet or not, but just how much value they placed on each need. It’s also worth noting that I would challenge them on some of their choices when their ranking did not match the actions that they described in the interview.
By collating all this data, we start to get a picture of which needs are important to the users.
Prioritising Opportunities
Unmet needs
Just because a need is of high importance doesn’t mean that it is an opportunity. It is only an opportunity if it is not being met by the market. So as well as “importance” for each need, we need to understand whether they are “unmet”.
I took a position on whether or not they were “unmet” based on what I learnt in the interviews and by doing market research. If the interviewees already had a good solution to their need, then it is clearly “met”. But if they don’t, then we still need to understand whether there is something on the market already solving this problem. Just because our interviewees haven’t found it, doesn’t mean that the solution doesn’t exist (I often end up going back to interviewees to let them know that there is a product out there solving their problem).
Based on this exercise, I believe that I found 9 needs that were unmet.
Spotting the Opportunities
Opportunities are the important needs that are not currently met by the market. Based on this research, I believe there are 5 opportunities:
- Minimise the time it takes to compare ingredients of similar products
- Minimise the time it takes to compare nutritional values of similar foods
- Minimise the time it takes to compare sustainability of packaging for cleaning/personal hygiene products
- Maximise the understanding of the quality of ingredients
- Maximise understanding of the benefit of nutritional values / ingredients
These are the opportunities I would add to an Opportunity Solution Tree.
Conclusions and next steps
You can see how the Jobs to be Done framework gives some great structure to help understand a problem space. In the space of just a couple of days I went from minimal understanding to being able to talk fluently about what might be important to people and where there could be gaps in the market.
Note, this was only 5 interviews. This doesn’t prove that any of these are a big opportunity. But it gives us a great idea about where to start looking and testing. Note, the“Outcome-driven innovation” approach advocates doing large scale survey versions of this exercise to get accurate data about whether there is a real opportunity. However, this is likely to be much too costly an exercise for most to do.
In this instance, the above is enough research for me to move on to solution ideation, risky assumption mapping and building MVPs as a way to ascertain whether these are real opportunities.
P.S. if you or anyone you know would be interested in working with me on it, let me know!
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