The Origins of Jobs-To-Be-Done
What is jobs-to-be-done?
Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) is a framework or approach used by designers to help them understand the problems that people face, the goals they are trying to achieve, the jobs they are trying to get done.
By understanding these jobs and understanding their priority for customers, companies can identify where human goals are not being satisfied by existing solutions and use this knowledge to shape new innovative solutions.
There are some overlaps with other approaches used by designers, such as Design Thinking. However, it’s a bit different from Design Thinking because rather than focusing on the customer ‘needs’, JTBD focuses more on the customers ‘jobs’ outcomes that people are trying to achieve.
Jobs as the unit of analysis
Within this framework, the unit of analysis is no longer the customer or the product, it’s the core functional ‘job’ the customer is trying to get done. From this perspective:
- Customers aren’t buyers, they are job executors.
- Markets are defined as groups of people trying to get a job done.
- Needs are the metrics customers use to measure success when getting a job done.
- Competitors are any solution being used to get the job done.
- Customer segments are based on how customers struggle differently to get a job done.
- Good designs enable customers to get their jobs done better, faster and more efficiently.
The origins of jobs-to-be-done
In order to understand this approach, let’s dig into the history of the idea. There are a number of streams that have fed into the contemporary idea of jobs-to-be-done. We’ll look at each of these in turn.
Stream 1: Marketing and business strategy
In the early 1980s, one of the founding thinkers of marketing Theodore Levitt wrote “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole”. He argued that customers are not looking for a product — they are looking for a solution. This influential quote has graced many boardroom slide presentations, influencing companies to think deeper about their core purpose. Do they exist to make a product? Or do they exist to enable the customer to achieve some underlying goal? Companies that look at the underlying human needs, goals and jobs vastly increase their chance of long-term, sustainable profit.
This line of thought runs through the history of marketing and business strategy to the highly influential Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen. It was Christensen who first coined the term ‘jobs-to-be-done’ in his 2003 book “The Innovator Solution”. (A follow-up to his legendary study of disruptive innovation is “The Innovators Dilemma”.)
He developed this idea in a later book “Competing Against Luck” where he wrote “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…The functional, emotional, and social dimensions of the jobs that customers need to get done constitute the circumstances in which they buy”.
At this point, JTBD was not a fully-fledged theory or methodology. However, these words were to spur a number of thinkers to look for a way to develop this into a methodology that could be used (and monetized) to drive innovation.
Stream 2: Human-computer interaction and interaction design
Since the earliest days of computer science in the mid-twentieth century, there have been psychologists, ergonomists and computer scientists who have sought to understand better the interactions of humans with computers. Numerous methodologies have arisen within this discipline (collectively known as Human-Computer Interaction, or HCI) which enable researchers and designers to understand software design requirements or analyse an interaction in a scientific way. These includes methods such as task analysis, root cause analysis, cognitive task analysis, goal-directed design etc. All these methods have a common theme that human behaviour can only be understood within the context of the end-goals that a person is trying to achieve.
One of the leading thinkers in the field of HCI, Don Norman, wrote in depth in his 1988 book “The Design of Everyday Things”, about the importance of considering the JTBD (without using that language): “Most innovation is done as an incremental enhancement of existing products. What about the radical ideas, ones that introduce new product categories to the marketplace? These come about by reconsidering the goals, and always asking what the real goal is: what is called the root cause analysis.”
Stream 3: Outcomes driven design
Shortly after Don Norman wrote The Design of Everyday Things, Anthony Ulwick (an ex-IBM product planner) founded the product strategy company Strategyn. Ulwick and his team focused on developing reusable methodologies that could help companies innovate.
In 2005 he launched ‘Outcomes-Driven Innovation’ and published the book ‘What Customers Want”. He argues in his book that customers have desired outcomes they are seeking from a product. Outcomes are “an important benefit a customer would like to receive from the strategy, plan or decision that is being contemplated by them.” Shortly after Christensen coined the term ‘job-to-be-done’, Ulwick and his firm began developing their outcomes driven approach in a new direction. In the years since, they have developed a comprehensive systemic methodology for innovation which they call ‘the jobs-to-be-done’ method.
Kick-back from HCI and UX Design
As the JTBD way of thinking and in particular Ulwick’s approach become mainstream, many within the HCI community spoke up and claimed that they had already been doing this for a long time.
Jared Spool, author of Website Usability (1997) wrote, “JTBD is just over-simplified task analysis re-invented by business professors…It’s a gimmick…to get people who have ignored their users to pay attention to them.”
Meanwhile Alan Cooper, author of early interaction design handbook “About Face, The Essential of Interaction Design (1995)” and creator of “Goal Directed Design” wrote, “Aha, you have divined my secret. I copied JTBD 25 years before they existed. I even accidently named my process ‘Goal Directed Design.’”
Mixing back in marketing concepts: The jobs to be done ‘progress’ perspective
While UX designers were getting upset about the JTBD approach, other individuals such as Bob Moesta and lan Klement attempted to re-focus the JTBD conversation away from particular tasks (such as drilling holes) and more towards the higher level drivers of behaviour: our purpose in life and the progress that we are making towards those goals, such as furnishing our home to create a sense of wellbeing.
These thinkers were more influenced by modern marketing theories that discuss human consumption behaviour in terms of our sense of purpose and our drives for self-fulfilment (see especially Self-Expansion Theory — Aron et al 1986 and Social Exchange Theory — Fiske 1992).
While some of the JTBD community claimed this missed the point and tried to focus back on specific jobs, other writers such as Jim Kalbach, have since tried to reintegrate this way of thinking into the original task-based approach.
Our next article ‘How to do jobs-to-be-done’ (also written by James Laurie) discusses how JTBD can be integrated into our work. Drawing mainly from Ulwick’s Outcome Driven Innovation methodology it also includes other strands of the JTBD approach.
