Jobs to be Done — Bridging a Gap
As a student and practitioner of Jobs to be Done, I have become increasingly dismayed at the tone of Twitter and Medium debate over the different interpretations and applications of this theory. That being said, at times it is hard to ignore, sort of like not being able to look away from a car accident on the highway. I appreciate the passion of the participants (though not always the manner of expression), as it represents deep feelings and commitment to an important theory, mindset and tool. I write this article with trepidation, as I have no wish to inflame passions further, or even incite more debate about which approach is best. I am inclined to think that good practitioners of different approaches are able to enhance their innovation efforts — efficiency, sustaining or disruptive.
Though this post will quickly reveal me to be an enthusiastic follower of Bob Moesta’s approach to Jobs to be Done, I have no reason to believe that Tony Ulwick and Strategyn are not able to get results for their clients. Tony’s dedication to bringing a more scientific approach to innovation is clear. I don’t doubt that Strategyn has helped many organizations grow and prosper. Part of the reason I am writing this article is to explore Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) and understand it better. To date, ODI has not resonated with me as strongly as the approach I have learned and applied. However, I enjoy learning and I prefer to not dwell in a world of absolutes. The objectives of this post are as follows:
· Provide an introduction to how we initially applied JTBD in health care
· Seek understanding of an ODI approach to our project
· Explore similarities and differences in JTBD approaches through this project
Our health system hired Bob Moesta and the ReWired Group to teach us their approach to Jobs to be Done, applying it to a market segment we refer to as low-acuity on-demand care. Our experience with Bob and his ReWired team was unique and exceptional. Bob is one of the smartest, kindest and most generous individuals I have encountered in my career. While our Innovation Engine team has a wide range of customer discovery techniques at our disposal, learning his interview technique was a revelation. The process of synthesizing and distilling interview findings was also a great learning experience. Following the interview process, we brought a multi-disciplinary team to ReWired’s offices, including innovation, physician network operations, physician leadership, and marketing. Our three days together with Bob and his team provided a transformational view into health care consumers.
Another reason for me to write this article is to say that our Innovation Engine team has found this approach to be quite helpful in innovation and new product development — not just marketing. Given where we are in our efforts, I cannot detail all of our findings (e.g specific job statements) and results — this is proprietary, strategic information for our organization, and still a work in process. Perhaps one day we can publish our results in case studies, but it would be imprudent from a business standpoint to do so now. And I would kind of like to keep my job!
Our project with the ReWired team was centered on 20 interviews conducted with patients of our health system who we treated for some type of minor illness or injury — e.g. sinus infections, urinary tract infections. We talked to a demographically diverse group of people who hired a range of solutions over the prior 90–120 days — our urgent care centers, on-site clinics, competing urgent care centers, primary care physician practices, virtual (video) visits, CVS Minute Clinic and even emergency departments. Some interviews provided insights into multiple occurrences which later revealed different Jobs to be Done at different times. Some criticisms of the ReWired approach have characterized it highly solution or product-focused. In our case, we had a wide variety of hires. Admittedly, we did not interview people who did not hire any existing products or services due to the challenge in identifying them on a timely basis. I do believe that our understanding of habits and anxieties provided perspective into why consumers may delay a hire or avoid it altogether.
The documentation of the Forces of Progress for each interview was enlightening and we learned a great deal by focusing on our customer’s actual language. In health care, we use a lot of jargon and “producer-focused” terminology. Our work with ReWired really opened our eyes to this and gave us a new mindset going forward. We also learned a great deal about how to draw useful information out of our customers through Bob’s well-known interview technique.
At the conclusion of the work, we jointly arrived at three distinct Jobs to be Done. Each had some variation of the context (or circumstance) and the desired progress. The variation in the job tended to be more related to emotional components than functional. These statements are not structured as they would be under ODI. A key difference in the two approaches is that under ODI “The core functional job has other types of jobs associated with it. They include emotional jobs, related jobs and consumption chain job.” Under the Christensen/Moesta approach, “A job has functional, emotional and social dimensions. A job has inherent complexity to it.”
At this point, I would like to begin to examine our work from an ODI perspective. I have not received any formal training from Strategyn, but I have read Tony’s “Jobs to be Done — Theory to Practice” and a number of his Medium posts. I find the Medium posts to be more robust and a bit more consumable. Recognizing that ODI is patented, I do have to say that Tony has lifted the veil on quite a bit of his approach and I appreciate the time he has invested in publishing this content. Though it is not the topic of this article, I highly recommend that disruptive innovation enthusiasts of check out his Growth Strategy Matrix — a very interesting construct.
After Defining the Customer, the second step in the ODI process is Define the Job-to-be-Done. Under ODI, the core functional job is the critical unit of analysis. Tony’s guidance includes the following:
· Take the customer’s perspective
· Don’t overcomplicate it
· Leave emotion and other needs out of it
· Define the job, not the situation
· Recommended format:
Job statement = verb + object of the verb (noun) + contextual clarifier
So, this is the first point at which I offer a retroactive application of ODI to our project and invite Tony or other ODI practitioners to weigh in on how well (or poorly) I have applied it. Based upon my understanding of the core functional Job-to-be-Done, my draft statement for our project is as follows:
Prevent a minor illness or injury from impacting my life
I drew upon an example from Tony’s book, “prevent weeds from impacting crop yields” for an herbicide company. Reflecting upon our process, while we did not intentionally create a core functional job statement at the outset, the way we identified our project scope and structured our interview process was clearly centered around the diagnosis and treatment of a minor illness or injury.
The next ODI step is to Uncover Customer Desired Outcomes (Needs). In order to do this, one first applies an eight-step universal job map. Desired outcomes are captured for each step. As Tony states “for any given Job-to-be-Done, we often uncover between 50 and 150 desired outcome statements.” Whoa! I will not try to identify all of those here. However, what I would like to do is to offer a few sample outcome statements — again, for input from ODI practitioners.
Tony’s guidance for constructing an outcome statement is as follows:
Outcome statement = direction of improvement + performance metric + object of control + contextual clarifier
Attempting to follow this format, I offer a few potential outcome statements from our work, developed retrospectively:
· Minimize the time searching among numerous care options
· Minimize the time until diagnosis
· Minimize the time until treatment
· Maximize the likelihood of effective treatment
As I read through our detailed report from ReWired, I do see desired outcomes/needs expressed. Our interviews disclosed performance attributes that consumers sought and their “hiring and firing criteria”. The process was different from the ODI process but as I reflect on both of these methods I actually find them to be more similar than I expected. I suspect that if I went back and counted, I would be surprised by the number we uncovered.
Another significant difference in the two approaches is the Outcomes-Based Segmentation step utilized under ODI. This step involves conducting a quantitative survey with a representative/statistically significant sample of consumers. Without going into too much detail, my understanding of the approach is that the survey asks consumers to score or rank each desired outcome by (1) Importance and (2) how well their solution satisfied each outcome. (Tony has provided an example on Medium — see below) As I previously indicated, in our project there was a wide range of solutions for which we would have to survey.
This is a step in the ODI process that I find particularly challenging from a logistics and expense standpoint. One barrier for our team is offering adequate incentives for survey completion due to industry regulations and internal policies. In addition, we would also likely need to engage external resources to identify/screen survey participants and possibly to conduct the survey. I would love to hear from ODI practitioners what barriers they encounter in administering such surveys and how they overcome them. As a consumer, I would find such a survey rather onerous to complete. That being said, ODI practitioners obviously get this done and have had success with it.
ODI has been subject to criticism related to its survey methodology. I’m not an expert in that area. I am wary of 11-point scales and asking consumer to opine about what they might do in a situation. The example Tony provides does not seem to have those issues — I assume the survey participant is reflecting upon actual experiences.
As Tony explains in his Medium post “Market Segmentation Through a Jobs-to-be-Done Lens”, the scoring of each outcome statement with respect to importance and satisfaction yields an analysis of overserved and underserved needs. Subsequently, a clustering process is used to define distinct market segments as depicted below:
This step is analogous to the cluster analysis we performed with the ReWired Group on the numerous Forces of Progress we documented for each interview participant. As such, I liken the job statements and detailed job sheet we developed to the segments that ODI identify. The key difference of course, is that ODI utilizes a quantitative survey process. I would note that ReWired helped us design a rapid test to validate our ability to identify the jobs for a sample of our patients at multiple care locations.
One of Tony’s takeaways from his post caught my eye: “The same person can be in different ‘segments’ on different days, depending on the context in which they are getting the job done.” We noted the same in our work — indeed, some of the individuals we interviewed demonstrated this statement. In addition, I like this statement from Tony in “Jobs To Be Done: Theory to Practice”: “We have conducted hundreds of segmentation studies for companies in different industries and have concluded that the differences in people’s needs do not come from different demographics or psychographics.” Preach it! When I hear statements like these, I feel like our two “camps” are not so far apart and not irreconcilable.
Given my reflection here on the two approaches, I must say that I was a wee bit stung by Tony’s recent January 16th Medium post entitled “Outcome-Based Market Segmentation Outperforms Milkshake Marketing”. My assumption is that he would classify our work with ReWired as “Milkshake Marketing” and I know our work to be more robust and impactful than that characterization. That being said, things have become polarized in the Jobs to be Done community and I understand his need to defend his life’s work and business. Nor would I expect Tony not to position his approach as superior to other approaches.
We have applied the ReWired JTBD approach in other situations and we find it to be helpful well beyond marketing. For instance, it helps us design a patient/consumer experience with care providers and staff that better aligns with the customer’s Job to be Done. We are able to customize experiences rather than provide a one-size-fits-all journey. We incorporate Jobs to be Done into the Empathy and Define stages of a Design Thinking process — though it is not the only form of customer discovery that we employ. While our job statements include social and/or emotional components, I don’t believe that we’ve lost sight of delivering on what ODI defines as the core functional job.
I don’t disagree with a point Tony made in his January 16th post, that segmenting around a unique product use case can leave “innovation opportunities hidden from view.” I don’t perceive our approach as precluding interviews with customers who have hired other products. Bob has emphasized to us the importance of interviewing those who fire our products and hired others. Have we always been “collectively exhaustive”? No, not always, but our efforts have borne fruit nonetheless.
Though I’ve expressed dismay about the discourse on JTBD — particularly its tone — it did prompt me to being exploring ODI in more detail, albeit in a retroactive fashion. Would I use it? I don’t know — I’m not opposed to the idea, and I intend to keep exploring this approach. Time and budget are a consideration, particularly with respect to the quantitative survey process. I assume that additional training from Strategyn would be required. Also, I don’t have a good understanding of how one goes about licensing the process to use on their own. I am not a consultant who would use the process for clients in competition with Strategyn, so hopefully using it for our organization’s innovation processes would not be patent infringement.
Tony’s position is that an investment in ODI produces a level of predictability that far outweighs the approach we are currently using. At this stage (which is fairly early in our deployment of JTBD) we are pleased with the results of our approach, particularly for the situations in which we have employed it. However, this initial exploration into ODI does intrigue me about the possibilities of fusing concepts from both approaches. I’m inclined to think that they are different, but not mutually exclusive.
I can see why ODI could be an excellent way to innovate for medical devices. One of Tony’s first clients was Cordis, maker of angioplasty balloon products. The rigor of the quantitative survey process seems very useful for that customer segment. I would be delighted to talk with anyone who has used ODI for health care service delivery (e.g. primary or specialty care, development of a disease-focused program).
My last reflection is on why ReWired’s approach to JTBD particularly resonates with our team. While ODI captures social and emotional components, it does seem to demote them to the functional components. In the delivery of health care services, there is a tremendous presence of social and emotional forces. The concept of progress, which is derided by some ODI practitioners, is highly relevant. The Forces of Progress framework has proven to be an invaluable tool for many situations.
A 25-year veteran in the health care industry, I am simply passionate about the potential impact of Jobs to be Done on driving a far more consumer-oriented focus — whatever flavor you choose. We live in an increasingly polarized world — and JTBD is beginning to reflect that, unfortunately. I choose to have an appreciation for each approach. I am hopeful, though perhaps naïve, that offering these reflections on our work from both perspectives might reduce the polarity, if only slightly.
Twitter: @Jay Gerhart
References cited written by Anthony W. Ulwick:
Jobs to be Done — Theory To Practice (2016)
January 16, 2018 Medium Post: outcome-based-market-segmentation-outperforms-milkshake-marketing-2eadf3d07b23
November 17, 2017 Medium Post: market-segmentation-through-a-jobs-to-be-done-lens-5ef9242de65
June 21, 2017 Medium Post: outcome-driven-innovation-odi-is-jobs-to-be-done-theory-in-practice-2944c6ebc40e
