disruptive innovation
Jobs to be done
The basis of the book is about addressing the problem that a customer has. In this case a dentist, and we need to indicate the problem through questionnaire.
JTBD helps us understand the creative destruction around us by helping us understand that even though solutions and technologies come and go, human motivation changes very slowly. In some cases, human motivation hasn’t changed at all. The focus on customer motivation is the key to successful, ongoing innovation and business.
We can’t attack every market. Which ones should we focus on?
Our video ad must connect with customers in just five seconds. How can we do that?
Which shade of white will help customers experience luxurious but not sterile?
Decide on 3 main points- save time, earn more money, client retention?
It takes !0X more cost to get a new patient
“No business plan survives first contact with a customer.”
A JOB TO BE DONE DEFINED
A Job to be Done is a process: it starts, it runs, and it ends. The key difference, however, is that a JTBD describes how a customer changes or wishes to change. With this in mind, we define a JTBD as:
A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she evolves herself through buying and using a product.
It begins when the customer becomes aware of the possibility to evolve.
The questionnaire should be a nudge
It continues as along as the desired progress is sought. It ends when the consumer realises new capabilities and behaves differently, or abandons the idea of evolving.
Upgrade your user, not your product.
Don’t build better cameras - build better photographers. - Kathy Sierra
Demonstrate how we can help promote their more profitable services
Keep in mind that Customer Jobs describe the “better me”. They answer the question, How are you better since you started using [product]? Humans are proactive, aspiring organisms. We buy and use things to improve ourselves. To make progress. If you’re not describing a Customer
Job in terms of progress, you’re probably describing something else.
JTBD PRINCIPLES
Customers don’t want your product or what it does; they want help making themselves better (i.e., they want to evolve, make progress).
Their choice, time and money?
Jobs were never intended to explain what the product must do. They stand for what the customer must do.
When customers start using a solution for a JTBD, they stop using something else.
Progress defines value; contrast reveals value. See how easily you can answer this question: “Which food do you most prefer, steak or pizza?” Many people find this difficult to answer. An easier question might be, “When do you prefer steak, and when do you prefer pizza?”
Frame the questions.
Producers, consumers, solutions, and Jobs, should be thought of as parts of a system that work together to evolve markets. What is a system? A system is a collection of parts that work together to achieve a desired effect. The value is not in any one particular part of the system but in how those parts work together.
From the positive surveys, we only need to tweak the App. It works as a system
Grill manufacturer Weber understands the idea of producers, consumers, products, and Jobs as part of a system. Weber understands that it’s not in the business of making and selling grills. It’s in the business of making people better grillers. That’s why it offers educational materials, recipes, party-planning guides, grilling accessories, and even a free phone hotline for grilling advice. For many grillers, the JTBD is also about entertaining friends and family with cooking theater, as well as tasty food. In this case, it’s about becoming a better host and entertainer. Weber understands that no matter how well its grills function, if customers can’t use them to make progress against their JTBD, the grills are worthless.
There are instructions and room for feedback on the teeth4life.org.uk site. The Blogs should be directed for the App customers
CASE STUDIES
Calls with JTBD practitioners helped Dan realise the benefits of framing an interview around what Jobs customers are trying to get done. He did this by changing his questions. Instead of “How would you feel if you could no longer use this?” he asked customers, “Can you tell me about the other solutions you’ve tried? What did or didn’t you like about each one?” In other words, he shifted from asking broad, individual questions to asking questions aimed at understanding customers’ journeys as they searched to find solutions that fit their JTBD. He would then investigate if other customers had similar journeys.
How do you remind patients to monitor themselves for health/cancer?
What other solutions did you try before deciding on Clarity?
What did and didn’t you like about other solutions you had tried?
If you could no longer use Clarity, what would you use instead?
The above is to differentiate. So include the advantage of an App over a website. The APP can be personalised and therefore engage the user, build empathy with the customer, which reduces litigation
Ask customers about what they’ve done, not just what they want. Confirm it if you can.
Ask for web analytics, do they know?
Ask the right questions to learn how your customers view competition
What other solutions did you consider before trying the product?
What other solutions have you actually used?
If the product wasn’t available to you, what would you have done instead?
What solutions have the people you know tried or used?
Discover your customers’ motivation through comparing and contrasting the solutions that they consider as competition:
What do the various solutions have in common? What is different about them?
What did or didn’t the customers like about each solution?
What would customers do if they couldn’t use their existing solution for their JTBD? What would the consequences be?
Dig deeper into their motivation.
How will customers know their Job is Done? That is, when do they know they are making progress and things are getting better?
How are they expecting life to be better once they have the right solution for a JTBD?
These types of questions help you understand two things: what customers are struggling with now, and how they hope life will be better when they have the right solution. Put these two together, and you’ll have their JTBD.
The above are too open, and would be part of a discovery interview
Ask yourself, “From which budget will my product take away money?”
Create better marketing material by speaking to your customers’ JTBD.
Focus on delivering emotional progress (getting a Job Done). Don’t focus solely on functionality.
How many Jobs might an innovation be used for?
How can JTBD help you reimagine existing products?
How can JTBD help you avoid wasting resources by building features that customers don’t care about?
How does anxiety stop customers from buying your product? Is there really such a thing as an “impulse purchase, they may delay and buy later. Is there something that is pushing them to make a change now, or are they deciding to be proactive and avoid feeling guilty in the future?
7 The Forces of Progress
Forces that oppose each other unpacking demand generation Push and pull shape the JTBD Unpacking demand reduction Put it to work
The last few case studies made frequent references to pushes, pulls, habits, and anxieties. These four forces work together to generate and shape customer demand. This singular focus on customer motivation, and how forces shape customer demand, is what distinguishes JTBD from theories of innovation and design processes
Solving for customers’ habits is often an easy win. Your prospective customer already knows about your product and wants to buy it but can’t switch because of some small habit holding him back. All you have to do is figure out what’s holding your customer back and solve it.
Fight anxiety and generate pull by helping customers visualise the progress they will make by using your product. Show them how their lives will be better
This may be moving from the NHS, giving their users something for almost nothing
Do customers a favour: help them visualise making progress. Create marketing and advertising materials that tell customers that you understand their struggle for progress, that help them visualise how life will be better when they have the right solution, and that explain why your product is the right solution.
Reduce anxiety-in-choice with trials, refunds, and discounts
Months free trial
Identify any habits-in-use that keep customers from using your product. Adjust your product to help them along.
Don’t sell customers cosmetics; sell them hope. Don’t sell outdoor grills; sell a way to become awesome at making food delicious and entertaining. Don’t sell people drills; sell them ways to become better at making home repairs or to become construction professionals.
Motivated patients improve dentists working life. Engaged users buy treatment, you don’t need to sell
Before you make anything, have a clear picture in your mind of what customers will stop doing.
JTBD doesn’t tell me what kind of innovation I should make or how to build it. Instead, its restricts itself to (1) what customers are struggling with, (2) how they imagine their life being better when they have the right solution, and (3) what they do and don’t value in a solution.
Don’t restrict competition to products with similar functionality or physical characteristics
Confirm that competition exists between products by finding customers who switched.
Continually refresh the competitive landscape with ongoing feedback from customers.
Remember that not every JTBD needs to be solved with a product that customers buy.
This is a case study for nurses
Interviews-Armed with these two insights—(1) the struggle and consequences nurses face regarding adverse events and (2) nurses’ desire to feel as if they are helping other people—Omer
Begin by identifying a struggle. Start wide, and get progressively narrow.
The first thing Omer did in creating a new product from scratch was to identify a struggling moment. He started by casting a wide net as he sent surveys to doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators.
Find innovation opportunities when customers exhibit compensatory behaviours. - YouTube videos for Mrs Collins
JTBD differentiates emotional from functional
“What do people— unprompted—complain about?”
Digging deep into customer motivation reveals innovation opportunities.
You can deliver progress to your customers’ JTBD by offering a set of products that work together as a system. Perhaps the most powerful JTBD principle is that the study of the customers’ JTBD is the study of a system. We’ll look into that more later, but for now, notice two things that Justin did: (1) he created a product (Marketing for Developers) that customers would buy after using a different product (Product People Club), and (2) he designed Marketing for Developers as a collection of videos, reading material, worksheets, and audio material. Justin’s combination of products works together to deliver customer progress. This is an important distinction of JTBD theory: it avoids the problem of unfocused “Swiss Army” products that try to solve too many Jobs.
The teeth4life.org.uk site can be a further resource to help the product
13 The System of Progress
Why study systems and the system of progress?
The interdependencies between customer demand and the producer The system’s four main parts
The forces of progress that power the system of progress
The system of progress is continuous
Is the system of progress new?
Put it to test
14 Innovation and the System of Progress
The customer does not understand the system Improving interdependencies within the system When a system’s interdependencies change JTBD empowers us to innovate
Put it to work
Customers know only what the system tells them.
Similarly, the needs, wants, and desired outcomes that customers express do not represent their problem; they represent interactions between the customer and the system of progress. This is why customers’ stated preferences are unreliable and why customers’ “needs” and “wants” keep changing.
Innovators must understand what the customer does and doesn’t know.
We must abandon the idea that customers have a laundry list of “needs”. Instead, we should see customers as having only one need: to make progress within the systems they belong to.
It all comes down to four points: (1) all customers want to make progress within the systems they belong to; (2) customers, producers, innovators, and products are all parts of a system; (3) understanding the system comes from studying the interdependencies between the parts, not from studying the parts; and (4) each system is complex and one of a kind, so solutions that improve them must also be one of a kind.
Persuade customers to reject their current products by changing their JTBD. A great salesperson understands that customer “wants” come from the system, not the customer.
What’s important are: (1) Does it help you and your team work together? (2) Does it describe a “better me” for the customer? (3) Does it help you avoid describing a product or how someone uses it?
The emphasis on a struggle for progress is why this JTBD model often makes use of phrases such as give me, help me, make the, take away, free me, or equip me. These phrases remind us that success comes from the customers using the product to make progress.
Phrases in questionaire?
16 Get Started Today
Influencing others
Learning JTBD from others jtbd.info
JTBD Meetups
Contacting me
Be a practitioner first. Then, tell everyone about the benefits and some practices.
Great designers will want to understand their customer’s struggle before they design a solution for it. Unfortunately, getting this directly from the customer can be hard.
People are averse to change. You’re more likely to put people off—instead of winning their support—if you try to directly sell them on a new way of doing things. Instead, let them explore their prejudices, anecdotal guesses, and intuition. Then, reframe and massage their stories into a format that everyone can verify.
Here is a way you can put your teammates’ hypothesis into a format that you can all test: (1) How are customers currently struggling? (2) What is pushing customers to need a new solution? (3) Without describing the feature, how will the customer’s life be better once the feature exists? (4) What is preventing customers from adopting a new solution?
Some customers don’t have a hygienist, NHS don’t have time, some want to move out of NHS and give clients more
A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she evolves herself through buying and using a product.
It begins when the customer becomes aware of the possibility to evolve.
It continues as along as the desired progress is sought.
It ends when the consumer realises new capabilities and behaves differently, or abandons the idea of evolving.
Does this describe an action?
Can I visualise someone doing this?
If you answer yes to these questions, you’re probably describing a solution for a JTBD and not a JTBD itself. Remember, a JTBD is not a task, activity, or has any functional characteristic. It describes a customer’s desire to improve themselves—something that can neither be seen nor can described in terms of actions or functional qualities.
WHAT ARE JTBD PRINCIPLES?
Customers don’t want your product or what it does; they want help making their lives better (i.e., they want progress).
People have Jobs; things don’t.
Competition is defined in the minds of customers, and they use progress as their criteria.
When customers start using a solution for a JTBD, they stop using something else.
Innovation opportunities exist when customers exhibit compensatory behaviours.
Solutions come and go, while Jobs stay largely the same.
Pictures took over from text
Websites took over from newsletters and pamphlets
Videos took over from pictures
Favour progress over outcomes and goals.
Progress defines value; contrast reveals value.
Solutions for Jobs deliver value beyond the moment of use.
Producers, consumers, solutions, and Jobs, should be thought of as parts of a system that work together to evolve markets.
The basis of the book is about addressing the problem that a customer has. In this case a dentist, and we need to indicate the problem through questionnaire.
JTBD helps us understand the creative destruction around us by helping us understand that even though solutions and technologies come and go, human motivation changes very slowly. In some cases, human motivation hasn’t changed at all. The focus on customer motivation is the key to successful, ongoing innovation and business.
We can’t attack every market. Which ones should we focus on?
Our video ad must connect with customers in just five seconds. How can we do that?
Which shade of white will help customers experience luxurious but not sterile?
Decide on 3 main points- save time, earn more money, client retention?
It takes !0X more cost to get a new patient
“No business plan survives first contact with a customer.”
A JOB TO BE DONE DEFINED
A Job to be Done is a process: it starts, it runs, and it ends. The key difference, however, is that a JTBD describes how a customer changes or wishes to change. With this in mind, we define a JTBD as:
A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she evolves herself through buying and using a product.
It begins when the customer becomes aware of the possibility to evolve.
The questionnaire should be a nudge
It continues as along as the desired progress is sought. It ends when the consumer realises new capabilities and behaves differently, or abandons the idea of evolving.
Upgrade your user, not your product.
Don’t build better cameras - build better photographers. - Kathy Sierra
Demonstrate how we can help promote their more profitable services
Keep in mind that Customer Jobs describe the “better me”. They answer the question, How are you better since you started using [product]? Humans are proactive, aspiring organisms. We buy and use things to improve ourselves. To make progress. If you’re not describing a Customer
Job in terms of progress, you’re probably describing something else.
JTBD PRINCIPLES
Customers don’t want your product or what it does; they want help making themselves better (i.e., they want to evolve, make progress).
Their choice, time and money?
Jobs were never intended to explain what the product must do. They stand for what the customer must do.
When customers start using a solution for a JTBD, they stop using something else.
Progress defines value; contrast reveals value. See how easily you can answer this question: “Which food do you most prefer, steak or pizza?” Many people find this difficult to answer. An easier question might be, “When do you prefer steak, and when do you prefer pizza?”
Frame the questions.
Producers, consumers, solutions, and Jobs, should be thought of as parts of a system that work together to evolve markets. What is a system? A system is a collection of parts that work together to achieve a desired effect. The value is not in any one particular part of the system but in how those parts work together.
From the positive surveys, we only need to tweak the App. It works as a system
Grill manufacturer Weber understands the idea of producers, consumers, products, and Jobs as part of a system. Weber understands that it’s not in the business of making and selling grills. It’s in the business of making people better grillers. That’s why it offers educational materials, recipes, party-planning guides, grilling accessories, and even a free phone hotline for grilling advice. For many grillers, the JTBD is also about entertaining friends and family with cooking theater, as well as tasty food. In this case, it’s about becoming a better host and entertainer. Weber understands that no matter how well its grills function, if customers can’t use them to make progress against their JTBD, the grills are worthless.
There are instructions and room for feedback on the teeth4life.org.uk site. The Blogs should be directed for the App customers
CASE STUDIES
Calls with JTBD practitioners helped Dan realise the benefits of framing an interview around what Jobs customers are trying to get done. He did this by changing his questions. Instead of “How would you feel if you could no longer use this?” he asked customers, “Can you tell me about the other solutions you’ve tried? What did or didn’t you like about each one?” In other words, he shifted from asking broad, individual questions to asking questions aimed at understanding customers’ journeys as they searched to find solutions that fit their JTBD. He would then investigate if other customers had similar journeys.
How do you remind patients to monitor themselves for health/cancer?
What other solutions did you try before deciding on Clarity?
What did and didn’t you like about other solutions you had tried?
If you could no longer use Clarity, what would you use instead?
The above is to differentiate. So include the advantage of an App over a website. The APP can be personalised and therefore engage the user, build empathy with the customer, which reduces litigation
Ask customers about what they’ve done, not just what they want. Confirm it if you can.
Ask for web analytics, do they know?
Ask the right questions to learn how your customers view competition
What other solutions did you consider before trying the product?
What other solutions have you actually used?
If the product wasn’t available to you, what would you have done instead?
What solutions have the people you know tried or used?
Discover your customers’ motivation through comparing and contrasting the solutions that they consider as competition:
What do the various solutions have in common? What is different about them?
What did or didn’t the customers like about each solution?
What would customers do if they couldn’t use their existing solution for their JTBD? What would the consequences be?
Dig deeper into their motivation.
How will customers know their Job is Done? That is, when do they know they are making progress and things are getting better?
How are they expecting life to be better once they have the right solution for a JTBD?
These types of questions help you understand two things: what customers are struggling with now, and how they hope life will be better when they have the right solution. Put these two together, and you’ll have their JTBD.
The above are too open, and would be part of a discovery interview
Ask yourself, “From which budget will my product take away money?”
Create better marketing material by speaking to your customers’ JTBD.
Focus on delivering emotional progress (getting a Job Done). Don’t focus solely on functionality.
How many Jobs might an innovation be used for?
How can JTBD help you reimagine existing products?
How can JTBD help you avoid wasting resources by building features that customers don’t care about?
How does anxiety stop customers from buying your product? Is there really such a thing as an “impulse purchase, they may delay and buy later. Is there something that is pushing them to make a change now, or are they deciding to be proactive and avoid feeling guilty in the future?
7 The Forces of Progress
Forces that oppose each other unpacking demand generation Push and pull shape the JTBD Unpacking demand reduction Put it to work
The last few case studies made frequent references to pushes, pulls, habits, and anxieties. These four forces work together to generate and shape customer demand. This singular focus on customer motivation, and how forces shape customer demand, is what distinguishes JTBD from theories of innovation and design processes
Solving for customers’ habits is often an easy win. Your prospective customer already knows about your product and wants to buy it but can’t switch because of some small habit holding him back. All you have to do is figure out what’s holding your customer back and solve it.
Fight anxiety and generate pull by helping customers visualise the progress they will make by using your product. Show them how their lives will be better
This may be moving from the NHS, giving their users something for almost nothing
Do customers a favour: help them visualise making progress. Create marketing and advertising materials that tell customers that you understand their struggle for progress, that help them visualise how life will be better when they have the right solution, and that explain why your product is the right solution.
Reduce anxiety-in-choice with trials, refunds, and discounts
Months free trial
Identify any habits-in-use that keep customers from using your product. Adjust your product to help them along.
Don’t sell customers cosmetics; sell them hope. Don’t sell outdoor grills; sell a way to become awesome at making food delicious and entertaining. Don’t sell people drills; sell them ways to become better at making home repairs or to become construction professionals.
Motivated patients improve dentists working life. Engaged users buy treatment, you don’t need to sell
Before you make anything, have a clear picture in your mind of what customers will stop doing.
JTBD doesn’t tell me what kind of innovation I should make or how to build it. Instead, its restricts itself to (1) what customers are struggling with, (2) how they imagine their life being better when they have the right solution, and (3) what they do and don’t value in a solution.
Don’t restrict competition to products with similar functionality or physical characteristics
Confirm that competition exists between products by finding customers who switched.
Continually refresh the competitive landscape with ongoing feedback from customers.
Remember that not every JTBD needs to be solved with a product that customers buy.
This is a case study for nurses
Interviews-Armed with these two insights—(1) the struggle and consequences nurses face regarding adverse events and (2) nurses’ desire to feel as if they are helping other people—Omer
Begin by identifying a struggle. Start wide, and get progressively narrow.
The first thing Omer did in creating a new product from scratch was to identify a struggling moment. He started by casting a wide net as he sent surveys to doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators.
Find innovation opportunities when customers exhibit compensatory behaviours. - YouTube videos for Mrs Collins
JTBD differentiates emotional from functional
“What do people— unprompted—complain about?”
Digging deep into customer motivation reveals innovation opportunities.
You can deliver progress to your customers’ JTBD by offering a set of products that work together as a system. Perhaps the most powerful JTBD principle is that the study of the customers’ JTBD is the study of a system. We’ll look into that more later, but for now, notice two things that Justin did: (1) he created a product (Marketing for Developers) that customers would buy after using a different product (Product People Club), and (2) he designed Marketing for Developers as a collection of videos, reading material, worksheets, and audio material. Justin’s combination of products works together to deliver customer progress. This is an important distinction of JTBD theory: it avoids the problem of unfocused “Swiss Army” products that try to solve too many Jobs.
The teeth4life.org.uk site can be a further resource to help the product
13 The System of Progress
Why study systems and the system of progress?
The interdependencies between customer demand and the producer The system’s four main parts
The forces of progress that power the system of progress
The system of progress is continuous
Is the system of progress new?
Put it to test
- The customer imagines a new me
- The customer searches for and chooses a solution.
- The customer uses a solution to start making progress.
- The customer realises a new me.
14 Innovation and the System of Progress
The customer does not understand the system Improving interdependencies within the system When a system’s interdependencies change JTBD empowers us to innovate
Put it to work
Customers know only what the system tells them.
Similarly, the needs, wants, and desired outcomes that customers express do not represent their problem; they represent interactions between the customer and the system of progress. This is why customers’ stated preferences are unreliable and why customers’ “needs” and “wants” keep changing.
Innovators must understand what the customer does and doesn’t know.
We must abandon the idea that customers have a laundry list of “needs”. Instead, we should see customers as having only one need: to make progress within the systems they belong to.
It all comes down to four points: (1) all customers want to make progress within the systems they belong to; (2) customers, producers, innovators, and products are all parts of a system; (3) understanding the system comes from studying the interdependencies between the parts, not from studying the parts; and (4) each system is complex and one of a kind, so solutions that improve them must also be one of a kind.
Persuade customers to reject their current products by changing their JTBD. A great salesperson understands that customer “wants” come from the system, not the customer.
What’s important are: (1) Does it help you and your team work together? (2) Does it describe a “better me” for the customer? (3) Does it help you avoid describing a product or how someone uses it?
The emphasis on a struggle for progress is why this JTBD model often makes use of phrases such as give me, help me, make the, take away, free me, or equip me. These phrases remind us that success comes from the customers using the product to make progress.
Phrases in questionaire?
16 Get Started Today
Influencing others
Learning JTBD from others jtbd.info
JTBD Meetups
Contacting me
Be a practitioner first. Then, tell everyone about the benefits and some practices.
Great designers will want to understand their customer’s struggle before they design a solution for it. Unfortunately, getting this directly from the customer can be hard.
People are averse to change. You’re more likely to put people off—instead of winning their support—if you try to directly sell them on a new way of doing things. Instead, let them explore their prejudices, anecdotal guesses, and intuition. Then, reframe and massage their stories into a format that everyone can verify.
Here is a way you can put your teammates’ hypothesis into a format that you can all test: (1) How are customers currently struggling? (2) What is pushing customers to need a new solution? (3) Without describing the feature, how will the customer’s life be better once the feature exists? (4) What is preventing customers from adopting a new solution?
Some customers don’t have a hygienist, NHS don’t have time, some want to move out of NHS and give clients more
A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she evolves herself through buying and using a product.
It begins when the customer becomes aware of the possibility to evolve.
It continues as along as the desired progress is sought.
It ends when the consumer realises new capabilities and behaves differently, or abandons the idea of evolving.
Does this describe an action?
Can I visualise someone doing this?
If you answer yes to these questions, you’re probably describing a solution for a JTBD and not a JTBD itself. Remember, a JTBD is not a task, activity, or has any functional characteristic. It describes a customer’s desire to improve themselves—something that can neither be seen nor can described in terms of actions or functional qualities.
WHAT ARE JTBD PRINCIPLES?
Customers don’t want your product or what it does; they want help making their lives better (i.e., they want progress).
People have Jobs; things don’t.
Competition is defined in the minds of customers, and they use progress as their criteria.
When customers start using a solution for a JTBD, they stop using something else.
Innovation opportunities exist when customers exhibit compensatory behaviours.
Solutions come and go, while Jobs stay largely the same.
Pictures took over from text
Websites took over from newsletters and pamphlets
Videos took over from pictures
Favour progress over outcomes and goals.
Progress defines value; contrast reveals value.
Solutions for Jobs deliver value beyond the moment of use.
Producers, consumers, solutions, and Jobs, should be thought of as parts of a system that work together to evolve markets.