Jobs to be Done: The new way to understand & know your customer
What Is Jobs To Be Done?
Jobs to be Done is about the clear understanding of the underserved pain points of the customer, this alone is a vast improvement over alternative approaches since it does not rely on luck and avoids wasting time and money on irrelevant or suboptimal alternatives, Jobs to be done is still a young theory or methodology that does not ask about the characteristics of customers, but about the higher-level tasks (jobs) they want to accomplish.
This leads to a new perspective on product, user, and also competition. In practical application, the approach can be combined well with familiar methods, such as those from design thinking.
Until now, the general principle has been that the better you know your target group and can describe them, the better the products and services you can develop based on these considerations. Detailed personas were used to give customers a face and a personality.
The purpose of all this was to be able to put oneself in the shoes of one’s own customers – after all, one is often not even part of the target group oneself. But you cannot simply predict a person’s actions from their characteristics. There are many correlations between a person’s characteristics and their actions.
Another common mistake is to focus too much on a particular product or misunderstand customer needs. Theodore Levitt famously said, “Customers don’t want a drill, they want a hole in the wall.” Instead of focusing on developing a better drill, we should concentrate on the actual problem.
How should you structure your business most efficiently? This is where the UNITE Jobs-to-be-Done Statement and Map come into play. The jobs to be done framework enables you to drive customer-centric growth and innovation to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.
The Jobs To Be Done Theory
If marketers, decision-makers, or product developers want to improve business results, they have to understand the jobs that arise in the life of our customers, for which they hire certain solutions. Understanding who these people are in the wrong unit of analysis.
What we really want to know is what they are trying to get done. Unsurprisingly, the underlying theory behind this is called Jobs to be Done. At the center of the theory is the “job”: a “job” is the fundamental problem a customer needs to resolve in a given situation.
The Jobs to be Done Theory pushes us to understand the customer experience. Why do customers come to us, and not the competition? Is it because we have the product with the highest specifications? Are we the cheapest? Or is it due to our fantastic marketing department?
The Jobs to be Done Theory has three basic assumptions.
- Customers buy a product or service to perform a specific task.
A passenger doesn’t want a ride in a cab, he wants to reach a place. A construction worker doesn’t want to push a wheelbarrow, he wants to move material from one place to the next.
Such a task becomes the job to be done.
- The task is at the heart of strategies and innovations.
Products evolve over time, but the job to be done remains fundamentally the same.
As a result, if the customer’s needs are always initially conceived as the jobs to be done, they remain stable and valid for longer periods. Companies can remain focused on outcome-driven innovation.
- The jobs of your customers open up completely new perspectives for you.
Jobs to Be Done allows strategy, innovation, and product creation to be based on stable customer needs that offer the greatest value creation potential. We solicit customer insights to serve them better.