Organizations that lack clarity on what the real jobs their customers hire them to do can fall into the trap of providing one-size-fits-all solutions that ultimately satisfy no one. Deeply understanding jobs opens up new avenues for growth and innovation by bringing into focus distinct “jobs-based” segments—including groups of “nonconsumers” for wh

“We try to position ourselves around jobs that don’t have competitors,” Whitman says. If a company is looking to change its strategy, that work usually goes to a conventional consulting firm. But if they want help in implanting that strategy, getting large numbers of people to do something better or more consistently in order to invariably execute

There’s another important lesson in the story of SNHU’s success: it systematically removes the complexity and frustrations from the prospective student—such as navigating the financial-aid process and tracking down transcripts—and resolves them through the structured processes of SNHU. This is what processes aligned with customer jobs do: they shif

You can capture the relevant details of the job in a job spec, which includes the functional, emotional, and social dimensions that define the desired progress; the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make; the full set of competing solutions that must be beaten; and the obstacles and anxieties that must be overcome. The job spec becomes the bluep

Historically, FranklinCovey operated like a typical training company. It created content that potential customers, such as sales people, would find useful and designed courses that enabled client training managers to perform their job of offering sales training to their employees. But it discovered that training budgets are highly vulnerable in tou

Processes are powerful. By their very nature, processes are set so that employees perform tasks in a consistent way, time after time. They are meant not to change. When processes are organized around the customer’s Job to Be Done—optimized to facilitate the progress and deliver the experiences that customers seek—processes are the source of competi

Competitive advantage is conferred through an organization’s unique processes: the ways it integrates across functions to perform the customer’s job.

Here is the fundamental problem: the masses and masses of data that companies accumulate are not organized in a way that enables them to reliably predict which ideas will succeed. Instead the data is along the lines of “this customer looks like that one,” “this product has similar performance attributes as that one,” and “these people behaved the s

As W. Edwards Deming is also credited with observing, every process is perfectly designed to deliver the results it gets. If we believe that innovation is messy and imperfect and unknowable, we build processes that operationalize those beliefs. And that’s what many companies have done: unwittingly designed innovation processes that perfectly churn