Jobs to Be Done

While defining the functional job correctly is important, uncovering the customer’s desired outcomes (the metrics they use to measure success when get the job done) is the real key to success at innovation.

While Jobs-to-be-Done is the theory, Outcome-Driven Innovation is the process that puts it into practice.

We follow a strict set of rules when constructing desired outcome statements—for example, they are purposely designed and structured to be measurable, controllable, actionable, devoid of solutions, and stable over time. They are also structured so they can be prioritized for importance and satisfaction using statistically valid market research meth

Despite the available needs-gathering methods, companies nearly always fail to uncover all or even most of the customer’s needs. How is this possible? While nearly every manager agrees that the goal of innovation is to devise solutions that address unmet customer needs, a common language for communicating a need does not exist.

The core functional job is the anchor around which all other needs are defined. It is defined first, then the emotional, related and consumption chain jobs are defined relative to the core functional job.

Emotional jobs define how customers want to feel or avoid feeling as a result of executing the core functional job. Social jobs define how the customer wants to be perceived by others.

Second, a job has no geographical boundaries.

Customers have different unmet needs because subsets of customers often encounter added difficulties that the other customers do not face. These added difficulties create additional unmet needs for that user.

Innovation does not necessarily require invention. Innovation is the ability to use technology (existing or new) to address an unmet customer need.