Jobs to Be Done

How to get a handle on customer needs is an unsolved mystery—and that mystery is killing innovation. Before a company can succeed at innovation, managers must agree on what a need is—and the types of needs that customers have. The key to solving this mystery lies in Jobs-to-be-Done Theory.

Analysis of hundreds of jobs has revealed that all jobs consist of some or all of the eight fundamental process steps: define, locate, prepare, confirm, execute, monitor, modify and conclude (see the universal job map). This insight is essential for creating a framework around which customer needs (desired outcomes) are gathered. (To learn more abo

A good job map will describe what the customer is trying to get done independent of all the competing solutions that customers are using. In other words, it will be accurate for all customer situations, regardless of the products they are using to get the job done. A completed job map represents the “ideal process flow” for that job: all the steps

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.

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.

Our experience suggests that companies can win with a dominant strategy if they introduce a product or service that gets the job done (addresses the customer’s unmet desired outcomes) at least 20% better and at least 20% more cheaply. This can be measured with high precision and probability when evaluating a proposed concept against a complete set

Our Outcome-Based Segmentation methodology is executed in four steps: First we analyze the Job-to-be-Done and capture all the customers’ needs in the form of desired outcome statements. (The special syntax of these outcome statements guarantees precision and comparability). Next, we field a survey that is administered to a statistically valid repre

Why do you conduct competitive analysis? Is it merely to see which features of competitors’ products are technically superior? Or is the goal to gain the insight that is needed to create products and services that get a job done better and/or more cheaply than competing solutions? We argue that the latter should be the goal. Therefore, comparing fe

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