User:Steve jaques1/sandbox

Jobs to be Done is a theory used to explain the motivation for why people bought products in the past, and to help predict what products they will buy in the future. It is used by organizations to improve the success rate of product development efforts by helping them: 1. Uncover the customers job to be done (i.e. the problem they are trying to solve); 2. Design products to do the job (solve the problem); and to 3. Organize around the job (aligning structure, process and people to deliver the product required to solve the Job to be Done). .

The theory was developed by both managerial practitioners and researchers in response to the "90%" failure rate of new product development launches. Former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley arugued “we need to reinvent the way we market to consumers. We need a new model", sighting that most of the methods we "learned to segment markets, build brands, and understand customers are broken".

In addition, it was advanced by Clayton Christenson as a compliment to the Disruptive Innovation theory: "For years, I'd been focused on understanding why great companies fail [disruption theory], but I realized I had never really thought about the reverse problem: How do successful companies know how to grow? [Job to be Done theory]".

Jobs to be Done is a metaphor for the problem-solving process customers use to make progress in a particular circumstance (i.e. closing the gap between where they are vs. where they want to be). Similar to an employer who "hires or fires" employees to do a job; customers "hire or fire" products to get their job done.

Jobs to be Done is a "Theory"
Kurt Lewin said “there is nothing as practical as a good theory”. Theory explains "what causes what" and is intended to help "frame problems in such a way that we ask the right questions to get us to the most useful answers". A theory must explain the past, and predict the future. Therefore, a well formulated Job to be Done should:

1. Explain the motivation for why consumers bought a product in the past (i.e. why markets look the way they do today).

2. Predict what products consumers will buy in the future (i.e. what markets will look like in the future).

What is a Job to be Done
Customers don't want products, they want solutions to their problems. Peter Drucker stressed this point when he said "the customer rarely buys what the company thinks it's selling". As a result, organizations get into trouble by defining themselves by the products they sell, not by the problems they solve (jobs to be done).

The key concepts of a Job to be Done (''"People don't just buy stuff, they buy what stuff does for them"). ''


 * Progress: A job is the progress that a customer seeks in a given circumstance (i.e. closing the gap between where they are vs. where they want to be).  Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, says that making progress is about solving "the problem the customer is facing, and [achieving] the results that she needs...they hire turbotax to get their taxes done".
 * Circumstance: The circumstance is driven by the context surrounding the problem the customer is trying to solve. The context includes the who, what, when where, how and why (i.e. social influence, political influence, family status, financial status, etc.). Because jobs occur in the flow of daily life, the circumstance is central to the jobs definition and becomes the essential unit of analysis (not customer characteristics, product attributes, new technology, or trends).
 * Dimensions (Functional, Social & Emotional): Jobs are never simply about the functional - they have important social and emotional dimensions, which can be even more powerful than functional ones.
 * Ongoing and recurring: Jobs are seldom discrete events. Unlike products and services that come and go, Jobs are usually persistent and long lasting (ex. people always had a need for communication, consider the products and services hired for the job: pony express, telegraph, radio, telephone, email, mobile phone, instant messenger, online social communities, etc)


 * Customer: A customer is a person who "hires" a product to get the job done; and has the ability to "fire" the current product and hire another product to solve their problem.

Uncovering the Customers Job
What problem is the customer trying to solve (i.e. job to be done)? Customers sometimes are not aware they even have a problem until a product or service is presented to them that changes their lives in a positive manner. Even if the customer has identified a problem, they are not always able to articulate what product or service will make their lives better.

Unfortunaly, organizatiozations don't think about enough. what has to get fired for my product to get hired? They think about making their product more and more appealing, but not what it willl be replacing.

Jobs-to-be-Done is used in product development to understand the customers "struggle & frustration" in closing their gap, and to identify the "motivation" for why the customers have "hired" or "fired" products in the past (to help predict future decisions).

Jobs analysis doesn’t require you to throw out the data and research you’ve already gathered. Personas, ethnographic research, focus groups, customer panels, competitive analysis, and so on can all be perfectly valid starting points for surfacing important insights. Here are five questions for uncovering jobs your customers need help with.

Questions to start with [Excerpt from "Know Your Customers' Jobs to be Done"):

 * 1) Do you have a job that needs to be done?  In a data-obsessed world, it might be a surprise that some of the greatest innovators have succeeded with little more than intuition to guide their efforts. Pleasant Rowland saw the opportunity for American Girl dolls when searching for gifts that would help her connect with her nieces. Sheila Marcelo started Care.com, the online “matchmaking” service for child care, senior care, and pet care, after struggling with her family’s own care needs. Now, less than 10 years later, it boasts more than 19 million members across 16 countries and revenues approaching $140 million.
 * 2) Where do you see nonconsumption?  You can learn as much from people who aren’t hiring any product as from those who are. Nonconsumption is often where the most fertile opportunities lie, as SNHU found when it reached out to older learners.
 * 3) What work-arounds have people invented? If you see consumers struggling to get something done by cobbling together work-arounds, pay attention. They’re probably deeply unhappy with the available solutions—and a promising base of new business. When Intuit noticed that small-business owners were using Quicken―designed for individuals—to do accounting for their firms, it realized small firms represented a major new market.
 * 4) What tasks do people want to avoid? There are plenty of jobs in daily life that we’d just as soon get out of. We call these “negative jobs.” Harvard Business School alum Rick Krieger and some partners decided to start QuickMedx, the forerunner of CVS MinuteClinics, after Krieger spent a frustrating few hours waiting in an emergency room for his son to get a strep-throat test. MinuteClinics can see walk-in patients instantly, and their nurse practitioners can prescribe medicines for routine ailments, such as conjunctivitis, ear infections, and strep throat.
 * 5) What surprising uses have customers invented for existing products? Recently, some of the biggest successes in consumer packaged goods have resulted from a job identified through unusual uses of established products. For example, NyQuil had been sold for decades as a cold remedy, but it turned out that some consumers were knocking back a couple of spoonfuls to help them sleep, even when they weren’t sick. Hence, ZzzQuil was born, offering consumers the good night’s rest they wanted without the other active ingredients they didn’t need

How to hear what your customer don't say:

Timeline

 * 1) First Thought
 * 2) Passive Looking
 * 3) Triggering Event #1
 * 4) Triggering Event #2
 * 5) Deciding
 * 6) Commitment (Fire/Hire) - Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction
 * 7) Consuming

Product Switching ("what has to get fired for my product to get hired"?)
Organizatiozations don't think about enough. what has to get fired for my product to get hired? They think about making their product more and more appealing, but not what it willl be replacing.

Jobs-to-be-Done is used in product development to understand the customers "struggle & frustration" in closing their gap, and to identify the "motivation" for why the customers have "hired" or "fired" products in the past (to help predict future decisions).

Forces of Progress
The "Forces of Progress" are the customers emotional circumstances that create the demand for a new product. It is the interim space a customer is in until they decide to “hire” or “fire” a product. While in this interim space there are two groups of forces (Forces Compelling Change and Forces Opposing Change) that work against each other to shape customer demand.

Forces Compelling Change (Demand Generation)
The forces (Push & Pull) that work together to generate demand. The push is the motivation to switch products based on the current product not meeting the need of their current circumstance, and the pull directs their motivation.

Push of the Circumstance

Is where the customer is feeling the struggles and frustration with their existing product. The push is driven by their current circumstance where the current product is no longer supporting their need.

Pull of New Product

Is where the customer is seeing the benefits of the new product to solve their problem. "There are two types of pull (1) an idea for a better life (i.e. make progress) (2) preference for a particular product."

Forces Opposing Change (Demand Reduction)
The forces (Anxiety of Switching & Habit of the Present) that work together to reduce demand.

Anxiety of Switching

Is where the customer is feeling uncertain about switching to the new product.

Habit of the Present

Is where the customer is afraid to lose (loss aversion) what they already have. Loss aversion is 2x as powerful as the pull to a new product.

Design Products That do the Job
In the business of product development it is the producer’s job to understand what products and services customers want. With Job-to-be-Done it is imperative that the producer understand the customer’s functional, social, and emotional dimensions for progress along with the different circumstances in which the product or service would be utilized. "New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable." This is the practice of "nailing the job perfectly" through creating experiences at the time of purchase or in use where the customer continually "hires" the product.

"With few exceptions, every job people need or want to do has a social, a functional, and an emotional dimension. If marketers understand each of these dimensions, then they can design a product that’s precisely targeted to the job. In other words, the job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis for a marketer who hopes to develop products that customers will buy"

Examples of Making Progress
Henry Ford - "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." The job to be done here was not creating horses that could run faster, but people wanted to go point A to point B faster than what they were.

Prescriptive vs. Descriptive
Jobs-to-be-Done is unlike the standard market segmentation where the correlated data of sales (products or service) are based on buyer characteristics (age, gender, race, education, profession, income level, martial status, etc.), or division of market product categories (function or price); instead it seeks understand the root cause of the purchase; the why the customer "hired" the product or service.