Introduction
Imagine you are innovating a product/service. You know the features that will resonate best with your customers. You know exactly where your competitors are weakest. When you go to market, your product is, of course, very well-received. On top of that, your marketing outreach is spot on, to bring in even more customers.
This is the dream scenario of every entrepreneur, right? But the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) method makes this dream a not-so-distant reality.
Why?
Because, while traditional market research focuses the product (what customers want in it). But JTBD focuses on customers’ everyday goals, and builds products to meet those goals. This shift in focus powerfully taps into the truest reasons that customers buy.
The Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework
Per JTBD, in their typical day, people have ‘job to be done,’ and ‘hire’ products to get those jobs done. They ‘fire’ products that fail. Where they struggle to get a job done is where innovation is best positioned.
Here is a lay summary of the jargon above:
- Customers are trying meet goals in their everyday life
- These goals are practical, social, & emotional in nature
- These goals don’t change over time
- Customers use products to meet their goals
- Product innovation should focus where customers have pain meeting a goal
- Competitors’ weaknesses can be found where they fail to meet customers’ goals
Examples
Let’s say a customer goal – the job – is ‘creating a mood with music.’
To do the job of ‘creating a mood with music,’ records were hired by customers in 1931. Then cassette tapes were hired in 1966, leading to the record’s decline. 1982 brought in CD players as the new hire, replacing cassettes. Music streaming was first hired in 1997 and remains how we prefer to create a mood with music.
What product will we hire next?
The customer’s goal has been to create a mood with music…for thousands of years! But the products have changed, because all products go obsolete.
That is the power of JTDB.
If you apply the method in your market research, you will have a winning formula for growth. No research is 100% certain, but the key is to minimize decision-making risk. There is no method more trustworthy to deliver results than JTBD.
Research Process
JTBD can be applied to any industry.
And B2B and B2C.
It involves qualitative, in-depth interviews, in which you ask current or prospective customers a set of specific, prescribed, and probing questions.
The interview questions uncover the customer’s:
- Struggles or pains
- The causes of those pains
- How the pains are being solved
- Which pains aren’t getting solved
- How competitors are solving the pains
Complete at least 20 one-hour customer interviews and analyze the key themes that emerge, to get a true feel for your customers’ JTBD.
Product Development
For early stage startups and newer small businesses, JTBD research can be used to:
- Be sure there is a real problem for your product to solve. Your customers’ pains guide product development.
- Build a minimum-viable-product (MVP) by looking at customers unmet goals, and building your solution’s features around them.
Tweak your current product for better product-market fit.
Based on customer struggles, decide on features to leave in, or out. Now that you have a beautifully-iterated product matched to customer needs, you can now create perfectly targeted marketing materials.
Innovation & Competitive Advantage
Later stage startups, and more established companies can use JTBD research to:
- Innovate new products that meet customers’ unmet goals
- Discover the holes in competitors’ solutions, to fill with your new solution
Once you’ve innovated a product that’s sure to beat the competition, you can create a marketing plan founded on solid ground.