In the past, customer-centric operations almost always meant the same approach: Getting to know and characterizing one’s own customers as well as possible in order to be able to draw conclusions about their (consumer) behavior and needs from their characteristics. What sounds sensible at first glance,

However, is not entirely flawless. The still quite young principle of “jobs to be done” (JTBD) represents an alternative approach with which you can gain more direct access to your customers.

What Is Jobs-to-be-Done?

A clear understanding of underserved pain points

Jobs to be Done is about the clear understanding of the underserved pain points of the customer, this alone is a vast improvement over alternative approaches since it does not rely on luck and avoids wasting time and money on irrelevant or suboptimal alternatives.

Jobs to be done is still a young theory or methodology that does not ask about the characteristics of customers, but about the higher-level tasks (Customer Jobs) they want to accomplish. This leads to a new perspective on product, user, and also competition. In practical application, the approach can be combined well with familiar methods, such as those from design thinking.

Until now, the general principle has been that the better you know your target group and can describe them, the better the products and services you can develop based on these considerations. Detailed personas were used to give customers a face and a personality. The purpose of all this was to be able to put oneself in the shoes of one’s own customers – after all, one is often not even part of the target group oneself. But you cannot simply predict a person’s actions from their characteristics. There are many correlations between a person’s characteristics and their actions.

The Job-to-be-done is a statement that describes, with precision, what a group of people is trying to achieve or accomplish in a given situation. A job-to-be-done could be a task that people are trying to accomplish, a goal or objective they are trying to achieve, a problem they are trying to resolve, something they are trying to avoid, or anything else they are trying to accomplish.

A perspective

According to Tony Ulwick, Jobs-to-be-done is best defined as a perspective — a lens through which you can observe markets, customers, needs, competitors, and customer segments differently, and by doing so, make innovation far more predictable and profitable.

When Einstein engaged in his thought experiments, he pictured himself riding on a beam of light and traveling through the universe. From this perspective he was able to view the universe through a new lens, enabling him to see things in a different and meaningful way and to develop a theory that others could not.

Similarly, when you look at marketing and innovation through a Jobs-to-be-Done lens, everything looks different:

• The unit of analysis is no longer the customer or the product, it’s the core functional “job” the customer is trying to get done.
• Markets aren’t defined around products, they are defined as groups of people trying to get a job done.
• Customers aren’t buyers, they are job executors.
• Needs aren’t vague, latent, and unknowable, they are the metrics customers use to measure success when getting a job done.
• Competitors aren’t companies that make products like yours, they are any solution being used to get the job done.
• Customer segments aren’t based on demographics or psychographics, they are based on how customers struggle differently to get a job done.

When a company thinks about a market from this perspective, it is much more likely to create and deliver extraordinary products and services. Why? While products come and go, the customer’s job-to-be-done is stable over time. With a focus on a stable unit of analysis, it becomes possible to define customer needs that are stable over time as well, giving companies unique, robust targets for value creation. In short, jobs-to-be-done offers a new framework and lens through which a company can take its understanding of customer needs to the next level — and bring predictability to innovation.