Jobs To Be Done: Theory to Practice

“This approach to innovation is analogous to expecting a sharpshooter to hit a target without knowing what the target is. It is like expecting a doctor to recommend the right treatment without knowing what is wrong or what the symptoms are.”

Key takeaway

Lead with needs not with ideas

“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.”

Key takeaway

How can you know it it worked if you can’t measure it?

“The only way to discover segments of customers with unique sets of unmet needs is to segment the market around unmet needs.”

Key takeaway

Demographic segmentation is old school, now it’s better to segment around unmet needs

“To secure a winning value proposition, a company must (1) know where in the job the customer is underserved, (2) secure the value proposition that communicates to customers that their needs can be satisfied, and (3) do everything in its power to satisfy the targeted unmet needs better than its competitors. “

Key takeaway

The playbook is pretty straightforward, but executing it can be difficult

“An effective market strategy should align the strengths of a company’s product offerings with the customer’s unmet needs.”

Key takeaway

It seems very obvious but the best market strategies are those which align incentives

“The other part of the market strategy is segmentation: recognizing that the normal demographic methods for segmenting customers, while helpful for sales resource prioritization, are not helpful for opportunity identification, and hence solution identification.”

Key takeaway

Segmenting around needs outperforms demographic data since we can gather so much more data in a digital age. Facebook machine learning uses outcome based targeting which beats demographic targeting (I can attest from first hand experiments)

“Jobs-to-be-Done Theory – The notion that people buy products and services to get a job done and that new products and services win in the marketplace if they help customers get a job done better and/or more cheaply.”

Key takeaway

JTBD is at the heart of disruption theory