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Summary
The concept of jobs to be done (JTBD) provides a lens through which we can understand value creation. You’re probably familiar with the basic principle: people “hire” products and services to accomplish an objective. By providing a language for discovering problems independent of solutions, JTBD helps organizations identify new opportunities for growth, get aligned, and make human-centered decisions. JTBD provides a lingua franca to shift your collective mindset. In this talk, we’ll look at some of the core concepts of JTBD and how you can unleash human-centered insights across your company, from product to marketing to sales and more. We will also be doing a collaborative exercise during the call, focused around recently submitted proposals for the upcoming Design at Scale conference (formerly known as Enterprise Experience.)
Key Insights
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Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is a market innovation framework that focuses on the user's core objective, removing products and technology from the initial problem framing.
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A customer journey map primarily represents the organization's go-to-market story, not the customer's actual job or goal.
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JTBD separates functional job steps from outcomes, emotional factors, and circumstances, enabling granular analysis of customer needs.
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JTBD originates from business disruption theory and is designed to predict adoption by understanding the true problems customers want solved.
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In B2B scenarios, JTBD recommends starting with understanding the end user’s job first, then working upstream to buyers and stakeholders.
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JTBD’s reductive approach provides a stable, logical foundation that can then be layered with empathy and emotional insights for richer experience design.
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JTBD offers a common language to break silos across design, product management, marketing, sales, and customer success teams.
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JTBD can be integrated with existing methods like design thinking, agile, and lean as a precursor step to ensure the right problem is targeted.
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Normalization and inference in JTBD may lose some fidelity from raw user quotes but result in consistent insights usable for surveys and modeling.
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JTBD is not a design methodology exclusively but a business tool that can catalyze collaboration and innovation across company functions.
Notable Quotes
"The customer journey map is really an egotistical document. It’s about me, not the chicken’s story."
"People don’t want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. The drill is the means, the hole is the outcome."
"Jobs to Be Done language explicitly expunges technology and products from its language to get a different view of the world."
"Jobs to Be Done is a reductive framework that helps us focus on the core problem we must get right first."
"You can combine Jobs to Be Done core logical framing with empathy layered on top for total experience understanding."
"Start downstream with the end user’s job and work upstream to buyers and other roles in the value chain for B2B."
"The advantage of Jobs to Be Done is a clear and stable unit of analysis to which you can add emotion, brand, price, and more."
"Your partners in product management, marketing, and customer success are already using Jobs to Be Done language and methods."
"Jobs to Be Done can be a Trojan horse to get designers and marketers talking and collaborating more effectively."
"Jobs to Be Done is a catalyst for conversation, change through collaboration, and a way to break down silos."
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