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Jobs To Be Done

Thursday, February 25, 2021 • Enterprise Community
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Jobs To Be Done
Speakers: Jim Kalbach
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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

  • Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is fundamentally a market innovation framework rooted in business theory, not a design methodology.

  • JTBD maps focus on the customer’s objective and process independent of products, brands, or technology, unlike customer journey maps which are company-centric.

  • Separating the functional job from the outcomes allows for more granular understanding of what customers truly want to achieve.

  • JTBD’s language forbids references to products or technology and requires statements to start with verbs, ensuring clarity and normalization.

  • JTBD serves as a stable logical nucleus that can be layered with empathy, emotions, and aspirations to create richer experience maps.

  • In B2B contexts, starting JTBD analysis from the end user 'downstream' and working back toward buyers creates more effective product-market fit.

  • JTBD helps break siloed thinking by providing a shared language across design, product management, marketing, and customer success teams.

  • JTBD favors inference and normalization during research, trading some qualitative fidelity for consistency and predictive power.

  • JTBD is applicable not only for innovation and design but also for guiding go-to-market strategies and customer success efforts.

  • JTBD can coexist with and complement existing methodologies like Agile, Lean, Design Thinking by providing a clear problem framing.

Notable Quotes

"The customer journey map is really an egotistical document — it’s my story, not the chicken’s story."

"People don’t want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole."

"Jobs to be done expunges technology and products from its language to focus on what the individual is trying to achieve."

"The best way to have a solution that ‘sucks’ is to solve the end user’s problems so the solution pulls through the organization."

"Empathy is not a good starting point for innovation because it’s unstable and doesn’t provide a clear problem to solve."

"Jobs to be done gives us a normalized, structured, and stable unit of analysis to then add emotion, brand, and price on top."

"Design thinking starts too high with empathy; jobs to be done starts with the functional core and grounds innovation."

"You don’t have to call it jobs to be done — you can white label it or integrate its logic into your existing maps."

"Jobs to be done can be a catalyst for conversations and change by connecting teams across an organization."

"Understanding the problem independent of the solution is key to finding the solution that somebody will actually adopt."

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