Jobs to be Done helps teams identify unmet user needs and decide which are worth addressing. It guides product development by identifying jobs people struggle to achieve and generates a roadmap for innovation.
JTBD uses specialist techniques to identify unmet needs people have when carrying out seemingly straightforward tasks. When carried out carefully, JTBD will identify unmet needs in situations where people are dissatisfied, helping to guide product development:
- Innovation in emerging and mature categories
- Identification of unfulfilled user needs
- Solutions for innovation
- A roadmap from product development
My approach to JTBD
I’ve used JTBD since 2018 for a range of companies. I used the method most successfully for a project with a well known online food services client that used the outputs to generate a prototype that went into private beta. I’ve repeated it many times, with minor tweaks here and there…
Stage 1. Determine the ‘Overall Job’ that needs to be carried out. This is the overarching job for which the app, tool, service or product is employed to do. For our project, the online food ordering service wanted to understand the job of ‘buying lunch’.
Stage 2. We carried out 32 qualitative depth interviews. For reference, this is very large qualitative sample, but the usage occasion was of relevance to everyone in the UK and we needed to understand different gender, age, demographic and dietary differences. For products with more targeted user groups, samples are much smaller – usually single figures.
The structure of the interview was as follows:
- We used the last time the user bought lunch to ensure memory was vivid
- We broke it down into discrete stages
- We explored decision making (jobs) within each stage
- We evaluated if pain was present for each job
- We then determined what a ‘successful outcome’ would look like for each job
It’s important to consider the detail that we went into. Across the interviews, we eventually captured over 75 decisions that needed to be made within the ‘Overall Job’ of buying lunch.
I would point out that the interviewing is extremely difficult. The moderator needs to use active listening throughout the interview, reflecting the decision making, checking specific needs and determining specific outcomes.
Stage 3. After the qualitative stage, an important stage of analysis begins. Key tasks:
- Develop a job map. Capture the stages the user has to move through to complete the job successfully. Typically it will comprise of around 8 stages.
- Write the ‘Outcome Statements’. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the process – each statement should be written in the same format to avoid bias, and describe a successful outcome to a job.
For many, stopping the process here is an option, as it’s often apparent from the qualitative interviews where the most pain lies – and therefore where the opportunities for innovation are.
However, for this project, a huge number of jobs and associated pain points were identified when buying lunch and we needed to be clear about which were the most prominent and could feasibly be satisfied with a food ordering app.
Stage 4. To determine where pain was most acute – and which features would be most valuable to users – we used a quantitative survey:
- We screened people for relevance – not everyone buys lunch
- We developed profiling / attitudinal questions to identify users and segment them – different attitudes to buying lunch were important to assess
- We asked customers to score the job outcome statements in two ways: How satisfied they were with the current situation, and how important it was to improve the situation
Stage 5. We pulled the qualitative and quantitative research findings together. A simple scoring system is used to determine when an outcome statement is sufficiently dissatisfying / important enough to improve.
Stage 6. Finally, we used the research results to identify innovation opportunities. This was surprisingly easy and powerful. Most innovators know that the innovation process is usually fraught with unknowns and so it was refreshing to be confident in the ideas that emerged.
- We used the job map to pin outcome statements that were unfulfilled and important to improve
- For each of the outcomes, we quickly identified features that would solve the pain users were experiencing
- The feature ideas were used to create a roadmap for innovation
Summary
Put simply, it works! Jobs to be done confidently predicts unmet needs and intuitively suggests innovation ideas. That said, it’s a difficult technique to master:
1, The interview moderation is challenging and stretches the most experienced moderator to think quickly and clearly about processes users go through, associated jobs, pain points and successful outcomes
2, Generating outcome statements that are not biased, leading or irrelevant is incredibly difficult
If you would like to learn more, please drop me a line via the contact page and I’d be happy to discuss the technique and how it could be applied to your business.
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