An Introduction to Jobs Theory
Why You Should Hire This Book
Innovation can be far more predictable — and far more profitable — but only if you think about it differently. It’s about progress, not products.
Ever since Michael Lewis chronicled the Oakland A’s unlikely success in Moneyball, organizations have been trying to find the Moneyball equivalent of customer data that will lead to innovation success. Yet few have.
As Yogi Berra famously observed: “We’re lost, but we’re making good time!”
None of that data, however, actually tells you why customers make the choices that they do.
It’s seductive to believe that we can see important patterns and cross-references in our data sets, but that doesn’t mean one thing actually caused the other.
As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?
What job did you hire that product to do? The good news is that if you build your foundation on the pursuit of understanding your customers’ jobs, your strategy will no longer need to rely on luck. In fact, you’ll be competing against luck when others are still counting on it. You’ll see the world with new eyes. Different competitors, different priorities, and most important, different results. You can leave hit-or-miss innovation behind.
The Milk Shake Dilemma
Why is innovation so hard to predict — and sustain? Because we haven’t been asking the right questions.
My theory of disruptive innovation, which explains the phenomenon by which an innovation transforms an existing market or sector by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility, and affordability where complication and high cost have become the status quo — eventually completely redefining the industry.
At its core, it’s a theory of competitive response to an innovation.
For years, I’d been focused on understanding why great companies fail, but I realized I had never really thought about the reverse problem: How do successful companies know how to grow?
It wasn’t for months that I finally had an answer. Moesta shared with me a project for a fast-food chain: how to sell more milk shakes. I wonder what job arises in people’s lives that causes them to come to this restaurant to “hire” a milk shake?
It turned out that a surprising number of milk shakes were sold before 9:00 a.m. to people who came into the fast-food restaurant alone.
It soon became clear that the early-morning customers all had the same job to do: they had a long and boring ride to work. They needed something to keep the commute interesting. They weren’t really hungry yet, but they knew that in a couple of hours, they’d face a midmorning stomach rumbling. It turned out that there were a lot of competitors for this job, but none of them did the job perfectly.
“Help me stay awake and occupied while I make my morning commute more fun.”
Turns out that plenty of milk shakes are purchased in the afternoon and evening, outside of the context of a commute. In those circumstances, the same customers could hire a milk shake for a completely different job.
In that moment, the milk shake isn’t competing against a banana or a Snickers bar or a doughnut, like the morning milk shake is. It’s competing against stopping at the toy store or my finding time for a game of catch later on.
This implies there is likely not just one solution for the fast-food chain seeking to sell more milk shakes. There are two. A one-size-fits-all solution would work for neither.
Executives are inundated with data about their products. They know market share to the nth degree, how products are selling in different markets, profit margin across hundreds of different items, and so on. But all this data is focused around customers and the product itself — not how well the product is solving customers’ jobs. Even customer satisfaction metrics, which reveal whether a customer is happy with a product or not, don’t give any clues as to how to do the job better. Yet it’s how most companies track and measure success.
That experience made me realize that part of the problem is that we’re missing the right vocabulary to talk about innovation in ways that help us understand what actually causes it to succeed.
The value of Jobs Theory to you is not in explaining past successes, but in predicting new ones.
There are multiple layers to the Jobs Theory construct to ensure that you create products that customers will not only want to buy, but also products they’re willing to pay premium prices for.
Identifying and understanding the Job to Be Done is key, but it’s just the beginning. After you’ve uncovered and understood the job, you need to translate those insights into a blueprint to guide the development of products and services that customers will love. This involves creating the right set of experiences that accompany your product or service in solving the job.
And finally, you have to ensure that you have integrated your company’s internal capabilities and processes to nail the job consistently.
Creating the right experiences and then integrating around them to solve a job, is critical for competitive advantage. That’s because while it may be easy for competitors to copy products, it’s difficult for them to copy experiences that are well integrated into your company’s processes.
Progress, Not Products
To elevate innovation from hit-or-miss to predictable, you have to understand the underlying causal mechanism — the progress a consumer is trying to make in particular circumstances. Welcome to the Theory of Jobs to Be Done.
Shifting our understanding from educated guesses and correlation to an underlying causal mechanism is profound. Truly uncovering a causal mechanism changes everything about the way we solve problems — and, perhaps more important, prevents them.
Innovation, in a very real sense, exists in a “pre–quality revolution” state. Managers accept flaws, missteps, and failure as an inevitable part of the process of innovation. They have become so accustomed to putting Band-Aids on their uneven innovation success that too often they give no real thought to what’s causing it in the first place.
I’m able to provide insight because there is a toolbox full of theories that teach me not what to think but rather how to think. Good theory is the best way I know to frame problems in such a way that we ask the right questions to get us to the most useful answers. Embracing theory is not to mire ourselves in academic minutiae but, quite the opposite, to focus on the supremely practical question of what causes what.
I believe that good theory is essential for effective management practice and the most powerful tool I can offer my students.
What causes a customer to purchase and use a particular product or service? We believe Jobs Theory, at last, provides an answer.
We define a “job” as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance.
It’s key to understanding why they make the choices they make. The choice of the word “progress” is deliberate. It represents movement toward a goal or aspiration. A job is always a process to make progress, it’s rarely a discrete event.
The idea of a “circumstance” is intrinsic to the definition of a job. A job can only be defined — and a successful solution created — relative to the specific context in which it arises.
The circumstance is fundamental to defining the job (and finding a solution for it), because the nature of the progress desired will always be strongly influenced by the circumstance.
A job has an inherent complexity to it: it not only has functional dimensions, but it has social and emotional dimensions, too.
The key features of our definition are: A job is the progress that an individual seeks in a given circumstance. Successful innovations enable a customer’s desired progress, resolve struggles, and fulfill unmet aspirations. Jobs are never simply about the functional — they have important social and emotional dimensions. Because jobs occur in the flow of daily life, the circumstance is central to their definition. Jobs to Be Done are ongoing and recurring. They’re seldom discrete “events.”
A well-defined job offers a kind of innovation blueprint. This is very different from the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because it entails a much higher degree of specificity about what you’re solving for.
And needs, by themselves, don’t explain all behavior: Many wonderful inventions have been, unwittingly, built only around satisfying a very general “need.” On the other end of the spectrum from needs are what I’ll call the guiding principles of my life.
The full set of Jobs to Be Done as I go through life may roll up, collectively, into the major themes of my life, but they’re not the same thing.
Jobs Theory is not primarily focused on “who” did something, or “what” they did — but on “why.” Understanding jobs is about clustering insights into a coherent picture, rather than segmenting down to finer and finer slices.
Jobs Theory is an integration tool. When you identify a struggle to make progress, you can begin to infer not only the practical but the critical unseen or unspoken social and emotional dimensions of the Job to Be Done.
A well-defined job is multilayered and complex. It means that perfectly satisfying someone’s job likely requires not just creating a product, but engineering and delivering a whole set of experiences that address the many dimensions of the job and then integrating those experiences into the company’s processes (as we’ll discuss in depth later in the book). When you’ve done that well, it’s almost impossible for competitors to copy.
It’s important to note that we don’t “create” jobs, we discover them. Jobs themselves are enduring and persistent, but the way we solve them can change dramatically over time.
For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.
Sound theory — the kind that truly explains, predictably, what will cause what to happen — does not develop overnight. It has to be shaped, tested, and refined, and the context in which it does and does not apply must be understood.
With all theory building, you have to be open to finding things that the theory can’t explain — anomalies — and use them as an opportunity to strengthen it. We know, for example, that Jobs Theory is not useful if there is no real struggle for a consumer or the existing solutions are good enough.
A theory is essentially a proposition: we propose this set of processes will help develop innovations that will be successful.
We believe Jobs Theory will make an enormous difference in the quest to shift innovation from a game of chance to a predictable endeavor.
Changing a well-established view of the world rarely happens overnight — and even when it happens, it still takes time to refine and perfect the right new perspective.
Theories that explain causality are among the most important and practical tools business leaders can have.
Fully understanding a customer’s job requires understanding the progress a customer is trying to make in particular circumstances and understanding all of its functional, social, and emotional dimensions — as well as the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make.
Jobs in the Wild
Jobs Theory transforms how you define the business you’re in, the size and shape of the market in which you compete, and who your competitors are.
Because Jobs Theory uncovers the cause of why consumers make the choices they do, it’s useful in a wide range of industries and organizations — from the simplest consumer packaged goods to complex business-to-business solutions. In every case, uncovering why customers make choices allows organizations to better create solutions that get hired.
HR and learning professionals wanted their work to matter — and to be acknowledged to matter — in implementing their companies’ most important priorities. That insight led to years of reworking, rethinking, and repositioning all of FranklinCoveys offerings around its customers’ key Jobs to Be Done.
The FranklinCovey sales team would focus on identifying and selling the specific courses that a customer might need in any given year. But there was a flaw with that approach. If a CEO declared a set of priorities and goals that didn’t match those particular courses, they weren’t going to be hired. So FranklinCovey revised its approach: instead of selling courses, it now sells all access passes that provide customers with nearly unlimited access to all its courses and content.
FranklinCovey also sells entire processes and experiences geared toward satisfying a particular Job to Be Done. At a high level, the offerings are grouped around various categories of jobs — for example leadership, execution, customer loyalty, sales performance — but underneath each of those categories are offerings aimed at specific Jobs to Be Done. Jobs that are measured in business outcomes.
Intuit cofounder Scott Cook was an early adopter of Jobs Theory — and his work has helped define and shape the theory. Within Intuit he refers to the “improvement in the customer’s life that matters most to him in selecting the product.”
Interestingly, Cook says he nearly missed the insight that led to QuickBooks — a product that has become critical to Intuit’s long – term growth beyond its original offering — because he wasn’t focused on the right things.
Highlight (orange) – Chapter 3: Jobs in the Wild > Page 62 · Location 1078
What Cook and his team identified was the difference between a task (enter a debit in the ledger) and a genuine struggle — in specific circumstances.
It became clear that Intuit’s competitors for this Job to Be Done were not the other sophisticated accounting software products already on the market , but rather the decision whether to hire another person just to do the books, spending extra hours at the office just to get the paperwork done, figuring out how to construct and use one of the generic spreadsheet software products available, or even a shoebox where all the receipts went with no hope of ever actually being properly reconciled.
To outside eyes, QuickBooks might have seemed an unlikely success. After all, the product offered half the functionality of more sophisticated accounting software at twice the price.
Competitors were focused on making the best accounting software possible. Cook and his team focused on the job customers were trying to do.
A product that has been designed specifically to fulfill a well-understood Job to Be Done allows you to crawl into the skin of your customer and see the world through her eyes. It says to the customer, “We get you.”
When you are solving a customer’s job, your products essentially become services. What matters is not the bundle of product attributes you rope together, but the experiences you enable to help your customers make the progress they want to make.
Deeply understanding jobs opens up new avenues for growth and innovation by bringing into focus distinct “jobs-based” segments — including groups of “nonconsumers” for which an acceptable solution does not currently exist. They choose to hire nothing, rather than something that does the job poorly. Nonconsumption has the potential to provide a very, very big opportunity.
Questions for Leaders What jobs are your customers hiring your products and services to get done? Are there segments with distinct jobs that you are inadequately serving with a one-size-fits-none solution? Are your products — or competitors’ — overshooting what customers are actually willing to pay for? What experiences do customers seek in order to make progress — and what obstacles must be removed for them to be successful? What does your understanding of your customers’ Jobs to Be Done reveal about the real competition you are facing?
The Hard Work—and Payoff—of Applying Jobs Theory
Job Hunting
Innovation is less about producing something new and more about enabling something new and important for customers.
Jobs Theory is an integration tool — a way to make sense of the complex amalgam of needs that are driving consumer choices in particular circumstances. It tells you which pieces of information are needed, how they relate to one another, and how they can be used to create solutions that perfectly nail the job. Jobs Theory is effective because it focuses you on the right complexity, breaking it down into elements you need to understand for successful innovation. It’s the difference between having a full, comprehensive narrative versus a few scattered frames of the movie, randomly selected as highlights. Jobs to Be Done tell the whole story.
When uncovering jobs: the problem lies not in the tools you’re using, but what you are looking for and how you piece your observations together.
We offer here five ways to uncover jobs that might be right in front of you if you know what you’re looking for: seeing jobs in your own life, finding opportunity in nonconsumption, identifying workarounds, zoning in on things we don’t want to do, and spotting unusual uses of products.
Some of the most successful start-ups in recent years have come from the founders’ personal Job to Be Done.
You can learn as much about a Job to Be Done from people who aren’t hiring any product or service as you can from those who are. We call this “nonconsumption,” when consumers can’t find any solution that actually satisfies their job and they opt to do nothing instead.
Whenever you see a compensating behavior, pay very close attention, because it’s likely a clue that there is an innovation opportunity waiting to be seized — one on which customers would place a high value. But you won’t even see these anomalies — compensating behavior and cobbled-together workarounds — if you’re not fully immersed in the context of their struggle.
I think I have as many jobs of not wanting to do something as ones that I want positively to do. I call them “negative jobs.” In my experience, negative jobs are often the best innovation opportunities.
You can learn a lot by observing how your customers use your products, especially when they use them in a way that is different from what your company has envisioned.
The “needs” being identified were too often limited exclusively to “functional” needs without taking into account the broader social and emotional dimensions of a customer’s struggle.
Where was the stroke of genius in all these success stories? It’s in knowing what to look for. There is a method to the madness. What they have in common is the search for cause. With a theory to predict what will cause what to happen, breakthrough innovations do not require getting lucky.
How to Hear What Your Customers Don’t Say
Rarely, though, can customers articulate their requirements accurately or completely — their motivations are more complex and their pathways to purchase more elaborate than they can describe. But you can get to the bottom of it. What they hire — and equally important, what they fire — tells a story. That story is about the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of their desire for progress — and what prevents them from getting there.
And most data only tracks one of the two important moments in a customer’s decision to hire a product or service. The most commonly tracked is what we call the “Big Hire” — the moment you buy the product. But there’s an equally important moment that doesn’t show up in most sales data: when you actually “consume” it. The moment a consumer brings a purchase into his or her home or business, that product is still waiting to be hired again — we call this the “Little Hire.” If a product really solves the job, there will be many moments of consumption. It will be hired again and again.
Companies don’t think about this enough. What has to get fired for my product to get hired? They think about making their product more and more appealing, but not what it will be replacing.
There are always two opposing forces battling for dominance in that moment of choice and they both play a significant role.
The forces compelling change to a new solution:
- First of all, the push of the situation — the frustration or problem that a customer is trying to solve — has to be substantial enough to cause her to want to take action.
- Secondly, the pull of an enticing new product or service to solve that problem has to be pretty strong, too.
The forces opposing change:
There are two unseen, yet incredibly powerful, forces at play:
- First, “habits of the present” weigh heavily on consumers.
- Second, the “anxiety of choosing something new.” “What if it’s not better?”
Jobs Theory helps innovators identify the full picture of the progress a customer is trying to make in particular circumstances, including the complex set of competing needs and relative priorities.
As many of the executives we interviewed have told us, when you hit upon a job, it just makes intuitive sense. It feels true.
When you have an insight, you don’t have to convince yourself that it’s important or powerful. You just know.
The key to getting hired is to understand the narrative of the customer’s life in such rich detail that you are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request.
Uncovering a Job to Be Done is only the first step. You are selling progress, not products. In order to create a solution that customers actually want to hire — and hire repeatedly — you have to see the full context of customers’ Jobs to Be Done and the obstacles that get in their way.
Building Your Résumé
New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable.
The job spec is from the innovator’s point of view: What do I need to design, develop, and deliver in my new product offering so that it solves the consumer’s job well? You can capture the relevant details of the job in a job spec, including the functional, emotional, and social dimensions that define the desired progress, the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make, the full set of competing solutions that must be beaten, and the obstacles and anxieties that must be overcome.
Although identifying and understanding the Job to Be Done is the foundation, it’s only the first step in creating products that you can be sure customers want to hire.
That involves not only understanding the job, but also the right set of experiences for purchase and use of that product, and then integrating those experiences into a company’s processes. All three layers — Uncovering the Job, Creating the Desired Experiences, and Integrating around the Job — are critical.
Creating experiences and overcoming obstacles is how a product becomes a service to the customer, rather than simply a product with better features and benefits.
Organizations that focus on making the product itself better and better are missing what may be the most powerful causal mechanism of all — what are the experiences that customers seek in not only purchasing, but also in using this product? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you’re probably not going to be hired.
A product that consistently creates the right experiences for resolving customers’ jobs should speak to the consumer: “Your search is over, pick me!”
Purpose brands play the role of communicating externally how the “enclosed attributes” are designed to deliver a very complete and specific experience. A purpose brand is positioned on the mechanism that causes people to purchase a product: they nail the job. A purpose brand tells them to hire you for their job.
Because purpose brands integrate around important Jobs to Be Done rather than conform to established bases of competition, purpose brands frequently reconfigure industry structure, change the basis of competition, and command premium prices.
A very long list of purpose brands, including Starbucks, Google, and craigslist.org, were actually built with minimal advertising at the outset. They’re such strong brands that they’ve become verbs: “Just Google it.”
Purpose brands create enormous opportunities for differentiation, premium pricing, and growth. A clear purpose brand guides the company’s product designers, marketers, and advertisers as they develop and market improved products.
Achieving a purpose brand is the cherry on the top of the jobs cake. Purpose brand, when done well, provides the ultimate competitive advantage. Look no further. Don’t even bother shopping for anything else. Just hire me and your job will be done.
The Jobs to Be Done Organization
Integrating Around a Job
Organizations typically structure themselves around function or business unit or geography — but successful growth companies optimize around the job.
Processes touch everything about the way an organization transforms its resources into value: the patterns of interaction, coordination, communication, and decision making through which they accomplish these transformations are processes. Product development, procurement, market research, budgeting, employee development and compensation, and resource allocation are all accomplished through processes. Helping customers have a delightful experience using your product is made up of processes. What information do we need to have in order to decide what to do next? Who is responsible for each step? What do we prioritize over other things? Resources, generally speaking, are fungible. They can be bought and sold. Products can, often, be easily copied. But it is through integrating processes to get the job done that companies can create the ideal experiences and confer competitive advantage.
W. Edwards Deming, father of the quality movement, may have put it best: “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.”
Processes are often hard to see — they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time.
Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied.
McKinsey’s processes are so pervasive that consultants from very different backgrounds and training can be “plugged” into the processes by which they habitually do their work — with confidence that they will deliver the needed results. They can also churn the resources — the consultants — every few years without fear of diminution of quality because their processes are so robust.
A 2010 Bain & Company study reported that fewer than one-third of major reorgs reviewed delivered any material improvement and many actually destroyed value.
Through a jobs lens, what matters more than who reports to whom is how different parts of the organization interact to systematically deliver the offering that perfectly performs customers’ Jobs to Be Done. When managers are focused on the customer’s Job to Be Done, they not only have a very clear compass heading for their innovation efforts but they also have a vital organizing principle for their internal structure.
Keeping what matters in focus is challenging for any organization, especially with the forces at play as a company grows.
It is, to be sure, easier to focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness. Most businesses are very, very good at that. Creating the right metrics is hard. But so important.
Jobs are not flexible — they have existed for years and years, even centuries. But how we solve for jobs varies over time. The important thing is to be attached to the job, but not the way we solve it today. Processes must flex over time when a better understanding of customer jobs calls for a revised orientation. Otherwise you’ll risk changing the concept of the job to fit the process, rather than the other way around.
Aligning with jobs is considering what “process optimization” means. In so doing, you avoid the trap of allowing today’s critical processes to become tomorrow’s inhibitors to growth.
Stack fallacy highlights the tendency of engineers to overweight the value of their own technology and underweight the downstream applications of that technology to solve customer problems and enable desired progress. “Stack fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layers above yours,” Sharma says. It’s the reason that companies fail so often when they try to move up the stack. “They don’t have first-hand empathy for what customers of the product one level above theirs in the stack actually want. They’re disconnected from the context in which their product will actually be used.”
In short, stack fallacy and Jobs Theory shine light on the same hazard: to mistake technical know-how — which Ford and Qualcomm had in spades — for the customer’s Job to Be Done, about which they understood very little.
The key to successful innovation is to create and deliver the set of experiences corresponding to your customer’s job spec.
Despite the value of developing a set of processes integrated around the customer’s job, it does not come naturally to most companies.
A powerful lever to drive job-centric process development and integration is to measure and manage to new metrics aligned with nailing the customer’s job.
The best way to move toward a more jobs-centric organization is to carefully set up and integrate the right processes, measure the right things, and over time embed jobs centricity in the culture.
What elements of the end-to-end experience are most critical to perfectly solving your customer’s job? What metrics could you define to track performance against these elements?
Keeping Your Eye on the Job
Peter Drucker, too, warned us that the customer rarely buys what the company thinks it sells him.
Even great companies veer off course in nailing the job for their customers and focus instead on nailing the job for themselves. In our research and experience, that’s because companies fall into believing one of three fallacies:
- The Fallacy of Active Versus Passive Data
- The Fallacy of Surface Growth
- The Fallacy of Conforming Data
The railroad industry did not decline because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That need actually grew, but cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones stepped in to handle that job nicely. The railroads were in trouble, Levitt wrote back in 1960, “because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business.”
Once products are launched, a faucet is opened and data is created, data that didn’t exist until sales had been made and customers created. Managers feel an understandable sense of reassurance when they shift their attention from the hazy contours of a story of struggle to the crisp precision of a spreadsheet.
- Product sales generate data about products.
- Customers’ purchases generate data about customers themselves.
- Investments in people, facilities, and technology generate data on their productivity, returns, and value.
- Competitors emerge, leading investors and managers to create benchmarks that make data.
Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world.
The Fallacy of Surface Growth. When a company makes big investments in developing relationships with customers, natural incentives arise to find ways to sell more products to existing customers. The marginal cost of selling more products to existing customers is very small — and the profit is oh so alluring. We call this “surface growth.”
The Fallacy of Conforming Data. Data has an annoying way of conforming itself to support whatever point of view we want it to support. In fact, Nate Silver, a well-known statistician and founder of the New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight (it was acquired by ESPN in 2013), noted, “The most calamitous failures of prediction usually have a lot in common. We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is.”
We pick and choose the data that suits us. “Decisions don’t get made. They happen,” observes neuromarketing expert, Gerald Zaltman, a longtime colleague at Harvard Business School who has spent years studying how managers represent their ideas and apply their ideas and knowledge.
The healthiest mindset for innovation is that nearly all data — whether presented in the form of a large quantitative data set on one extreme, or an ethnographic description of behavior on the other — is built upon human bias and judgment.
Passive data needs active management.
How would your people characterize the fundamental business you are in?
How are you ensuring that your customers’ Job to Be Done has a voice in your decision making and resource allocation activities?
A deep understanding of customers’ Jobs to Be Done should trigger a cascade of questions about how the company is organized, what’s measured and rewarded, what priorities run throughout the company, and how people work together to solve problems.
The Jobs-Focused Organization
Having a jobs-focused organization leads to four categories of clear benefit:
- Enable distributed decision making with clarity of purpose — employees throughout the organization are empowered to make good jobs-focused decisions and to be autonomous and innovative.
- Align resources against what matters most — and free resources from what does not.
- Inspire people and unify your culture in service of what they care about most.
- Measure what matters most — customer progress, employee contributions, and incentives.
A leader has to count on employees up and down the company’s ranks to make the right choices in everyday decisions. Those choices will determine a company’s real strategy.
If that culture has formed around the job, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.
A clearly defined job spec that everyone understands can serve the same purpose — a focal point for employees to make the right decisions without being told specifically what to do each time.
Since we know that strategy is formed in the everyday choices employees make about resources, processes, and priorities, clarity about what jobs your customers are hiring you to do provides a kind of intuitive playbook.
At its best, Jobs Theory enables “lean” operations — waste and overhead and time are minimized systematically because once you have alignment around the job, LeBlanc says, wasted time, energy, and resources are minimized.
But the data we use to measure efficiency is double-edged. Yes, it enables measurement and management, but data also creates a model of the external world.
When companies organize themselves into business units with responsibilities for products of certain characteristics or units with responsibilities for certain customer groups, data is gathered through those filters creating models that rarely map to customer jobs.
In contrast to the usually generic nature of most companies’ mission statements, a well-crafted statement of the jobs a company exists to solve can be both inspiring and practical.
Final Observations About the Theory of Jobs
The Theory of Jobs to Be Done was built inductively. Because failure in innovation has been so common, I could not start with a core proposition of causality in successful innovation that I could test in a deductive way. So, for two decades I have carefully and inductively observed what people who sold and bought things were trying to do, and tried to get answers to the question, “Why?” A key goal in building a theory inductively is to develop one or more “constructs.”
I would like to try to put boundaries around the word “jobs” as we are using it. It is easy to slip into using “jobs” to describe our attempts to understand a wide range of human motivations. But not everything that motivates us is a Job to Be Done. Jobs, as we’ve defined them here, take work to uncover and understand properly, thus dubbing something a job shouldn’t roll off the tongue with minimal thought. My definition of a job in this book is intentionally precise. I see two problems that you must avoid as you study and apply Jobs Theory. First, if you or a colleague describes a Job to Be Done in adjectives and adverbs, it is not a valid job. It might describe an experience that a customer needs to have in order to do the job, but it is not a job, as we have defined it here. A well-defined Job to Be Done is expressed in verbs and nouns.
Second, defining a job at the right level of abstraction is critical to ensuring that the theory is useful.
