Jobs to be done + [company name]

People don’t buy products, they hire them to do a job.

There are obstacles and anxieties along the way. “A job is the progress that a customer desires to make in a particular circumstance.” A job is a process to make progress, rarely a discrete event. One form of progress can be the resolution of a specific problem and the struggle it entails. There are obstacles and anxieties along the way. When they hire your product they are simultaneously firing something else. All notes from Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen.

The 3 aspects of a job Functional job (What something does and how it works) Emotional job (How I feel buying and using this product) Social job (How others perceive me for buying and using this product) Talk about coke, crossfit.

A job is also about process “Satisfying a job means not only creating a product for it, 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.” - Clayton Christensen, Competing Against Luck The processes of an innovative solution can’t easily be copied or observed by competitors. In this way, a product company is also a services company.

Example jobs (taken from Competing Against Luck) QuickBooks: Have the confidence that financial mechanics are operating efficiently - invoices sent, cash collected, and bills paid. The progress is more about what people didn’t want to do than what they did. Competitors are hiring another person to do the books, spending extra hours at the office doing it themselves, figuring out how to use a spreadsheet to do it, a shoebox of receipts with no hope of being sorted through. Created software that easily showed bills paid/received, Sargento Thin Cheese slices: Have an enjoyable cheese experience on my daily sandwich without all the calories, fat and guilt that come with it. Created thin cheese to ease the guilt. Marketing campaign to allow people to understand they can have both chips and cheese and feel great about it.

Things to think about What are the metrics that matter to the customer? Are our processes supporting the things customers are hiring us to do? Are there segments with distinct jobs that we are inadequately serving with a one- size-fits-none solution? What experiences do customers seek in order to make progress? What obstacles must be removed for them to be successful?