JTBD.2 – Describing your job and getting the NEEDS right.
This is part two of a series of six articles on Jobs-to-be-done.
Describing your job – from a customer perspective.
It’s one of the inescapable facts of life that, as a business, you often start with the business, be it your existing business, or with the one you want to build. That’s all fine and well, but in order to describe your job in a way that your customers would, it might actually complicate things. Often, even the job you are doing isn’t what you initially think it is. Many very successful companies have understood what exactly they are delivering, how their customers get to hear about them, and what makes them the first choice among consumers. They have found their niche. They fill a need.
If this is where you want to be, switch your business mind with the customers’ perspective. Start off by describing your job – and you will probably want to revisit that description later when you’ve learned more. Why? Because it’s almost certain your job wording will be wrong. As you’re now aware of this, it should be easier to name that job and revisit it later.
Let’s do this with a fictional example that you might be able to relate to. I know I can because I have that job on offer – and no one really does deliver on it: As a music streaming customer, I listen to music, a lot. Real music, however, is live. And I tend to miss out on a lot of opportunities to see my favorite bands.
My job: ‘alert me of upcoming concerts for my favorite bands’.
Let’s add some context: often, I miss out on my favorite bands because they are not playing at the major venues and don’t have the budget to advertise on a large scale. And they also don’t know of me – which I understand as my listening habits change over time; for many bands, I won’t be a lifetime fan.
Be more specific
Let’s turn that into a description. I’ll start with the job title:
Job-to-be-done: Experience my favorite music, live.
And to add further detail, here’s more background – basically just my rationale why this would be great and why it makes so much sense:
Making more sense
Good. Now you have your first job description. But, to be honest: you will be pretty much the only person who knows this as a good description. It’s most likely written in your own words, and it’s also almost definitely about your job, not about the user’s That’s fine though, because now we’ll get all of that user perspective out of your head and on paper.
Enter the JTBD forces push, pull, anxiety and habit.
- Anxiety is all the user’s fears of change. It is about insecurity (what will happen if I try this?), but also about lack of trust (is this really the right service for me?).
- Push is the pain of the current situation that drives the user to seek out alternatives. It can simply be unhappiness, a lack of options, or a more concrete pain that welcomes change.
- Habit is all that is warm and fuzzy about the current state. It is what we’ve learnt to master, and why we don’t see the obvious alternatives in front of us.
- Pull is the desire we feel when we become aware of the possibilities of a new situation. It is the (real or apparent) appeal of what we do not have now, and the rational appeal of a better way.
We all have experienced these forces, and with a bit of practice, it is a good categorization of all our accumulated knowledge and the assumptions we hold of our users. So let’s get them out of our system. You can do this in 30 minutes, and simply write post-its until your brain runs dry.
What is important, and what is true?
The following exercise was born out of a whim, but we found it to be magic. It’s actually very simple:
- Draw a coordinate system. Right is true. Up is important.
- Be brutally honest. Put the cards where they really belong.
To add some more explanation: we are trying to find out what really matters both to our users and to us trying to be hired by as many users out there as possible. We thus need to understand how personally important a card we just wrote is to our users. If it does not really matter to them, it will not be the card that wins them over.
But we also need to understand how true the card is: a card is true if we‘re 100% certain that 100% of our users experience that force. If it’s only 10% of our users, the card is not true. If we don’t know for sure, it’s not true, either. If we feel we have an issue here because there is a card that could really be the key force, stop this exercise right here. Stop, validate your hypothesis, come back again and move the card to the right.
Now, step back and take a look at the prioritized forces. It should be easy from hereon in to write a better description of the job.
Add what counts as success
Are we there yet? Not really…what we still need is a metric for success – and it better be one that’s not a business metric (“we are successful when we have X users, and Y clicks”). So how do we add that bit of understanding that’s critical for our product to succeed? Why should our customers choose to hire us? What makes them think ‘good job’ after engaging us?
As Tony Ulwick (with a lot of JTBD experience) puts it:
A desired outcome is a metric that customers use to measure success when getting a job done.
Is there a format available to help us define that metric? Again, Tony has just what we’re looking for:
This can really help to understand why you might be chosen over your competition: because you deliver on that metric.
One helpful hint: If you’re stuck, try thinking of at least two metrics. One should define the user’s first-time usage – what would be the metric for a ‘job interview’ with her? The other metric should apply to the user’s decision if she should come back to see you more often – what makes her prefer you over your competition?
Next steps
{This will become available soon: You can continue to the next part in this series, adding detail to your JTBD description.}
But – if that is overkill for what you do – you can also choose to leave it here. You already took the main, the hardest step. You have defined situation, motivation and expected outcome of the job. And you have decided how your users will measure you both before and after they’ve hired you. You have chosen their perspective.
