Jobs-to-be-Done Thinking
Sure - people buy products and services to get jobs done, but that is just the tip of the innovation theory iceberg. Over the past 20 years, Strategyn discovered that viewing company growth initiatives from a customer’s perspective changes everything about the innovation process - from market selection and understanding customer needs to opportunity identification, market segmentation, product strategy and solution development.
Many companies still have a product-centric view of the world. This means they define their markets around products or technology; they try to uncover customer needs by asking customers how to make a product better; they segment their markets using demographic or psychographic classification schemes. This also means they think innovation begins with a product idea and that innovation is all about generating and managing thousands of ideas through some kind of filtering process. This thinking leads them to 2% to 20% success rates that most companies see today when introducing new products.
Generating ideas and hoping they are in attractive markets, address unmet customer needs and are better than competing solutions is a high-risk guessing game. Why take this risk? Viewing the market from a jobs-to-be-done perspective opens the door to a new and vastly superior approach to innovation and growth.
Jobs-to-be-done thinking is based on a customer-centric view of the market. It defines markets, needs and opportunities through the eyes of the customer.
For example, we have discovered that in any market, customers consider between 50 and 150 metrics when assessing how well a product or service enables them to successfully execute any job. These metrics (or desired outcomes) are the customer’s needs – and they can be captured, prioritized and effectively used to guide a company’s strategy and innovation efforts.
When all these metrics are known up front in the innovation process, success is 5 times more likely. Why? Because instead of generating ideas and hoping they meet important customer criteria, product and service solutions are systematically constructed to address the metrics customers use to judge the creation of value.
Jobs-to-be-done thinking transforms the art of innovation into a science.
