They're not buying ice cream, for example, but celebration, bonding, and indulgence. COPYRIGHT ©2020, CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN INSTITUTE – ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Modularity Theory is a framework for explaining how different parts of a product's architecture relate to one another and consequently affect metrics of production and adoption. First popularized by Clayton Christensen, the Jobs to be Done theory argues that people purchase products and services to solve a specific problem. Among others, this applies to students, teachers, parents, patients, and physicians, as well as underserved and underprivileged populations for whom solutions are often misaligned with their true priorities. Jobs to be done (JTBD) is a framework for understanding customers and their motivations for adopting a new product or service. As its name suggests, the concept is based on the notion that people buy products and services to “get a job done.” By understanding what that “job” is, businesses can create solutions that will win the marketplace. BY CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN, TADDY HALL, KAREN DILLON, AND DAVID S. DUNCAN SPOTLIGHT Determining how Jobs came to be associated with tasks and activities is tricky. “Focusing a product and its brand on a job creates differentiation,” he explained. Denise is the author of the bestselling book What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest (Jossey-Bass) and the new book FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World's Greatest Companies. The Job To Be Done (JTBD) is a framework for viewing your products and solutions in terms of the jobs customers are trying to get done. She has addressed business leaders around the world at corporate events such as Facebook, NFL, and Lexus, and conferences including International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), The Art of Marketing, and Sustainable Brands. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. She served as lead strategist at advertising agencies for Burger King and Land Rover and as the marketing leader and analyst for Jack in the Box restaurants and Spiegel catalogs. They then brought in two consultants to examine the problem, who were surprised to find that quite a few milkshakes were being sold in the morning. We are saddened by the passing of our friend and founder Clayton Christensen. Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. The jobs-to-be-done framework is a tool for evaluating the circumstances that arise in customers’ lives. "Looking at the market from the function of a product really originates from your competitors or your own employees deciding what you need," he says. They double down on market research, amass enormous amounts of customer data, and spend on advanced analytics in an effort to understand who customers are. First popularized by Clayton Christensen, the Jobs to be Done theory argues that people purchase products and services to solve a specific problem. Learn more at http://deniseleeyohn.com . There's a better way. The concept of Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) was popularised by Harvard Business Professor, Clayton Christensen (same dude behind The Innovator’s Dilemma) et al in a … “When we buy a product, we essentially ‘hire’ something to get a job done. The swiss army knife, for example, helps customers get dozens of jobs done, and the smartphone helps customers get thousands of jobs done. Now that differentiation is increasingly difficult to establish, much less maintain, adhering to his advice is even more important. News media including FOX Business TV, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times call on Denise when they want an expert point-of-view on hot business issues. The “jobs to be done” theory of innovation presents an approach to how companies introduce successful new products and services that remains as counter-intuitive—and relevant—today as it was when Christensen first shared the idea back in 2005. If they don’t, people might hire the product to do a job it wasn’t intended to do which leads to customer disappointment and company misdirection. Personas help designers understand and empathize with customers and design better products when they have specific, not generic, users in mind. Put Jobs-to-be-Done Theory (JTBD) into practice with Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI). He cautioned not to ignore the evidence that products that do specific jobs well—and are marketed with that precise target—command premium pricing and compete in markets much larger than those defined by product categories. Jobs-to-Be-Done: A Useful Tool to Focus on Outcomes Rather than Features. By Clayton M. Christensen, David S. Duncan, Karen Dillon and Taddy Hall. All Rights Reserved. He also studies demand for innovative resources and practices across the K–12 education system using the Jobs to Be Done Theory. A Message From The Christensen Institute. But what if that approach, giving people what we think they need, is flawed? Understanding the “job” for which customers hire a product or service helps innovators more accurately develop products that align with what customers are already trying to accomplish. Did it contain the right amount of syrup? © 2020 Forbes Media LLC. Popularity of purpose. The former can indicate how a product should be designed to be useful to customers while the latter points to how to give them an entirely new option for accomplishing their goal. A fast food chain interested in improving milkshake sales spent months doing market research, peppering customers with questions about their milkshakes. Christensen argued, however, that “the job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis for a marketer who hopes to develop products that customers will buy.” Truly useful products are designed through the lens of a customer’s circumstances Companies don’t need more data; they need different insights. Like personas, use cases can be very helpful in the design process because they can identify and clarify a user’s requirements. It involves identifying for which goals customers “hire” your product (and, ideally, also finding out if there are competitor products that these users are ready … Use of use cases. People need health solutions that help them do what matters most to them, instead of requiring them to rearrange their priorities. But also like personas, use cases are derived from a customer’s current state. “With an understanding of the ‘job’ for which customers find themselves ‘hiring’ a product or service, companies can more accurately develop and market products well-tailored to what customers are already trying to do.”. Prevalent personas. The Jobs Roadmap and the Jobs to be Done approach enable you to learn why people buy certain items – and not others – to fulfill tasks they must do. Was it chocolatey enough? A Job-to-be-Done is solution agnostic. CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN: McDonald’s, a number of years ago, as this idea of the jobs to be done was emerging, they decided that they needed to increase the sales of their milkshakes. Clayton worked tirelessly to better understand the nature of innovation. A selfie, he explained, “depicts how that person wants to be seen by others.” As such using semiotic analysis on selfies would reveal why someone is doing something and what progress they seek, thus suggesting how they might perceive a new product and its value. In this instance, the competitor wasn’t other milkshakes, but easily consumable breakfast foods like bagels or bananas, giving the chain an entirely new perspective on ways to compete. September 2016 ... Jobs-to-be-done theory can transform your understanding of customer choice in a way that no amount of data ever could, because it gets at the causal driver behind a purchase. in his Innovator's Solution and called "jobs to be done" or "outcomes that customers are seeking". Image Source: wbur.org Professor Clay Christensen has talked about: People don’t simply buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress. Consulting clients have included Target, Oakley, Dunkin' Donuts, and other leading companies. Want people to better manage their own health? Use cases identify scenarios, while JTBD identifies needs. In other words, the JTBD is the reason why your customers hire your product or service. Read the following article, to get more insight into the connection between the Jobs-to-Be-Done concept and the Strategy. Its roots lie in revolutionary work by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Companies use sentiment analysis to understand what customers are saying about them, how they feel about them, what aspects of their offering customers care about, etc. Christensen mentions examples of Ulwick and Richard Pedi of Gage Foods with the way of thinking about market structure used in the chapter "What Products Will Customers Want to Buy?" While conventional marketing focuses on market demographics or product attributes, Jobs Theory goes beyond superficial categories to expose the functional, social, and emotional dimensions that explain why customers make the choices they do. The theory of Jobs to Be Done is a framework for better understanding customer behavior. “Customers…often buy things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve,” the Christensen Institute explains. It makes sense for companies to espouse lofty goals and ideals that appeal to today’s more conscientious customers, employees, and other stakeholders. The minimum viable product (MVP) approach to innovation emphasizes learning from customers during the product development process. Denise is the author. JTBD challenges prevalent notions in business today—such as the use of personas and Minimum Viable Products (MVP)—and provides instruction on how to improve the predictability and profitability of innovations: Demand for data. In 1999, Tony introduced Clayton Christensen to the idea that "people have underlying needs or processes in their lives, that they are addressing in some way right now" - an … The Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) named her blog as one of the "Top 20 Marketing Blogs that Executives Actually Read." His work focuses on identifying strategies to scale student-centered learning in K–12 education through Disruptive Innovation. Unlimited appeal. Semiotics is the study of signs and their meaning—it decodes underlying messages and meanings. The core functional job is solution agnostic — independent of … The “job” has a lot of “requirements” — not just functional but also … Rather than looking just at what people buy, examine the … Instead of caring about thickness or flavor, customers were actually drawn to the fact that it was relatively tidy and could stave off hunger until lunch. Denise went on to head Sony Electronic Inc.’s first ever brand office, where she was the vice president/general manager of brand and strategy and garnered major corporate awards. Access frameworks, templates, examples and case studies. Philip Kotler calls Tony Ulwick “the Deming of innovation.” Clayton Christensen credits him with “bringing predictability to innovation.” No doubt, this approach has saved countless companies time and money and prevented many failed innovations. Christensen, who is planning to publish a book on the subject of jobs-to-be-done marketing, explains that there's an important difference between determining a product's function and its job. With her expertise and inspiring approach, Denise has become an in-demand keynote speaker. “Jobs to Be Done” Is innovation inherently a hit-or-miss endeavor? A Job-to-be-Done is stable over time. His original “Jobs to be Done” concept concerns the tasks people must get done to lead their lives. Christensen believed companies should signal to customers when they should and should not buy the product. But when these archetypes are derived from demographic information and existing behaviors and product usage, they may describe but they don’t prescribe. As Christensen wrote, “New growth markets are created when innovating companies design a product and position its brand on a job for which no optimal product yet exists.”. Design a business around a job-to-be-done. You need to know the why behind the what. By getting prototypes into the hands of users early on, companies can get valuable feedback that will help them develop products that customers want and will buy. But this gave no new insights. Conventional thinking on developing and marketing innovations, Christensen observed, focuses on knowing more and more about customers, which may or may not lead to productive insights about the products they actually would be interested in. The jobs-to-be-done framework emerged as a helpful way to look at customer motivations in business settings. Billions of dollars are spent every year providing needs for poor people. Denise Lee Yohn is the go-to expert on brand leadership for national media outlets, an in-demand speaker and consultant, and an influential writer. CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN: McDonald’s, a number of years ago, as this idea of the jobs to be done was emerging, they decided that they needed to increase the sales of their milkshakes. In 1999, Tony introduced Clayton Christensen to the idea that “people have underlying needs or processes in their lives, that they are addressing in some way right now”—an insight that was to become Jobs-to-be-Done Theory. “For me, this is a neat idea,” Christensen writes of the Theory of Jobs to Be Done. Companies regularly use target customer personas. Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the “average” customer in their category may do—but they often buy things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve. Categorize the Jobs to be Done. But fielding an MVP should not involve letting customers determine the purpose of it. To generate truly unique customer insights and predict their behavior, companies should also use semiotic analysis. Christensen astutely observed, “Customers make the choices they make to bring a product or service into their lives not because they’re dying to purchase something.” Given the nearly universal access and proliferation of choices available to customers today, the JTBD theory of innovation makes sense now more than ever. With access to data and tools readily available today, companies are consumed with the quest for more and more data. But over 15 years ago, Christensen proposed a more practical, and perhaps more attainable, concept of purpose. As students begin to see that school is a solution that they can "hire" in their lives to help them have friends and feel successful, a predictable result emerges—they engage. Not if you understand why customers make the choices they do. That is, personas may provide a rich understanding of what someone is doing today, but they don’t reveal what trade-offs or work-arounds they are accepting because there is no alternative—nor what that person really wants to do and the value of accomplishing it. Christensen first articulated this outcome-driven innovation in a 2005 paper for the Harvard Business Review titled The Cause and the Cure of Marketing Malpractice, writing: "When people find themselves needing to get a job done, they essentially hire products to do that job … Having a meaningful purpose beyond making a profit has become a popular notion among business leaders. What are the high-level jobs-to-be-done? Defining markets While conventional marketing focuses on market demographics or product attributes, Jobs Theory goes beyond superficial categories to expose the functional, social, and emotional dimensions that explain why customers make the choices they do. But he observed, “Focus is scary,” and companies tend to market their products without ties to a job, in “the myopic hope” that they will appeal to as many people as possible. Jobs-to-be-Done Theory proposes that in order to understand customer needs in a way that makes innovation predictable, companies should stop focusing on the product or the customer and instead focus on the underlying process or “job” the customer is trying to get done. The phrase Jobs to be Done, with regards to an innovation ideology, was first used by Clayton Christensen (Christensen 2003). JTBD instead builds on Theodore Levitt’s insight, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. Sentiments vs. semiotics. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. The recent passing of Harvard Business School professor and innovation expert Clay Christensen provides good reason to revisit one of the key business concepts he introduced. After conducting in-depth interviews, the team discovered that customers were buying milkshakes for breakfast during their morning commute. The “ jobs to be done” theory of innovation presents an approach to how companies introduce successful new products and services that remains as counter-intuitive—and relevant—today as it … Thick enough? Jobs to Be Done The theory of Jobs to Be Done is a framework for better understanding customer behavior. Christensen suggested that when a company communicates the job a product is designed to do, it is also communicating what jobs the product should not be hired to do. Thomas Arnett is a senior research fellow in education for the Christensen Institute. The Jobs-to-Be-Done framework is a representations of user needs born out of qualitative user research, such as field studies, interviews, and discount usability testing. They’re not buying ice cream, for example, but celebration, bonding, and indulgence. It was a privilege to work alongside him and learn from his intellect and exemplary kindness and compassion. Denise initially cultivated her brand-building approaches through several high-level positions in advertising and client-side marketing. Tradução por http://bmgenbrasil.com Vídeo original: https://www.phoenix.edu/lectures/clayton-christensen/milkshakes-understanding-the-job.html A recent article by Christensen described how selfies are signs, providing clues that bridge the gap between what customers say and what they actually do. Christensen ’s approach has become known as the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) theory. Companies don’t need more data; they need, EY & Citi On The Importance Of Resilience And Innovation, Impact 50: Investors Seeking Profit — And Pushing For Change, Michigan Economic Development Corporation BrandVoice. We call this progress the “job” they are trying to get done, and understanding this opens a world of innovation possibilities. Denise enjoys challenging readers to think differently about brand-building in her regular contributions to Harvard Business Review and Forbes, and has been a sought-after writer for publications including Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Knowledge@Wharton, ChangeThis, Seeking Alpha, QSR Magazine, among others. They want a quarter-inch hole!”—and provides a more reliable path to new product success by seeking to understand what the customer is trying to do. He called products that are tightly associated with the jobs for which they are meant to be hired “purpose brands.” For example, he described how FedEx designed its service to fill the “I-need-to-send-this-from-here-to-there-with-perfect-certainty-as-fast-as-possible” job and as a result, “FedEx became a purpose brand—in fact, it became a verb in the international language of business that is inextricably linked with that specific job.” Before a company sets its sights on fulfilling a higher purpose, it should first create something that fills an unmet customer need and does it well. Denise Lee Yohn is the go-to expert on brand leadership for national media outlets, an in-demand speaker and consultant, and an influential writer. Jobs-to-be-done theory tells us that the more jobs a product can help a customer get done, the more valuable that product is as a product platform in that space. The Jobs-To-Be-Done theory was popularized by Professor Clayton Christensen from Harvard Business School. MVP without a POV. A functional job-to-be-done is often a job that customers have …