Jobs to Be Done: A Roadmap for Customer-Centered Innovation

by Stephen Wunker, Jessica Wattman, David Farber

In a challenging economy filled with nimble competitors, no one can afford to stagnate. Yet innovation is notoriously difficult. Only one in 100 new products is successful enough to cover development costs, and even fewer impact a company's growth trajectory. So how do you pinpoint the winning ideas that customers will love?

Sifting through purchasing data for clues about what might sell and haphazardly brainstorming ideas are typical strategies. But Jobs to Be Done offers a far more precise and effective approach: determining the drivers of customer behavior - those functional and emotional goals that people want to achieve. Using the Jobs method, it becomes easy to see that people don't really need a quarter-inch drill bit but a quarter-inch hole. They're not buying just ice cream but also celebration, bonding, and indulgence. This simple shift in perspective opens up new insights about your customers and a wealth of hidden opportunities. Social media newcomer Snapchat, for example, used the Jobs process to capture the millennial demographic. By reducing functionality, the company satisfied its users' unmet need to document real life in the moment, without filters and "like" buttons.

Packed with similar examples from every industry, this complete innovation guide explains both foundational concepts and a detailed action plan developed by innovation expert Stephen Wunker and his team. From unlocking customer insights to ideation to iteration, you'll learn how to:
- Figure out what customers really want, even if they can't express it
- Sort out valuable insights from less useful customer data
- Dig into the underlying "why" of consumer behavior, not just the "what"
- Target unaddressed jobs to be done that have the power to disrupt
- Identify key customer segments you didn't know existed
- Develop solutions that work with ingrained habits, not against them
- Use a Jobs-based lens to get a broader view of the competition
- Generate better ideas in brainstorming sessions and vet your solutions
- Sidestep common mistakes, such as engaging in "feature wars"
- Spot emerging trends that are changing how customers will behave
- Work customer insights into the design process
- And much more

Jobs to Be Done gives you a clear-cut framework for thinking about your business, outlines a road map for discovering new markets, new products, and new services, and helps you generate creative opportunities to innovate your way to success.

Genres: Business, Design, Nonfiction, Entrepreneurship, Leadership

224 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2016

About the author

STEPHEN WUNKER was a long-time colleague of innovation thought leader Clayton Christensen, led development of one of the first smartphones, and now runs New Markets Advisors. He has written for publications including Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and The Financial Times.

Reviews

[Leah · Rating 2 out of 5]

(1.5/5 stars) This book wasn't what I was expecting lol I thought it was going to push me to get more organized and productive but it just made me think about business processes and customer centric ideations lol

I think it's also important to mention that this book is only good for it's time. It provides many real life examples that 10 years from now people would not relate to. Like how Uber has a variety of Uber services like Uber X etc.

It's a good book if you are in Customer Insights and Analytics for a corporation. It makes you delve into what your company/customer really wants/needs. It provides examples of thinking outside of the box and creative ideas for experimenting with products and marketing ideas.

When you brainstorm about a new product you should try focusing on the pain point of something and think of something that can fix it instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

[Juan Camilo Vélez Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aunque mi popularidad en esta red social (Goodreads) es pobre, se que los que me conocen saben de mi pasión por el diseño centrado en el humano, o como se conoce más popularmente diseño centrado en el usuario. Si usted no me conoce y por primera vez escucha el término, básicamente consiste en entender muy bien a los disfrutadores de los productos y servicios para luego producir soluciones que realmente impacten positivamente sus vidas, eso si, sin perjuicio de la calidad de vida de los demás, del medio ambiente y de la sociedad en general.

Este es el tema central de este libro, un abordaje bastante interesante para llegar a conocer lo sustancial de las personas antes de ponerse a diseñar productos, servicios y ofertas de valor. El autor, dice el prólogo, es el fundador del método de Jobs to be done lo cual hace de la lectura un espacio apasionante porque línea a línea estás consumiendo conocimiento de la fuente primaria.

Aunque el libro no lo logré encontrar en español (lo que es una tendencia en los libros de diseño y marketing) se deja leer muy fácil ya que explica un proceso con muy buenos diagramas y muy buenos ejemplos que, ñoños como yo, podemos ir a buscar en internet y encontrarlos fácilmente en español para profundizar el tema leído.

Confieso que compré este libro porque está de moda en un pequeño nicho profesional que se dedica al diseño centrado en el humano y al mercadeo en el que me muevo. El job to be done está muy pegado últimamente en estos foros y como no me gusta hablar de lo que no se, pues emprendí el viaje de leerlo. La verdad no me arrepiento porque encontré la profundidad que necesitaba en el tema, además pude incorporar un par de métodos en los procesos de mi empresa que en un par de ejercicios de implementación que hice con unos clientes arrojó resultados SORPRENDENTES.

Hay un tema que me da tristeza después de leer el libro y es que el término "Jobs to be done" corre la misma suerte de los términos "coaching", "valor agregado", "experiencia de usuario" que se han popularizado al punto que cualquier persona que lee una entrada de blog ya habla con propiedad del asunto y se auto proclama gurú de la materia sin tener la profundidad, o al menos el fundamento de pensamiento (por no decir fundamento teórico ya que esto no es ciencia en su estricto significado) que tienen los estudiados y practicantes expertos del tema.

No crean todavía mucho en el que les diga que sabe de "jobs to be done", creo que es una materia inexplorada diría que en el mundo entero, me atrevo a decir que nadie tiene una experiencia de 10.000 horas acumuladas para decir que domina el tema con maestría. Lo que si les digo es que crean en todo aquel que les diga que hará un approach de solución desde los jobs to be done y que lo quiere explorar con usted a ver hasta dónde llegan. Le auguro un buen puerto si co-crean y se arriesgan a practicar con rigor el método.

Lectura obligada para:
- Personas de mercadeo
- Personas de innovación
- Personas de investigación de mercados
- Personas de diseño de producto
- Gerentes generales y cargos directivos

[Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a succinct book on the jobs-to-be-done theory as a market research and business planning methodology. It first grounds the reader in the theory and its history, and is then broken out into the following sections:

PART I: UNDERSTANDING JOBS TO BE DONE:

KNOW WHERE YOU'RE STARTING FROM
1. Jobs: What customers are trying to get done
2. Job Drivers: Why customers have different jobs
3. Current approaches and pain points

CHART THE DESTINATION AND ROADBLOCKS
4. Success Criteria: The customer's definition of a win
5. Obstacles: What holds new ideas back

MAKE THE TRIP WORTHWHILE
6. Value: How insights become revenue
7. Competition: Becoming king of the road

PART II: USING JOBS TO BE DONE TO BUILD GREAT IDEAS: Making Success Repeatable

8. Establish objectives
9. Plan your approach
10. Generate ideas
11. Reframe your perspective
12. Experiment and iterate

So the first half of the book is largely about the tactics of jobs research and creating what the authors call a "Jobs Atlas." The second half is about how to build on the jobs findings to develop a business plan to bring a new offering to market.

My favorite quotes:

--"Companies often invest heavily to understand the so-called voice of the customer . . . Problems arise when they try to figure out what to do with all the information; they lack a structured way of determining what's important and what's not." pg. 4

--"Bad brainstorming sessions occur when only a few people participate, shouting out easy ideas to impress others . . . Give everyone a chance to quietly reflect and ideate." pg. 152

[Pascal Wagner · Rating 2 out of 5]

—-Summary—-
I was hoping to get a lot more out of this book but if you’ve been in business for a while, it shares information that you likely intuitively know. I think this would be a much better book to read if you were starting your first company.

---Notes---
The Jobs to be Done framework succeeds because it focuses innovation on the right questions rather than having them jump directly into devising solutions. But it is actually the framing of problems that often leads to breakthrough ideas. Companies can waste thousands of hours and risk undertaking bad projects because they miss the critical and often underappreciated step of laying out very clear and rigorously defined problem statements. (17)

Breakthroughs come from reimagining problems, not from creating an incrementally better solution to a well-understood challenge. To help people look at their challenges in a different way, we tell them to dig into the underlying "why" of consumer behavior and not just focus on the "what." For instance, parents may choose to bring their children to a movie on a Saturday afternoon, but the underlying job is to keep the kids entertained. A movie is just one of the possible ways of satisfying that job. The movie theater's true competition is not merely other cinemas but also playgrounds, arcades, and other diversions (17).

Designing for some theoretical average user can undermine the potential gains you may get from understanding distinct types of customers' jobs to be done (30).

Much like the problem of adding too many features, attempting to satisfy too many jobs leaves you with a complicated, expensive, one-size-fits-none product (32).

The company started talking in depth to its users. It didn't ask initially for specific ideas for improvement but rather tried to understand key jobs in certain contexts. When were the last three time you used the site? Why did you do that? If you hadn't used the site, what would you have done? How did using the site make you feel? What feelings were important to you then? How did the site's use fit into the broader set of things you were trying to accomplish? (35)

Common strategies for creating success (67)
-Reduce the effort, time, resources or money customers must expend to satisfy a job. [Simple Bank, online bank that eliminates common fees and reduces the effort needed to budget for expenses]
-Eliminate the confusion or complexity of using the product [iPhone, phone that has fewer capabilities than its Android counterparts, but vastly simplifies the user experience]
- Increase the number of jobs a customer can satisfy [Microsoft Office, Suite of computer programs that allows users to address a broad range of business challenges across job titles]
- Improve the quality of the end product or the speed of carrying out the task [Swiffer, A sweeping tool that makes it extremely quick to remove light debris from floors]
- Enhance the ease or comfort of using the product [OXO, Kitchen products that add a premium feel to basic tools (e.g. vegetable peelers with comfortable grips, no-bend measuring cups]
- Balance the satisfaction of functional and emotional jobs [Vanguard Target Funds, Self-adjusting mutual funds that help you save for retirement while reducing worries about keeping up with economic changes]
- Allow satisfaction among a wider variety of users or stakeholders [Kix, Breakfast cereal that tastes good for children, but meets nutritional standards of parents]

Assessing the viability of your ideas (94):
- Switching costs, how easily can customers leave their current solutions?
- Revenue stability, do additional sales require recruiting new customers, or are there add-on or repurchase occasions?
- Differentation, do you satisfy jobs in a way that is unique from competitors or difficult to replicate?
- Cost structure, will your product model changes (or remain optimal) as you acquire more customers?
- Scalability, what new infrastructure is required as the business scales?


The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him. One reason for this is, that nobody pays for a "product". What is paid for is the satisfaction. But nobody can make or supply satisfaction as such - at best, only the means to attaining it can be sold and delivered. Because the customers buys satisfaction, all goods and services compete intensively with goods and services that look quite different, seem to serve entirely different functions, are made, distributed, sold differently - but are alternative means for the customer to obtain the same satisfaction (100).

One example that stuck out was a prestigious racquet and lifestyle club in the UK. After engaging in some qualitative research with existing members, the club came to an interesting realization. Upon asking these members what jobs they were trying to get done in their first weeks and months, the club noticed that the answer of "play tennis or squash" was actually showing up much lower on the list than expected. On one end of the spectrum, members talked about jobs related to staying fit and healthy or enhancing their overall well-being. On the other end of the spectrum, however, a surprising number of members talked about how they joined the club as a way of meeting people (107).

When a facilitator simply asks for ideas and the first ideas are safe and unoriginal, the tone has been set. One researcher found that by having people record several ideas on their own first - without being influenced by ideas from others - groups generated 20% more ideas and 42% more original ideas (143).

[Doug McColgin · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's not often that I can't finish a book, but this one could not hold my attention. Perhaps its a matter of mismatched expectations rather than quality, but I simply didn't find value in it.

Having recently finished Competing Against Luck , I was looking for an alternative or complementary perspective on the Jobs To Be Done framework. Instead, this book presents a thoroughly complex pseudo-process that feels like a consultant's "How We Work" deck. Might be perfect for someone who wants to work directly from the recipe, but it doesn't provide much in the way of advancing the subject of empowering the user to think differently.

[Jon Nguyen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bad

This is not a good book if you’re trying to learn about JTBD. I’ve been reading through anything I can to learn more about it, but I found this book particularly bad. It talks about JTBD, but there isn’t a lot of rigor to it, and a lot of the book is just a mishmash of other business/marketing/product development recommendations rather than something specific about JTBD methodology. It’s also very superficial, and they do the annoying thing of pulling out historical examples of successful companies and products to point to why Jobs is successful, when it’s doubtful that those companies used JTBD methodology to achieve that in the first place.

[Patrik Gustafsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I associate jobs in this book to user stories. This book gives a slightly different perspective and a thought through methodology to pick improvements for a product or organization.

[Cindy Lu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an easy to read book about Job-To-Be-Done and the roadmap of applying it for innovation. The core concept is Job Atlas which involves 8 steps to build: 1) Discover the jobs 2) and Job Drivers 3) determine the current approach customers are using 4) and pain points 5) determine the success criteria customers use to evaluate a new solution 6) and obstacles of adopting the new solution 7) assess the value of the new offer and 8) define the field to beat competition. I especially like the summary and examples at the end of the book.

[Arvind Shastry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jobs to be done is a different approach towards product design. This aspect is well explained in the first half of the book. These principles are very relevant for next generation product companies. The second half of the book is about translating these principles into action. Wish the book had done a more thorough job in referencing the new companies and detailing more examples here

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another work read. This one a little entertaining. It does a good job of identifying a framework for customer-centered innovation with a lot of examples, both good and bad. The idea of jobs versus features was a good parallel. Understanding the drivers whether it is a long-term or near-term need. Overall, a good read with relevant information.

[Bruno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simple, clear, actionable guide to customer centric innovation

Clear set of principles explained in a simple way. Gives a good foundations to move foraged and implement customer centric innovation at small and larger scale organizations

[Fernando Javier Castillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a must read if you're in the marketing field and want to change your perspective on how the marketing needs to be managed, also works people in innovation and you're thinking on launching a product.

[Vidit Bhargava · Rating 4 out of 5]

Offers some great insights. And while it may be more of a ‘new perspective to look at things’ it does bring a lot of discipline to what can be really broad processes.

[Amun (Mohamed Elbadwihi) · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5. Great concept. Terrible book.

[Eli Fisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Job's to Be Done is an interesting read. I suggest it to anyone wanting to build a customer-centric product.

The book discusses the Jobs Atlas. This atlas is designed to help a business identify how to provide solutions that enable customers to solve their every day tasks (aka their jobs), while also ensuring these solutions align with the business's goals. The Jobs Atlas is broken into 3 sections.

Know Where You Are Starting From: Understand the jobs customers are trying to accomplish, both functional and emotional. Learn what drives those jobs. What underlying factors make certain jobs more important than others? Use both jobs and job drivers to segment customers who will buy and behave in the same way. Target new product requirements to fulfill the needs of specific customer segments rather than building a "fully loaded, one-size-fits-none" product. Identify who the stakeholders are for the job and what approaches the customers take to solve the job today. Understanding the stake holders and current approaches will inform pain points that innovation can be used to mitigate.

Chart The Destination and Roadblocks: Establish success criteria to measure if a job has been satisfied. Identify potential obstacles in adoption and use. Eliminate as many obstacles to ensure existing and first time buyers have success with your product and continue to purchase new products that help solve their jobs.

Make The Trip Worthwhile: Frame markets in terms of jobs, not products, to understand value. A value-based pricing strategy focused on the jobs being solved enables you to accurately set the price of your product. Measure the value of the product to your organization as well. Is the business model sustainable for the organization? While viewing traditional competition is important, identify non-traditional competitors that also solve the jobs you are working to solve. This helps identify how to position your product in the market and identify areas of nonconsumption (where competitors aren't playing), providing opportunities to grow.

Beyond discussing the structure of the Jobs Atlas, the book continues by showing how to put this atlas into practice. It provides some real world examples of companies using the techniques discussed.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Products and services fail regularly to meet customer expectations but what is going wrong? Companies are asking customers what they want and blindly seek to deliver it; yet not so many seem to analyse what they may need and work from that data point.

This is the central argument expressed by the authors, who believe that people purchase products and services to solve a specific problem or need. If a company can focus on the “jobs to be done” by a product or service for a customer, their innovation, development and sales processes can be much more successful.

It all makes for an interesting read. You can be wise and say that it is an obvious argument, but if that’s the case why are so many seemingly overlooking it? By reading this book maybe you can reboot your mindset and start to look at things in a different light. The style of the book was a little challenging and it felt disjointed, meaning that it was a bit easy to skip over sections, but the central theme and guidance is the main thing.

Comprehensive advice is given throughout so the reader can easily use this book as a blueprint or roadmap for future change. It would be something that you would probably be consulting on many occasions, so the complaint about a disjointed feel may fade away with many visits. It probably affects the initial, sequential read and slightly risks reader interaction and engagement.

It is definitely worthy of consideration in any case, assuming that your company does not already look at what customers need!

Jobs to Be Done, written by Stephen Wunker, Jessica Wattman & David Farber and published by AMACOM Books. ISBN 9780814438039. YYYY

[Shannon Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The core ideas are good and useful and colleagues swear by this book and approach. However I found a lot of the book simplistic in places and having surprising gaps in the approach. Furthermore even though one of the co-authors is a woman I found a lot of the book frustratedly built upon what I see as old fashioned examples that defaulted to gender stereotypes. Also it has a whole chapter on the value of diverse perspectives that somehow manages not to talk about either gender or racial diversity.

Possibly my 3 star rating reflects my prior exposure to most of the ideas and approaches here via working my colleagues who have previously read this and who use these approaches.

I’m also struck both in my colleague’s use and in the book by the likely confusion that occurs from the core language of the book - namely using “jobs to be done” to mean BOTH the “job” that a buyer of a product buys that product to achieve AND to a lesser extent roles within an organization (ie “jobs” in the more usual sense of the term). I think the core insight of focusing on the value and reason your customers buy your products or services is a key one and one that is relevant to nearly all businesses and organizations (where “buy” doesn’t always mean use money to acquire).

So my review is a bit negative. I think this could have been a stronger work.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contents
Introduction: Charting a Roadmap to Great Ideas

Part I Understanding Jobs to be Done: Finding High-Potential Avenues for Growth

Know Where You’re Starting From
Chapter 1. Jobs: What Customers are Trying to Get Done
Chapter 2. Job Drivers: Why Customers Have Different Jobs
Chapter 3. Current Approaches and Pain Points: How Customers Look at Today’s Solutions

Chart the Destination and Roadblocks
Chapter 4. Success Criteria: The Customer’s Definition of a Win
Chapter 5. Obstacles: What Holds New Ideas Back

Make the Trip Worthwhile
Chapter 6. Value: How Insights Become Revenue
Chapter 7. Competition: Becoming King of the Road

Part II Using Jobs to be Done to Build Great Ideas: Making Success Repeatable
Chapter 8. Establish Objectives
Chapter 9. Plan your Approach
Chapter 10. Generate Ideas
Chapter 11. Reframe Your Perspective
Chapter 12. Experiment and Iterate

Afterword: Institutionalizing Jobs to be Done Thinking (Cognizant)
Appendix A: Quick Reference Guide
Appendix B: Jobs in the Public Sector

[Ioannis Papikas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jobs to be done is one of the best frameworks to begin your product analysis, starting from your customer or potential user and understanding what they truly need, how they feel when they are trying to achieve it and what they are willing to do in order to reach their goal.

This book analyses the jobs to be done in simple, one step at a time chapters, on how to build your ideal jobs to be done and continue from there.

Jobs to be done are the first step, and can be named one of the most important, in a product roadmap and it's the mission generator for the entire business. Combining Jobs to be done with missions, OKRs and the Gibson Product Strategy model is the perfect start for a good overall Product Strategy planning!

[Noushin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Mak­ing a ‘bet­ter’ prod­uct is the easy part of in­no­va­tion. The hard part is en­sur­ing that your new prod­uct is bet­ter for the right peo­ple in the right ways.”

"Much like the prob­lem of adding too many fea­tures, at­tempt­ing to sat­isfy too many jobs leaves you with a com­pli­cated, ex­pen­sive, one-size-fits-none prod­uct.”

"If I had an hour to solve a prob­lem, I’d spend 55 min­utes think­ing about the prob­lem and five min­utes think­ing about so­lu­tions.” (Al­bert Ein­stein)

[Abhi Yerra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Using a methodology of approaching innovation in terms of not Problem-Solution but as a Job that Needs to Be Done. Most of the time this methodology doesn’t even have a to be tangible as an emotional job is just as important. Overall a short and quick book to read but still seems to be a rephrasing of existing books like Blue Ocean Strategy. Still a good refresher.

[Melih · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book presents itself as a practical guide do instituting Jobs to be Done theory in a corporation, but spends its entirety at the 45k foot level.

There’s clearly a ton of experience in the authors, but whether they’re under NDA or just not getting into the details - it’s shared only at an abstract, theoretical level.

Bummer 🙁

[May · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful approach for innovation, that fits well with other approaches such as business model canvas and lean startup. The last chapters are too much bragging about their own success stories, making it lose credibility somehow. It would have been nice to instead hear more about how they refined the method also by sharing failures/risks of the method.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping this would be less prescriptive and more about the theory. I enjoyed the first half of the book much more, and thought the 2nd half, which included information like lists of steps to perform, was too specific. I'd rather this focused on Jobs to Be Done & gave less information about strategy and other related topics that I would look to other places to learn.

[Gerard Chiva · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was expecting a more practical book. If you already know something about JTBD I wouldn't recommend it.
The book sits on the strategic level rather than the tactical level. It has some good stuff with regards to how to plan your product discovery and product strategy, but if you want to learn JTBD this is not the book for you. I'd rather go to "What Customers Want" from Anthony Ulwick.

[Wei-Meng · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a great read if you're beginning to learn about user research or customer development. But if you have some familiarity with the space, this book will leave you wanting something more in-depth and detailed, especially with its case studies. I'm in the latter camp, so the book wasn't a good fit for my situation.

[Joel Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

After reading the summary and reviews, I was expecting the book to provide more prescriptive guidance on a JTBD framework. While the content was a good overview of JTBD, it didn't actually provide any useful information on how to do any of the steps at a level that I found useful.

[Kevin Jarvis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some important messages here and a useful overall framework for how to approach a market from a “jobs” perspective, but it’s a little bit surface level and I would like to have seen a lot more practical guidance.

[Roemer Linkers · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book barely scratches the surface of the jobs to be done principle. Filled with superficial examples. Second half just describes general innovation steps. Did not provide me the information I was looking for.

[Jeremy Howlett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly some things that I will need to implement in my strategies to innovate. I fell in love with jobs their last year. This playbook helps to give actions to make it a part of my business strategy.