When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become Great at Making Products People Will Buy PDF

i © 2016 Alan Klement All rights reserved. ISBN: 1534873066 ISBN 13: 9781534873063 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911449 LCCN Imprint Name: NYC Publishing Table of Contents Acknowledgements 8 1. Challenges and Hope 1 Challeng...

i © 2016 Alan Klement All rights reserved. ISBN: 1534873066 ISBN 13: 9781534873063 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911449 LCCN Imprint Name: NYC Publishing Table of Contents Acknowledgements 8 1. Challenges and Hope 1 Challenges 1 Hope 7 About me 9 How to be successful with JTBD and this book 10 Abandon every MBA, all you who enter 10 2. What Is JTBD? 13 Where does JTBD come from? 13 What is a Job? What makes it Done? 16 What isn’t a JTBD? 18 3. What Are the Principles of JTBD? 24 JTBD principles 24 4. Case Study: Dan and Clarity 30 What’s the JTBD? 36 Put it to work 37 5. Case Study: Anthony and Form Theatricals 40 What’s the JTBD? 47 Put it to work 48 6. Case Study: Morgan and YourGrocer 50 What’s the JTBD? 57 Put it to work 57 7. The Forces of Progress 60 Forces that oppose each other 60 Unpacking demand generation 61 Push and pull shape the JTBD 63 Unpacking demand reduction 65 Put it to work 68 8. Jobs Remain while Solutions Come and Go 70  Apple destroys its number-one product 70 New innovations replace old ones 72 Create and destroy. Hire and fire. 76 Put it to work 78 9. When You Define Competition Wrong 81 Too “kool” for school? 81 Why did the chotuKool flop? 83 The mainframe versus the PC 87 Don’t be fooled by randomness 93 Put it to work 95 10. Case Study: Omer and Transcendent Endeavors 100 What’s the JTBD? 106 Put it to work 106 11. Case Study: Justin and Product People Club 108 What’s the JTBD? 115 Put it to work 116 12. Case Study: Ash and Lean Stack 118 What’s the JTBD? 123 Put it to work 124 13. The System of Progress 126 Why study systems and the system of progress? 126 Interdependencies between customers and producers 127 The system’s four main parts 128 The forces of progress that power the system of progress 130 The system of progress is continuous 130 Is the system of progress new? 136 Put it to work 137 14. Innovation and the System of Progress 140 The customer does not understand the system 140 Improving interdependencies within the system 143 When a system’s interdependencies change 145 Fragile interdependencies and cascade effects 147  JTBD empowers us to innovate 150 Put it to work 151 15. Get Started Today 153 Influencing others: JTBD top down 153 Influencing others: JTBD bottom up 154 Learning JTBD from others 156 jtbd.info 157 JTBD Meetups 157 Contacting me 158 16. How Do We Describe a JTBD? 160 Try it yourself 160 Describing a JTBD 162 17. Job Stories 165 Job Stories connect customers to their JTBD 165 A Job Story in action 166 Job Stories describe how Jobs are shaped 168 How to use a Job Story diagram 169 18. Hiring Criteria 171 Hiring Criteria connect struggles and solutions 171 An example of JTBD hiring criteria 172 Hiring criteria and the system of progress 174 19. Data You Can (and Can’t) Trust 176 Misplaced confidence 176 Mo’ data, mo’ problems 177 Special cause versus common cause 178 Use fewer but higher-quality investigative methods 181 Conduct investigations only with just cause 181 Be selective about which customers you investigate 183 What data should you gather from customers? 184 Familiar advice for some, new for others 187 20. Interviewing Customers 188 What to know about customer interviews 188  Customer case research 190 Basic structure and intent for an interview 190 Types of questions 191 The purchase timeline model 192 A more general interview approach 193 Do we need a model? 195 When the buyer and user are different people 196 21. Creating JTBD Insights 199 Analysis versus synthesis 199 Combine some analysis with mostly synthesis 202 OSEMN 202 KISS 205 22. Tools for JTBD Insights 206 Data dimensions & Job Map 206 Modeling interview and JTBD data 207 Intermissions 207 Customer roles 207 Appendix: A Summary of JTBD 211 What is JTBD? 211 What isn’t a JTBD? 211 What about different types of Jobs? 211 What are JTBD Principles? 211 Appendix: Summary of Putting JTBD to Work 213 Chapter 4 213 Chapter 5 213 Chapter 6 213 Chapter 7 214 Chapter 8 214 Chapter 9 214 Chapter 10 214 Chapter 11 215 Chapter 12 215 Chapter 13 215  Chapter 14 215 Notes 216 Acknowledgements This book does not represent innovation insights from one person, but from many. Those listed here – as well as those whose names I have mistakenly omitted – have helped me understand JTBD and thereby helped me write this book. I am indebted to them and the entire JTBD community. Tim Zenderman, Samuel Hulick, Leslie Owensby, Michael Sacca, Willis Jackson III, Morgan Ranieri, Andrej Balaz, Daphne Lin, Matthew Woo, Matt Brooks, Mat Budelman, Eric White, David Wu, Bob Moesta, John Palmer, Chris Spiek, Ervin Fowlkes, Timur Kunayev, Matthew Gunson, Alex Yang, Ryan D. Hatch, Leslie Owensby, Marc Galbraith, Daryl Choy, James Ramsay, Joshua Porter, Tor L. Bollingmo, Martin Jordan, Ryan Singer, Laura Roeder, Justin Jackson, Vincent vd Lubbe, Ash Maurya, Benedict Evans, Esteban Mancuso, Des Traynor and Paul Adams and Sian Townsend and the rest of the Intercom team, Daniel Ritzenthaler, Dan Martell, Anthony Francavilla, Omer Yariv, Justin Sinclair, Joanna Wiebe, Paulo Peres, Alexander Horré, Bleau Alexandru, Tom Masiero, Jose A. de Miguel, Dimitri Nassis, Roman Meliška, Paul Gonzalez, Lee Yanco, Thomas Fröhlich, Lou Franco, David Emmett, Thomas Huetter, Nir Benita, Kyle Fiedler and Trace Wax and the thoughtbot team, everyone at the NYC JTBD Meetup, Amrita Chandra, Jeremy Horn, David Lee, Barry Clark, Ryan Witt, Boris Grinkot, Alex Lumley, Claudio Perrone, Omar Gonzalez, Ain Tohvri, Amit Vemuri, Sri Vemuri, Hiten Shah, Paul Sullivan, Matthew Woo, Joanna Wiebe, George White, Dave Rothschild, Elvin Turner, Mike Rivera, Jason Evanish, Levi Kovacs, Debbie Szumylo Alan Klement nd October 2 2016 1. Challenges and Hope Challenges Hope About me How to be successful with JTBD and this book Abandon every MBA, all you who enter This book will help you become better at creating and selling products that people will buy. Your joy at work will grow. You will know how to help companies increase profits, reduce waste, remain competitive, and make innovation far more predictable and profitable. In doing so, you will help economies prosper and help provide stable jobs for employees and the families who depend on them. I struggled with innovation for many years. I finally made progress when I focused on two things: (1) the customers’ struggle to make life better and (2) how customers imagine their lives being better when they have the right solution. This understanding has helped me become a better innovator. I believe it will do the same for you. Everyone benefits from healthy entrepreneurship and innovation—yet challenges stand in our way. This chapter introduces these challenges. The rest of this book will equip you with the understanding of how your focus on the customer’s struggle as a Job to be Done (JTBD) will help you overcome these challenges. CHALLENGES Creative destruction is accelerating. The average time a company spends on the S&P 500 continues to drop. In 1960, it was fifty-five years; in 2015, it was about twenty (Figure 1). This happened for numerous reasons. A big one is that it has never been easier to create a product and get it to customers. This increases the pace at which new innovations disrupt the sales of incumbent ones and then go 1 on to replace them. This process is known as creative destruction. When one innovation wins, another loses. Why? Because a day has only so many minutes, and a customer can use only one product at a time. For example, every day I used to get an espresso from a coffee shop down the street. Two months ago, I bought a Nespresso machine. Now I make my own espressos. The coffee shop has lost my business. 1  Challenges and Hope FIGURE 1. CREATIVE DESTRUCTION IN ACTION. THE AVERAGE COMPANY LIFESPAN ON S&P INDEX HAS DECLINED OVER TIME (ROLLING SEVEN-YEAR AVERAGE). JTBD helps us understand the creative destruction around us by helping us understand that even though solutions and technologies come and go, human motivation changes very slowly. In some cases, human motivation hasn’t changed at all. The focus on customer motivation is the key to successful, ongoing innovation and business. This provides stable jobs for people who support the families who depend on them. “Sunk costs” keep us from creating new products. In 1975, a Kodak engineer invented the digital camera. What was management’s response? They shelved it. Management argued that Kodak “could” sell a digital camera, but why would they? They made billions of dollars selling photographic film. A digital camera would cannibalize their film sales. In the end, Kodak’s management decided that 2 the company would skip digital and focus on selling photographic film. In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy. What happened? Customers no longer needed film for their cameras—they had switched to digital cameras. Kodak’s downfall was due to management’s unwillingness to adapt to a world with digital cameras—something they had invented forty years earlier. Very often, it’s not legacy technology that stops companies from changing but being tied to a legacy business model. And when change is proposed to management, they have unlimited excuses to avoid it: “We make billions of dollars with our current products—why risk it by selling something different?” “We’ve spent a hundred years perfecting what we do and building the company we have today—why should we change?” Excuses like these make it hard for businesses to change—but change will always happen. JTBD gives you the confidence to break away from legacy business models and create the products 3 of tomorrow. It’s a mistake to focus on our customers’ physical characteristics. My father- in-law is sixty-five years old, is from the Bronx, and has never used a computer in his life. I’m thirty-five years old, I’m from Florida, and I wrote my first computer 2  Challenges and Hope program at fifteen. Our behaviors, physical characteristics, life goals, and personal histories couldn’t be more different. Nevertheless, we both own the same model of smartphone. We even use it in almost the same way. Will a study of who we are and how we behave explain why? Are these data information or 4 misinformation? FIGURE 2. ARE YOU BEING FED MISINFORMATION AND DON’T KNOW IT? JTBD helps you become better at knowing the difference between good data and bad data. This helps you focus on making changes to your product that bring profits instead of only increasing costs of production. We don’t take into consideration how customers see competition. In 2006, Indian manufacturer Godrej collaborated with Harvard Business School Professor Dr. Clayton Christensen to create the chotuKool—a low-cost, feature- minimal refrigerator. It was hailed as a “disruptive innovation” that would create a new market of refrigerators and create what Christensen calls “inclusive growth” for millions of low-income Indians. Unfortunately, the chotuKool was a costly flop. What happened? Chapter 9 reviews the various mistakes made in planning the chotuKool. However, the biggest mistake was the assumption that the chotuKool competed only with other refrigerators. As it turned out, customers had a different idea of what did and didn’t count as competition. From their point of view, the chotuKool didn’t compete with conventional refrigerators; rather, it competed with clay pots, Styrofoam coolers, boiling milk, and buying vegetables every day. For far too long, academics and analysis – who have no personal experience with innovation – have created and sold pseudoscientific theories about markets 3  Challenges and Hope to innovators. Unfortunately, these theories often mislead innovators. The resulting product failures exact terrible costs upon our economies. This happens because most, and perhaps all, of these theories don’t take consideration how customers view competition. Do PCs compete with mainframes because they’re both “computers,” or do PCs compete with typewriters, video game systems, and accountants? Do hard drives compete only with other hard drives, or do they also compete with tape storage, CDs, DVDs, floppy disks, flash drives, and cloud storage? JTBD helps you avoid mistakes like the chotuKool and falling victim to invalid theories of markets by giving you the knowledge to create an accurate model of competition before you create a product. It does this by helping you learn how to gain the customer’s perspective on what does and doesn’t count as competition for a JTBD. We myopically study and improve upon customers’ “needs” and expectations of today; instead we should study and improve the systems to which customers belong. In the 1860s, the Pony Express was created to help customers get letters and messages across the United States as fast as possible. It lasted only nineteen months. What happened? Western Union established the transcontinental telegraph. While the Pony Express was trying to solve the “needs” associated with using physical mail, Western Union thought, “What if 5 we could communicate without using physical messages?” Very often, innovators think they are studying customers’ needs when in fact they are studying how customers currently solve their problems, or what customers currently expect from a product. For many years, manufacturers such as Nokia, Palm, Research in Motion (RIM), and Motorola worked hard to satisfy customers’ stated needs and expectations: make a low-price smartphone with a physical keyboard. Today, those expectations have been reversed. Customers don’t mind shelling out several hundred dollars for a smartphone, and physical keyboards have almost completely disappeared. We can’t build the products of tomorrow by limiting ourselves to the needs and expectations associated with the products of today. Instead, we should focus on what never changes for customers—that is, their struggle to make progress. When we focus on delivering customers’ progress—instead of what customers say they want—we are free to imagine a world where many needs and expectations have been replaced with new ones. JTBD helps us ask, “Customers keep asking for smartphones with keyboards, but couldn’t we help customers so much more once we take it away?” Chapters 10 to 14 show you the power of prioritizing customer progress over everything else. 4  Challenges and Hope We may think only about the upsides of product changes, ignore the downsides, and fail to embrace new ways of solving customers’ problems. In the early 1980s, the Coca-Cola Company was losing market share to Pepsi. In response, Coca-Cola’s management decided to change the formula for Coke, believing that the change would increase market share. They were wrong. Loyal customers went up in arms over it; three months later, Coca-Cola’s original formula was restored. Over time, the company was able to regain its market share, but it was lucky. It had the money and resources to recover from the mistake. JTBD helps you know when it does and doesn’t make sense to change your product. Your product might be fine the way it is. Any further investment might only increase your costs of production. JTBD also helps you understand the opportunity costs: What happens when you don’t invest in new products, even if it means cannibalizing existing offerings? Kodak knows the cost of not embracing a new way of solving customers’ problems: bankruptcy. Our decision making can be misled when we manage by visible figures only, and don’t appreciate the context surrounding them. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a figure that seems straight forward enough. Ask customers to self-report their satisfaction with your product and record their responses. If the CSAT is high, you’re doing a good job. Easy right? Yet, such data and figures are incomplete at best, and misinformation at worst. In chapter 14 you'll learn about Spirit Airlines. Customers have consistently rated it as the worst airline in America. Nevertheless, it continues to be the fastest-growing and most profitable airline in America. If customers hate it so much, why do they keep buying it? Figures can not only be misleading; they can be misused. We see this today with the number of monthly active users (MAU) for Twitter. It has experienced explosive growth over the last five years –annual revenue was $106 million in 2011 and $2.2 billion in 2015. Yet, analysts and journalists continue to write articles titled The End of Twitter and A Eulogy for Twitter. Why? The most common criticism is that growth of Twitter’s MAUs has stalled at “only” 313 million. Is it any surprise when management's priority then becomes "how can we make MAUs go up" instead of "how can we continue to make Twitter valuable to users so they won't leave?" Yes, adding new features might push up visible figures such as MAU in the short term, but constant changes might upset and drive away loyal users. Instead, we should congratulate Twitter’s employees for their hard work and gently remind them of grandmother’s advice: “when you 6 try and please everyone, you end up pleasing no one”. 5  Challenges and Hope Many innovators and managers have been influenced by ideas such as "if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it" and "what gets measured gets improved". 7 However, such opinions do not take into consideration that: All models are wrong, but some are useful. The most important figures are unknown or unknowable, but successful management and innovation must nevertheless take account of them. If you torture the data long enough, they will tell what whatever you want. These statements were made by some of the most important mathematicians and systems thinkers of the 20th century. They are warnings for those who subscribe to the idea of being "data driven" and figure focused. Yes, data and figures can be helpful and are often necessary. We have payroll to meet and should strive to increase long term profits. But we can let data and figures deceive us. We must remember that data are only proxies for some results of a system. Moreover, the most important figures are unknown and unknowable. What figures or data would have told Apple to remove floppy drives from PCs, keyboards from their smartphones, or to create smartphone Apps sold through an App Store? At the time, many dismissed or criticized these ideas. Journalists claimed Apple’s management had lost their minds. Now we regard Apple’s decisions as obvious. And what about Twitter’s MAUs? The number of users who might want a product like Twitter is a figure that is unknown and unknowable. Twitter's 313 million MAU might represent one hundred percent of the market. Analysts, journalists, and even Twitter's own shareholders might be punishing the company even as it achieves market dominance. There are a variety of consequences that arise when we abandon intuition and risk taking in favor of management by visible figures only. Perhaps the worst are the unfounded beliefs that a product will last forever and that products and companies can continuously grow revenue and attract more customers. The reality is that growth for every product will slow and stop. Nothing lasts forever. Unfortunately, many managers either don’t know or accept this. Instead they become worried when growth slows. They start making changes to their product in the hope of attracting more customers and increasing revenue. However, the effect is often the opposite. Management ends up making the product worse for 8 existing customers. With some luck, a competitor won’t notice. 6  Challenges and Hope FIGURE 3. A TALE OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION. CHASING VISIBLE FIGURES OFTEN LEADS TO POOR DECISIONS ABOUT YOUR PROUCT. But luck will eventually run out. Another innovation will enter the market with a product that customers find more valuable. Why? Because the entrant’s innovation cuts off all the baggage the incumbent added during management’s frantic attempt to push up all those visible figures. This is when customers begin to switch from the incumbent to the new comer. So goes the cycle of creative destruction. Innovation is hard, risky, and nerve-racking. Just ask anyone who has successfully done it. But JTBD can help. With a JTBD point of view, we can see how visible figures tell us about individual parts of a system only. Once we understand that, we can apply JTBD thinking and understand the relationships around the data. This gives us the ability to assign the proper weight to these figures – or even dismiss them. This helps us become better at knowing if we continue to improve an existing product, or take a risk and develop a new one. HOPE JTBD and this book offer you hope whether you are a struggling innovator or just want to become better at understanding innovation. JTBD gives you a collection of principles for understanding customer motivation. This singular attention to customer motivation—instead of what customers say they want, their demographics, or what they do—is what distinguishes JTBD from other theories. This book offers an explanation of JTBD that is reliable, consistent, and complete. 7  Challenges and Hope At the time of this writing, no comprehensive book about JTBD existed. This is the first. Many others have written interpretations of some JTBD principles, but almost all of them have created more confusion about JTBD than clarity. This book stands out from other writings about JTBD because its contributors— including me—are all innovators and entrepreneurs in their own right. They’ve applied JTBD to their own businesses and products, rather than merely study and preach the theory. I developed this book and the principles of JTBD as if I were creating a product. For JTBD to be successful, it must deliver progress to those who plan on using it. Any theory of JTBD must take into account how successful JTBD practitioners apply it. This is why I interviewed sixty-three innovators about their struggles with innovation and how they used JTBD. I extracted numerous case studies and insights from these interviews. The most comprehensive and useful ones are featured in this book. I had to combine my experiences with those of these innovators to learn what JTBD should and shouldn’t be. I learned something from every JTBD practitioner I talked with. I am in their debt. Of course, you benefit the most from my struggles with innovation and JTBD and from those of the innovators featured in this book. With it, you add the accumulated experience of many others to your own. This collective knowledge will help you become better at creating and selling products that customers buy and at creating sustainable businesses. JTBD makes you better at making and selling what customers want, because innovators created it. Innovators created JTBD for themselves. We didn’t create JTBD to sell books, collect speaking fees, sell MBA diplomas, or get a PhD from a business school. We created JTBD because we needed help building a successful business that could support our families. We’ve faced the countless trade-offs involved in developing a business strategy, crafting advertising, designing, and engineering, from which questions like these arise: We can’t attack every market. Which ones should we focus on? Our video ad has to connect with customers in just five seconds. How can we do that? Which shade of white will help customers experience luxurious but not sterile? Which alloy should the suspension be made of to give customers the “feel the road” experience? You can know which data should be gathered from customers only after you’ve gone through the experience of needing answers to questions like these. 8  Challenges and Hope JTBD is a theory evolved over time. JTBD’s principles draw on studies in statistical theory, economics, systems thinking, and psychology. Its principles have slowly evolved over time—at least seventy-five years. JTBD is by no means a flavor of the month. As a theory, JTBD persists because it is completely decoupled from describing how to solve a customer’s problem. Instead, it is purely focused on understanding customer motivation. You need such a theory to help you become better at innovation. ABOUT ME I recommend JTBD because I’ve applied its principles as an entrepreneur, product manager, designer, engineer, and salesperson. I’ve applied it to my own businesses and on products whose success I was directly responsible for. I believe it’s wrong to preach a theory unless you’ve applied it yourself and were exposed to the risks in the event the theory failed. JTBD has helped me. I struggled with innovation for many years. I started my first business in 2003. It offered photographic services, image retouching, and a software platform where customers could create their own websites to showcase their artwork. It was a success. At the time, I didn’t understand why it was successful. But now I do. It was because I offered a collection of products that worked together—as a system—to help customers make progress. What progress did those customers want? “Help me promote myself and my work.” As my business grew, I saw myself transition from maker to manager. I didn’t like it. So, I sold the business and went back to making things. I started another business called Vizipres. It failed. Why? I made a product no one wanted. I lost money, but that didn’t bother me. What did bother me was lost time. I thought that perhaps I needed to learn from other entrepreneurs. I began working for others as an engineer and designer. Later, I began leading innovation efforts at various companies. Experience was teaching me some things but not enough. Things changed for me when I met Bob Moesta. He had already successfully applied JTBD principles to several of his own businesses and had helped a great many other companies innovate using JTBD principles. I learned several important principles of JTBD through Bob’s mentorship. I even worked with his consulting company. This is also when I met Chris Spiek and Ervin Fowlkes, who shared with me their experiences with applying JTBD. Inspired by all this knowledge, I began a third business. It was an advertising marketplace for mortgage brokers and real estate agents, and it was a success. 9  Challenges and Hope As I had done before, I passed the business to a cofounder. I learned long ago that I’m a maker, not a manager. That’s also when I realized that JTBD, at the time, was incomplete. Many of the principles and suggested theory of the time were inconsistent and often contradictory. I decided to unpack, refine, and expand the principles of JTBD to help others and myself. HOW TO BE SUCCESSFUL WITH JTBD AND THIS BOOK I don’t believe there is any one “right” way to innovate. Life has too many unknown and unknowable variables. This is why successful entrepreneur Steve 9 Blank says, “No business plan survives first contact with a customer.” JTBD prepares us for whatever curveballs are thrown at us because it equips us with principles instead of methods. Why? Methods come and go, whereas principles stick around. In fact, when you’re armed with the right principles, you can plug in any appropriate methods and mental models. You might even create some new ones! And while this idea may cause you some anxiety, over time you will find it empowering. The study and application of principles, instead of methods, is what gives you the confidence to act in a complex world. This attention to principles first and only is why this book makes a distinction between principles and practices. Part I unpacks what JTBD is and walks you through the most important principles of JTBD. Part II and Part III demonstrate those principles in action though various case studies. These chapters also give you ideas on how you can apply those principles today. I recommend everyone read Parts I to III. Part IV is where the practices and methods begin. These practices and methods are by no means perfect or even the best. I offer them to you so you can have a foundation to get started. Adjust them to make them work for you. Read Part IV only if you plan on doing JTBD research yourself. Last, I have used subsections and bolded type to help you skim the book and quickly find answers to your questions. These also give an idea of what comes next. In fact, after you read this chapter, I encourage you to take a few minutes and skim the whole book. Look at the chapters, subheads, and bolded type to get a sense of how this book works and how concepts will unfold for you. ABANDON EVERY MBA, ALL YOU WHO ENTER I invite you to explore JTBD with me. I also ask that you—at least for the time being—put aside any preconceived notions of competition, markets, customer 10  Challenges and Hope motivation, and even JTBD. You can pick them up again when the book is finished, or you may decide you no longer need them. 11  Part I The Job to be Done Our journey begins with an introduction to Jobs to be Done (JTBD). This section will equip you with a strong foundation to understand what it means to study customer motivation and why it is a vital part of innovation. 2. What Is JTBD? Where does JTBD come from? What is a Job? What makes it Done? What isn’t a JTBD? As a theory, JTBD is a collection of principles that help you understand customer motivation. JTBD is a struggle someone has to make life better. Someone has a JTBD when he or she wants to make an improvement but doesn’t know how. When that person finds and can use a solution to make that hoped-for improvement, there is no longer a JTBD. What’s JTBD thinking like? Charles Revson—who founded Revlon—knew what his business sold and why customers kept buying from it. He described Revlon’s business: “In the factories, we make cosmetics; in the drug stores, we sell hope.” Susan Prescott, Apple vice president, said, “[Apple is] dedicated to building products that make people’s lives better, often in ways that we couldn’t have 10 even imagined, enabling them to do things that they have never done before.” This is JTBD thinking. Prescott knows Apple’s goal isn’t to sell products but to “make people’s lives better.” Revson also knew that his customers didn’t want the cosmetics his company sold or care how they work. Rather, customers wanted the hope for a better life. That is what they paid for. How is JTBD different? JTBD’s single intent is to understand how and why customers struggle. It tells you about the way things are, not what you should do about it. It is descriptive, not prescriptive. This is in contrast to many—perhaps all—other approaches to design and innovation. Other approaches either describe customer motivation in terms of the things customers do (e.g., people buy cars so they can get from point A to point B), or they tell you what to do (e.g., you should create a low-end car to target the bottom of the market). Neither of these approaches helps you understand the “hope” that Charles Revson alluded to. WHERE DOES JTBD COME FROM ? The greatest—and most helpful—ideas and theories are not created by one person but are the result of many people over a long period. This is certainly the case with JTBD. Its principles have emerged from the work of a long lineage of researchers and innovators. Here are the most notable: 13  What Is JTBD? Joseph Schumpeter and creative destruction. The roots of JTBD go back at least seventy-five years to Joseph Schumpeter and his introduction of creative destruction. Schumpeter observed that new innovations steal customers from incumbent offerings and then eventually go on to replace them. At one time, horses and ships were our primary methods of personal transportation. Eventually, trains replaced horses, but then cars and airplanes replaced those trains and ships. JTBD incorporates Schumpeter’s insights as it seeks to understand why customers pick one way of doing things over another. Yes, innovators create new solutions, but the wheels of creative destruction turn only through the interaction between customers and innovators. JTBD also incorporates another one of Schumpeter’s brilliant insights that is almost always overlooked. Schumpeter argued that competition should not be measured only among products of the same “type.” He insisted that competition can come from anywhere. You might think you’re alone in a market or have market superiority, but some competitor unknown to you could be stealing away your customers. Your only sign that something is wrong is decreasing sales. In chapter 8, we take a close look at JTBD, creative destruction, and competition. W. Edwards Deming and systems thinking. Schumpeter’s influence on JTBD is restricted mostly to factors of market dynamics and competition. However, Dr. W. Edwards Deming has influenced JTBD the most. Those who are familiar with his nearly sixty years of contribution to theories of management and innovation will recognize his fingerprints throughout this book. However, his most notable influence comes from his development of systems thinking, which I discuss in chapter 13. Throughout Deming’s career, he frequently reminded businesses that: “The customer and producer must work together as a system.” “The consumer is the most important part of the production line.” “A dissatisfied customer does not complain; he just switches.” Deming also often challenged companies to remember creative destruction, and he impressed on business leadership that simply making a product better and better wasn’t enough. Eventually, someone invents new ways of solving customers’ problems. He would tell businesses, “Makers of vacuum tubes improved year by year the power of vacuum tubes. Customers were happy. But then transistor radios came along. Happy customers of vacuum tubes deserted vacuum tubes and ran for the pocket radio.” 14  What Is JTBD? Deming understood that satisfying your current customers wasn’t enough: “We must keep asking, what product or service would help our customers more? What will we be making five years from now? Ten years from now?” For Deming, 11 innovation should never stop. Psychology. On the psychology front, you’ll run into influences from Gary Klein, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, George Loewenstein, and Ann Graybiel. These are psychologists and scientists whose work form foundations of behavioral economics and naturalistic decision-making (NDM). Their work helps us understand how and why customers don’t make rational decisions when buying and using products, are inconsistent in their opinions of products, and don’t always act in their best interest. JTBD understands that if you want to make a great product and to develop a message that connects with customers, you have to understand the emotional forces that shape their motivation. Bringing it all together. Then, you arrive at Bob Moesta and his colleagues John B. Palmer and Rick Pied. Years ago, Bob told me, “If you were to call me the father of JTBD, then John would be the grandfather.” In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they worked together to combine their respective experiences into the first JTBD principles. They are the ones who came up with the idea and language that customers have “jobs” that they are trying to get “done.” FIGURE 4. GENEALOGY OF JTBD Bob was at the ailing Ford Motor Company as W. Edwards Deming turned it around by reshaping its design and manufacturing operations during the 1980s. 15  What Is JTBD? John’s contribution was to bring his own experience of quality functional deployment (QFD), experience with systems thinking, and behavioral economics to JTBD. Then, you get to this book and me. Bob’s influence on me cannot be understated. I’ve also been influenced by other notable JTBD practitioners such as Chris Spiek and Ervin Fowlkes. Last, but certainly not least, the entire JTBD community who exists today has had a tremendous influence on this book and JTBD. Without their application of and experience with JTBD, this book would not have been possible. WHAT IS A JOB? WHAT MAKES IT DONE? All consumers struggle when there’s a mismatch between how their lives are now and how they’d like things to be. This creates a Job. This Job is Done when a customer has a solution that takes him or her from the struggle to that better life he or she imagines. Don’t let the language trip you up. The phrase “Job to be Done” is just how we describe the struggle of a customer. Saying that a customer has a JTBD is like saying a customer has a problem to solve. Let’s unpack the Job and Done parts. Unpacking JTBD’s two parts. The two parts of JTBD can be defined as follows: A Job is one’s emotional struggle to make life better. It’s Done when one finds the right solution to overcome that struggle and make that better life happen. A Job is an emotional struggle to make life better. Let’s illustrate the concept of a Job. Imagine you create and sell cars. You might think that people want cars because, well, they buy cars. But is that right? Do people want the car itself? A car is just a bunch of glass, metal, rubber, and plastic put together. Moreover, that hunk of glass, metal, rubber, and plastic is expensive to buy and maintain. Do people really want that? Unsatisfied, you decide to go deeper. You go out and watch people use cars. You determine that people want cars that so they can get from point A to point B. That works, but only for a while. The longer you observe people buying and using cars, you develop lingering questions: If it’s about getting from point A to point B, why do some people use busses, motorcycles, bikes, roller skates, airplanes, trains, subways, taxis, or carpools? Why do some walk? All those modes of transportation get us from point A to point B. Why choose one over the other? 16  What Is JTBD? What about people who buy cars but don’t drive them? Instead, they take these cars to car shows. Even odder, they don’t drive the cars to the shows! They put them in trucks to take them there. Next, you think that if you study who customers are, then you will understand why they buy cars. But then you start noticing that people who share widely different physical attributes are buying and using the same cars. For example, the Ford Mustang—a classic American muscle car—is a popular sports car among 12 both men and women. This is when you come to three conclusions: 1. People don’t want the car itself—it’s just a bunch of materials. 2. Car ownership isn’t about getting from point A to point B— that just describes what (most) customers do with their cars. 3. People don’t buy products because of who they are. For example, people who have wildly different physical attributes often buy the same product. Unsatisfied, you take a different approach. You decide to ask these car owners some questions: “How did you come to realize you needed a car instead of some other form of transportation? How does owning a car make your life better?” You get some interesting answers, such as, “I want the independence and freedom to go to the places I want without having to work around someone else’s schedule.” But you also notice something else. Customers aren’t talking about cars, what they do, or how they work. They’re talking about themselves. Cars are about making their lives better. You decide to call that a Job. A Job is Done when you’re able to use a solution to make a better life happen. The to-be-Done is an important part of JTBD. It’s meant to impress on us that customers have a picture in their mind of how they want their life to be. They will be satisfied only when they get there. This happens when the struggle you were wrestling with before has disappeared. A balance has been created. You are now free to focus on making life better in other ways. You’re making progress. Your Job is Done. For example, I have a picture in my mind of a big family get-together where lots of people show up, have fun, and spend all day together. To make this picture in my mind a reality, I decide that I should get an outdoor grill so I can throw a BBQ in my backyard. Now, the grill itself or how it functions doesn’t 17  What Is JTBD? really matter to me – what matters to me is “can this grill help me make my BBQ a success?” A top of the line, feature loaded grill is worthless to me if I can’t use it to make my party a success. FIGURE 5. SAMUEL HULICK (WWW.USERONBOARD.COM) ILLUSTRATES THAT IT'S NOT ABOUT YOUR PRODUCT OR WHAT IT DOES. IT'S ABOUT WHAT CUSTOMERS CAN DO ONCE THEY USE YOUR PRODUCT TO MAKE PROGRESS. WHAT ISN’T A JTBD? I knew I had prejudices about JTBD when I started this book. But just because my approach to JTBD works for me, it doesn’t mean it’ll work for everyone else. My hedge against this bias was to interview as many JTBD practitioners as I could. What did or didn’t they find helpful about JTBD? How did the most successful innovators use JTBD? This section focuses on the concepts that commonly distract innovators when they apply JTBD. This will help you avoid making common mistakes. We’ve already explored how JTBD is about customer motivation. But what about activities, tasks, behaviors, or functionality? Does JTBD include them? To test this out, let’s consider two small case studies: something that happened over at Notre Dame Stadium, and how some homeowners of Southern California reacted to a drought. Strange things are afoot at Notre Dame Stadium. The University of Notre Dame has a very popular American football team. The school spends a great deal of time and money on maintaining the stadium’s grass field. One activity, maintain the grass, is made up of numerous tasks such as cutting, watering, and fertilizing. Notre Dame pays both in-house employees and outside businesses to help with these and other activities and tasks. 18  What Is JTBD? You might be tempted to believe that cutting, watering, fertilizing, and maintaining the grass all represent needs or Jobs. You figure that if the university pays for these services and engages in these tasks, then it must want to do them, right? In 2014, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick did what many fans considered sacrilegious: he decided that the stadium would switch from natural grass to FieldTurf. When interviewed about the switch, Jack said, “[A combination of reasons] led me to conclude that we would continue to struggle to maintain a grass field that meets the expectations of our student athletes and fans as it relates to appearance, performance, and safety.” How should we interpret this? Before 13 taking a closer look, let’s consider something similar over in California. Meet the frustrated homeowners of California. For many years, residents of California enjoyed their lush, green lawns. That all changed in 2015 when a severe drought began killing off homeowners’ lawns. On the plus side, residents no longer had to pay for traditional lawn-care services. Other residents were spared needing to water, fertilize, seed, and cut their grass themselves. On the negative side, residents such as Margarita Odelberg described how she “got sick and tired of looking at what looked like a pile of hay.” What could people like Margarita do? Here are some of the solutions these customers considered: Buy lawn-painting products such as Lawn Life, and then spray the yards themselves Hire someone else to paint their lawns Plant drought-resistant plants that don’t need to be maintained Replace their grass with mulch Install artificial grass Even more curious is how some residents chose to paint only their front lawns. Homeowner Carol Chait explained why she did so: “The front lawn—it’s your face to your neighbors and people driving down the street.” How should we think 14 about all this? It’s not the JTBD. If your business had focused only on serving the needs of owning a live, grass field, then you’ve just lost customers such as Notre Dame and the drought-stricken homeowners of California. Why? Many needs associated with owning a live, grass field have disappeared. In their place, many new needs have appeared. For example, homeowners are now concerned about the environmental impact of the dye, conserving water, and what will happen to 19  What Is JTBD? the dye when rain does fall. Ms. Odelberg commented that lawn paint helps “a dead lawn look alive—without wasting all that water!” Ms. Chait reasoned that it was OK to use lawn paint because “[if] you would put it on your face, you’d put it on your lawn.” Numerous questions arise when we compare and contrast all these solutions. Did these customers ever want a grass field? Do any needs—such as cutting the grass, water-resistant dye, being environmentally friendly, and conserving water—belong to the customer, or are those just the consequences of using a particular solution for a JTBD? You use solutions such as FieldTurf and drought- resistant plants explicitly to avoid having to do tasks associated with maintaining grass. There’s only one way to make sense of all this, and it requires that you not focus on the solutions (grass field versus FieldTurf) or on activities, functions, or tasks associated with those solutions (cutting the grass or washing FieldTurf). Instead, understand the motivation that’s behind choosing a grass field and how owning one makes people’s lives better. Functionality, activities, behaviors, goals, and tasks can all change when the solution changes. An activity or a function doesn’t define a JTBD. Of all the innovators I talked with, the most successful don’t let functionality creep into their JTBD thinking – that is, they don’t believe in the idea of a functional Job. Instead, they think of a JTBD as the motivation that causes customers to act. Why keep them separate? A JTBD describes why (motivation), not how (functionality). 20  What Is JTBD? FIGURE 6. FUNCTIONALITY, TASKS, AND ACTIVITIES DESCRIBE SOLUTIONS FOR A JTBD - NOT THE JTBD ITSELF. You are stuck in the world of today when you focus on functionality, activities, and tasks. Before AstroTurf came along, everyone assumed that people would always need to cut, water, and seed their lawns and footballs fields. But then the inventors of AstroTurf thought, “What if we created something that served the same JTBD as grass but also freed customers from needing to cut, water, or fertilize it?” Breakthrough innovations are realized when you reimagine or eliminate activities and functionality, not when you design for it. If you are in doubt whether someone is describing a JTBD, ask these questions: Does this describe an action? Can I visualize someone doing this? Does this describe a “how” or “what” and not a “why”? If you answer yes to these questions, you’re probably describing a solution for a JTBD and not a JTBD itself. Remember, customer motivation can’t be seen or can described in terms of an actions. You can see someone maintaining their lawn, but you can’t see why they do it. Perhaps cutting the grass has nothing to do with “cutting the grass”, but is about getting physical activity and being outside. That is why they do it themselves instead of paying someone else to do it. 21  What Is JTBD? As you’ll see over and over again through the case studies, customers considered wildly different solutions as competition for solving the same JTBD— solutions that have zero functionality in common. I admit, I sometimes slip into describing a JTBD as an activity or task. I suspect it happens because this is the easiest thing to do. You watch what people do, and you assume that they want to do those things. In fact, this is an example of a well-documented psychological phenomenon called attribute substitution. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman described it by saying that “people are not accustomed to thinking hard and are often content to trust a plausible judgment that quickly comes to mind.” In other words, when we see someone using a drill to make holes, we think, “Oh, the customer must want holes.” It never occurs to us that we’re describing only what the product does, and not why people use 15 it. I avoid biases such as attribute substitution by doing my best to make sure a JTBD is describing a motivation to make life better. I highly recommend you do the same. You may think you’re in the lawn-care business; then, one day, Notre Dame Stadium switches from a grass field to FieldTurf. You may think you’re in the business of making and selling lawn mowers; then, one day, someone 16 develops a GMO grass that doesn’t need to be cut. Should we care about functionality, activities, and tasks? At some point, you will understand the customers’ JTBD, and you will have to create a solution for it. This is when you’ll have to start thinking about functionality, activities, and tasks. This is also where JTBD ends. That is perfectly fine. There are already well-established fields of research that help you design for tasks and activities. Examples include activity theory; activity-centered design; service design; task analysis; human-computer interaction (HCI); and customer- outcomes, objectives, activities, resources (COAR). Why duplicate them? Besides, we want to understand the motivation that comes before customers engage in any task, activity, behavior, or use functionality. We don’t want to study customer goals; we want to know how goals are created. What about different types of Jobs? It is tempting to classify Jobs into different types. I’ve had discussions where people make arguments for Jobs that are sexual, social, personal, spiritual, religious, parental, spousal, safety related, physiological, artistic…the list goes on and on. I find that all they’re doing is describing the various of emotions that work together to form one JTBD. I would recommend classifying types of Jobs only if it is helpful to innovators. But I always see it as a distraction. Innovators and teams end up wasting their time trying to deal with inconsistent overlaps. Isn’t a social Job just a type of 22  What Is JTBD? emotional Job? If we call it a social Job, does that mean it’s not an emotional Job? If a Job is both social and emotional, does that count as one or two Jobs? What are the rules we use to determine when an emotional Job becomes a social Job? Where does one end and the other begin? They get so wrapped up in dissecting how a social Job is different from an emotional Job that they lose track of the big picture. Don’t worry if this feels overwhelming right now. You have the rest of the book and will see plenty of real-world examples to help you unpack and understand all this. Just keep in mind two points: 1. A JTBD is purely emotional. Tasks, activities, or functionality describe solutions for jobs. 2. Keep it simple. All Jobs are emotional. 23 3. What Are the Principles of JTBD? JTBD principles Here are a few JTBD principles that you will see demonstrated repeatedly throughout this book. There are others, but the principles below are perhaps the most useful and commonly used in the JTBD community. JTBD PRINCIPLES Customers don’t want your product or what it does; they want help making their lives better (i.e. they want progress). Charles Revson knew that customers didn’t want cosmetics, which are just colored oils. He also knew that customers didn’t want what those cosmetics do, which is simply coloring skin. He understood that his customers wanted hope. This understanding of customer motivation has helped keep Revlon in business for eighty-four years. In 2015, its 17 revenue topped $1.9 billion. It seems that selling hope is a profitable business. Focusing on the product itself, what it does, or how customers use it closes your mind to innovation opportunities. For example, if you sold drills, you might be tempted to think that people buy drills and bits because they want holes. But then 3M comes along and develops an entire line of damage-free hanging products that are designed specifically to eliminate the need for a drill or for making any holes. Another manufacturer, Erard, also avoided the “customers want holes” trap. It promotes a collection of TV mounts with a simple description: “The first TV wall-mount bracket with no drilling of the wall required.” While you were convinced customers wanted holes, your competitors 18 understood that customers wanted help improving their lives. JTBD is laser focused on describing customer motivation. John Palmer describes JTBD as such: “Jobs were never intended to explain what the product must do. They stand for what the customer must do.” And what must customers do? They must overcome their struggles and make their lives better. People have Jobs; things don’t. It doesn’t make sense to ask, “What Job is your product doing?” or say, “The Job of the phone is…” or “The Job of the watch is…” Phones, watches, and dry cleaning services don’t have Jobs. They are only examples of solutions for Jobs. 24  What Are the Principles of JTBD? Products don’t have lives to make better. They also don’t have motivations, aspirations, or struggles. However, people do struggle. They do have lives they want to improve. This is why people—not products—have a JTBD. Competition is defined in the minds of customers, and they use progress as their criteria. Imagine an entrepreneur who wants to be advised and inspired by someone whom she respects. She has a variety of options to choose from to achieve this. Examples include reading books, watching videos, attending conferences, or giving advisor shares in exchange for mentorship. The struggling entrepreneur cares little about how she gets advised and inspired. The concern is about making progress. “Are things better for me today than yesterday? Am I getting closer to that picture in my mind of how I want my life to be?” These are some of the criteria customers use to judge which products compete against each other to overcome a struggle. Customers don’t define or restrict competition based on the functionality or physical appearance of a product. Instead, they use whatever helps them make progress against a JTBD. When customers start using a solution for a JTBD, they stop using something else. Many solo entrepreneurs struggle with feelings of isolation. They want help being motivated and inspired. To get this Job Done, some choose to create local get-togethers through Meetup.com and encourage other solo entrepreneurs to join. If that doesn’t work, they may try getting people together in an online chat group. If that doesn’t work, they may decide to join an existing online community, such as Product People Club. If Product People Club, as a solution, is something that works to make their lives better, they stop searching for new solutions. Their Job is Done. These entrepreneurs were jumping from one solution to another. This makes competition for a JTBD a zero-sum game. For somebody to win, somebody else has got to lose. Just as only one puzzle piece can fit into an empty slot, a customer prefers only one solution at a time for a JTBD. Innovation opportunities exist when customers exhibit compensatory behaviors. Baking soda was originally advertised as a baking agent. Over time, customers started using it as a cleaner and deodorizer. Arm & Hammer picked up on this. It now sells a variety of baking-soda-based products specialized for 19 various cleaning and deodorizing purposes. The Segway was meant to revolutionize personal transportation for the masses. It failed. However, it did find success among members of law enforcement who began using it for their patrols. Tour companies also began using Segways as the ultimate gimmick to attract tourists and for family 20 activities. 25  What Are the Principles of JTBD? Baking soda and the Segway are examples of customers using products in ways for which they weren’t originally intended. Such situations represent opportunities to innovate a new product or to refit an existing one. Solutions come and go, while Jobs stay largely the same. JTBD is about understanding human motivation as a problem to be solved. Human motivation changes slowly. Therefore, Jobs change slowly. How long have people wanted to be mentored and advised by someone they admire? How long have parents wanted to teach their children life’s lessons? The answer is the same: a long time. Solutions, on the other hand, constantly change because technology enables better ways of creating solutions that solve our Jobs. This is why we focus on the JTBD and not the product itself or what the product does. Favor progress over outcomes and goals. Customer goals and outcomes are only the results of an action. The ball went into the net; that is a goal. Did you win the game? Are you becoming better at making goals? No one knows. Measure progress instead. Making a goal today isn’t as important as becoming better at making goals in the future. This philosophy is the same for your customers. They don’t wait until after they’ve finished using a product to determine whether they like it. They measure progress along the way. Do people wait until they lose ten pounds before judging whether a gym membership is successful? Customers need to feel successful at every touch point between themselves and your business, not just at the very end when the outcome of an action is realized. Design your product to deliver customers an ongoing feeling of progress. Over time, you will notice that you need to change the outcomes and goals you deliver to customers. Why? A successful product and business will continually improve customers’ lives. As customers use your product to make their lives better, they will face new challenges and desire new goals and outcomes. Progress defines value; contrast reveals value. See how easily you can answer this question: “Which food do you most prefer, steak or pizza?” Many people find this difficult to answer. An easier question might be, “When do you prefer 21 steak, and when do you prefer pizza?” A customer may find it difficult to compare two foods without any context. The last question is easier because the person being asked is thinking about food and context together. Products have no value in and of themselves. They have value only when customers use them to make progress in context. The value of steak is easier to 26  What Are the Principles of JTBD? assess when it’s matched with a fancy restaurant and a nice bottle of wine. But things can get wacky in that scenario if we swap a slice of pizza for the steak. The same effect, of course, also applies to pizza. A pizza birthday party for an eight-year-old makes perfect sense, but a steak birthday party for kids doesn’t seem quite right. The kids would probably be upset and the party a disaster. The same steak has more value at the fancy restaurant than at a kid’s birthday party. The steak doesn’t change, but its value does. Why? A steak at a fancy restaurant helps you have a better restaurant experience. It delivers progress. A steak at a child’s birthday party does not make the party better. It does not deliver progress. This is why we say progress defines value, and contrast reveals it. You understand the value customers place on a product when you compare and contrast the progress it delivers against the progress other products can deliver. A steak makes a fancy dinner better but a kid’s birthday party worse. A pizza makes a fancy dinner worse but a kid’s birthday party better. Solutions for Jobs deliver value beyond the moment of use. Imagine you own a car. When it’s sitting in your garage, is it still delivering value? Doesn’t the satisfaction of owning a car extend beyond when you’re actively using it? What’s more valuable, getting transported from point A to point B or having the peace of mind that you have the ability to go where you want to go, whenever you like? Our lives are dynamic. They can’t be measured well in static terms. Yes, a solution can provide functionality only in the moment, but its value to the customer is realized in contexts beyond that moment. A product should be designed with an understanding of how it improves customers’ lives, not just how it offers value in the moment. Solutions and Jobs should be thought of as parts of a system that work together to deliver progress to customers. What is a system? A system is a collection of parts that work together to achieve a desired effect. The value is not in any one particular part of the system but in how those parts work together. A car is an example of a system. Imagine I give you a box that contains all the parts of a car. What I gave you would likely be worthless to you. The parts are valuable to you only when they are assembled in a particular fashion, when they work together in a particular way, and when you can use them to make progress. You help customers better not by studying the individual parts of the car but by studying how those parts work together to help customers make progress. This same is true for a JTBD and innovation. You need to understand how several parts must work together to deliver progress to customers. Such a study 27  What Are the Principles of JTBD? will also help you understand why and how customers don’t make progress. The study of a JTBD is the study of a system, and solutions for Jobs can be thought of as parts of that system. Grill manufacturer Weber understands the idea of products as part of a system. Weber doesn’t sell only grills. It offers educational materials, recipes, party- planning guides, grilling accessories, and even a free phone hotline for grilling advice. Weber offers all these additional products because it understands that the customers’ JTBD isn’t about owning a grill that functions to cook things; it’s about being someone who can use a grill to make tasty food and becoming a better griller. For many grillers, the JTBD is also about entertaining friends and family with cooking theater, as well as tasty food. In this case, it’s about becoming a better host and entertainer. Weber understands that no matter how well its grills function, if customers can’t use them to make progress against their JTBD, the grills are worthless. The understanding that customers are buying a better version of themselves is why Weber delivers a constellation of products that work together—as a system—to help customers make progress. This is why Weber has been a successful, profitable company since 1893. 28  Part II Demand and Competition JTBD thinking encourages you to understand how demand for a product is generated and how customers view competition. The first three chapters in this part feature case studies of innovators who developed this understanding, and they describe how it helped them create and sell products. Use these to create a mental catalog of examples of what it is like to apply JTBD to innovation efforts. This will help you absorb the concepts in this book and become better at applying JTBD to your own innovation efforts. After these case studies, we’ll dig deeper into the forces that shape customer demand, why JTBD practitioners claim that Jobs remain while solutions come and go, and what it is like when an innovation effort fails to account for the forces of progress and how customers see competition. 4. Case Study: Dan and Clarity What’s the JTBD? Put it to work I didn’t know who Dan Martell was when I started writing this book. Another JTBD practitioner told me about Dan’s success as a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and JTBD practitioner. When I did catch up with him, I learned that he had applied JTBD principles while building a company called Clarity. JTBD thinking helped him improve his research efforts, understand the company’s profit potential, understand how Clarity could stand out to customers, find marketing messages that resonate with customers, and know which features his team should—and shouldn’t—add to his product so more customers would use it. Founded in 2012, Clarity is a marketplace that connects entrepreneurs with experts who can advise, motivate, and inspire. Dan created Clarity to ensure that entrepreneurs get the advice they need to grow their businesses. It helps them find the right experts and then schedules and hosts calls with them. (Three years later, Dan sold it to Fundable, which is a platform entrepreneurs can use to raise money.) Dan first heard about JTBD from Eoghan McCabe during Clarity’s early years. Eoghan is CEO of Intercom, one of the companies Dan invests in. Dan, intrigued by Eoghan’s recommendation, believed JTBD could help him grow Clarity faster: “Once I decided I wanted to learn more about JTBD, the first thing I did was to search Clarity’s marketplace. I found some [JTBD] experts and did a few calls. It was really helpful to get real-world experience and advice on how to approach it.” How can JTBD help you do better research? Dan had already been a strong proponent of customer interviews, even before getting into JTBD. Every week, he would call six customers or so and ask questions such as, “How would you feel if you could no longer use this?” or, “How can we improve Clarity?” But Dan knows that such interviews have limitations. In particular, he understands the difficulties inherent in talking with customers about their habits and that people often want to feel as if they are giving the “correct” answers. “I feel like customers have this really bad habit of lying sometimes,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘Yeah. I love your product. I use it all the time.’ Then, you look at the logs, and 30  Case Study: Dan and Clarity you realize they haven’t logged in once since signing up—so you know it’s not true.” Calls with JTBD practitioners helped Dan realize the benefits of framing an interview around what Jobs customers are trying to get done. He did this by changing his questions. Instead of “How would you feel if you could no longer use this?” he asked customers, “Can you tell me about the other solutions you’ve tried? What did or didn’t you like about each one?” In other words, he shifted from asking broad, individual questions to asking questions aimed at understanding customers’ journeys as they struggled to find solutions that fit their JTBD. He would then investigate if other customers had similar journeys. Dan said, “What I love about JTBD is that it really helped me to build a framework for those interviews. Before I became familiar with JTBD, I studied interview questions, extracted pain points, customer language, and all these other things. But when you frame it around the question, ‘What is the job your customer is hiring you to do?’ then it really puts a lot of things into perspective and helps you uncover key insights.” What do consumers consider as competition? How do you understand what customers do and don’t value in a solution? Dan’s new approach to interviewing customers encouraged him to learn about other ways they had tried to get advice. He also wanted to learn if getting expert advice was really what customers were looking for. “Getting expert advice” is just an activity—a solution for a Job. What was the Job itself? What was the emotional motivation to make the customers’ lives better? Answering these questions would help him continue to improve and promote Clarity. To help guide him through these interviews, Dan kept asking himself a few simple but powerful questions: What do customers see as competition to Clarity? What would they spend their money on if they didn’t spend it on Clarity? Have customers set aside a budget for using Clarity or some other solution? He then asked customers questions such as the following: What other solutions did you try before deciding on Clarity? What did and didn’t you like about other solutions you had tried? If you could no longer use Clarity, what would you use instead? 31  Case Study: Dan and Clarity These questions helped Dan learn what his customers considered as competition to Clarity. He learned that, before ending up with Clarity, customers had tried solutions such as joining entrepreneur groups, hiring individual advisors (who take equity), using LinkedIn, and attending conferences. “Understanding how people thought about our product and its competition helped us position it to be different,” Dan said. “A lot of people had tried LinkedIn before coming to Clarity. Whereas LinkedIn connects people, it doesn’t let them call in real time. It was also interesting to hear that customers considered Clarity as an alternative to attending a conference.” How do you learn what pushes customers to make a change? Dan began to learn two important observations as he talked with customers about the solutions they had used: what his customers did and didn’t value in a solution, and what was pushing them to make a change. He found these data by comparing and contrasting all the solutions they had used and asking himself, “What do these solutions have (or what do they not have) in common?” Dan realized that the solutions “use LinkedIn,” “hire an advisor,” and “attend a conference” had an important aspect in common: entrepreneurs were trying to make a connection with a specific person. Dan and his team saw that entrepreneurs seeking advice valued the messenger, often more than the message. When it comes to getting advice, it’s not just about the content. It has a lot to do with who’s delivering it. Dan said, “There’s real value in going after that person who is going to motivate you to make a change. It’s not just having someone tell you, ‘Go get ten sales tomorrow.’ It is having billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban tell you, ‘Go get ten sales tomorrow.’” Dan now knew what was pushing customers to seek a solution: entrepreneurs who were in a slump wanted inspiration from a particular person. Getting advice is just an activity. If the seekers merely wanted advice, they could have read a book or watched a video. They wanted more. They were hoping that someone else’s success would rub off on them. This is why they wanted someone they respected to inspire and motivate them to get out of an entrepreneurial slump. That was their emotional motivation to make a change. Making progress with this Job is more valuable to these customers than getting advice. Dan said, “I’ve got a list of competitors that tried to build competing solutions. Their marketing and positioning was all about, ‘Oh, if you want to talk to this type of person, we have them.’ But it was never about a person having the knowledge. It was what [you knew] the person you talked with had accomplished.” 32  Case Study: Dan and Clarity How can understanding the customer’s moment of struggle help you market a solution? These insights helped Dan and his team make two changes to how they advertised Clarity. Each change would differentiate their solution from what customers considered its competition and help customers realize that Clarity was better. The first change was to emphasize that Clarity would serve its customers on demand. As Dan put it, We started saying Clarity gave “on-demand business advice.” It was adding the words on demand that differentiated us from LinkedIn—which is an e-mail exchange from which you may or may not get a response. It also differentiated us from attending a conference—you didn’t have to wait until the next one came up. We mentioned all that in the copywriting. The second change was to highlight the fact that using Clarity was cheaper than attending a conference. Dan said, “Understanding what customers considered as competition also helped us position Clarity against the cost of going to a conference. Why invest thousands of dollars in expenses and the cost of a ticket if you can just talk to the speaker today?” How did the product attract more users and customers? Clarity is a marketplace for connecting buyers (entrepreneurs looking for advice) with sellers (those offering advice). This means that Clarity needed to attract two different groups of people—each with its own motivation for using Clarity. The motivation for advisors is simple: they want to make money by helping people. The entrepreneurs who use Clarity, however, are different. They want to be motivated and inspired, usually by a particular person. This meant that for its marketplace function to work, Clarity had to find experts whom customers recognized and respected. Dan said, Understanding what customers were trying to achieve with LinkedIn and conferences helped us with the supply side of the marketplace. We said to ourselves, ‘OK. If we recruit experts, we need to recruit a certain type of expert.’ One of the creative solutions that we came up with was to source experts from SlideShare (a website where conference speakers share their presentations with the public). If you think about it, people who are regarded as inspiring and motivational are those who give creative presentations at conferences. When we wanted to add topics or categories for Clarity, we would source experts who had presentations on SlideShare. 33  Case Study: Dan and Clarity How did Clarity realize its revenue potential? It was Dan’s understanding of what customers considered as Clarity’s competition that also helped him realize Clarity’s revenue potential. “We learned from customers that their budget for Clarity wasn’t coming from the IPO, or from a monthly membership, or from a training budget. It was coming from spending money to go to an event to meet people and to learn.” Dan realized that Clarity wasn’t taking money away only from lower-cost alternatives, such as LinkedIn, or from the price of a conference ticket. He learned that Clarity was tapping into the budgets for big-ticket items, such as hiring advisors and consultants, as well as entire budgets for attending conferences, which include airfare, hotels, and meals. This explained why his customers were willing to spend thousands of dollars on calls. This insight helped him understand how valuable his product was to customers. It also helped him understand Clarity’s true value in case it was acquired, which it eventually was. Clarity discovered a silent competitor: anxiety. Nobody comes to Clarity when he or she is having a great day. Dan and his team learned that entrepreneurs were hoping they could get inspired by someone they respected. Without this inspiration, these entrepreneurs would struggle to put into action any advice they were given. This generated demand for the product. But were there any forces that blocked this demand? Dan said, “The biggest competition for us is when a customer chooses to do nothing. I think that’s true for a lot of innovations. In Clarity’s case, entrepreneurs and innovators continue struggling in the dark. They wouldn’t choose to become a self-educator and solve their problem.” Dan began to learn about the anxiety that blocks people from using the product or keeps them from using it more, even when they do decide to reach out to an expert on Clarity: One of the questions that I would ask, which was about Clarity as a solution and not their JTBD, was, “What can we change to better meet your needs?” We found a bunch of anxieties around using Clarity. A majority of them were, “What if the expert doesn’t answer my question? What’s your guarantee? Is the call going to be recorded? What should I do to prep?” That last was one that really threw me off. Both the seekers and experts themselves felt we should teach them how to prepare for a good call. Dan and his team had taken it for granted that people would be prepared for a call. He assumed that both parties would set up the topic and then have a conversation. This was partly true. Customers had specific questions, but they didn’t know how to organize them or what made a question good or bad. Both sides wanted to prep, but they didn’t know how. 34  Case Study: Dan and Clarity Another anxiety that both parties shared was the fear of sounding stupid or not putting their best foot forward. What if an expert doesn’t have a good answer for a question? What if he or she temporarily forgets the best answer? What if I get nervous and forget my follow-up questions? These anxieties prevented both groups—entrepreneurs and experts—from using Clarity more. How can you reduce the anxiety customers face when using or buying your product? To fix the problem, Dan and his team added some prep questions and guidelines to the e-mail templates they sent out to notify both parties of a call. They also provided notes that outlined what a great call looks like and what expectations the parties should have going into the call. Dan said, “Discovering anxieties like those—that is the interesting part. What I love is thinking, ‘Here is the problem, and here is the anxiety point. How do we solve it in a way that’s elegant, simple, and doesn’t confuse the interface?’ That was always the fun part for me.” How can JTBD be used to research new features? As Dan became more familiar with JTBD, he began to develop his own tools and processes that would help him apply JTBD principles to improve Clarity. One such process was aimed at helping his team quickly validate ideas for new features. Before committing to developing a feature, the Clarity team wanted to make sure the problem they intended to solve was actually one that customers had. The best way to learn this was to find out if customers had tried to solve the problem before. Dan said, “An interview about how customers had tried to solve a problem in the past was more like a feature-usage timeline than a purchase decision.” An example of a feature the Clarity team chose not to build was one that saved search results when users looked for experts on Clarity’s marketplace. We asked customers questions like, “Have you ever tried to save results when you searched for an expert?” If they said no, then we’d move on. We then asked, “Do you have a browser bookmarklet? Which ones?” Then, they would say, “Evernote, Buffer…” It would provide so much context outside of the feature. It was more about how the customer had tried to solve their problems in the past. So, Dan’s team decided not to build the browser bookmarklet. They didn’t think it delivered enough value because the problem it solved wasn’t one their customers had struggled with. Dan said, 35  Case Study: Dan and Clarity A lot of people—especially if they’re committed or already invested in a solution—are looking for that confirmation bias that it’s something they should do. It’s a different question to ask customers how they solved the problem in the past. I could ask them, “Hey, what do you think of this?” They might say, “Oh, it’s prettier. It works great.” But that’s not really answering the question we’re asking. We want to know, “Are you going to use it? Are you struggling to make progress? Have you tried to solve this in the past? Do you want to hire someone or something to solve this Job to be Done?” If the answer is no, then cool. We write that down and move on. How does JTBD help innovators? Dan appreciates the focus JTBD puts on exploring customer motivation. He also wishes more companies would do that rather than “spy” on customers. I think the biggest thing which Jobs [JTBD] encourages people to do, which I’m a big fan of, is to stop spying on customers and start talking with customers. I feel that way especially with software, because we have the analytics and the geeks who are building the software; they’re all about tracking and logging and all these data…I always give the analogy of being a retail shop owner and hiding in the back room and trying to learn from your customers by watching the closed-circuit television. You could watch [customers] come in, walk around your store, pick up things, put them down, try things on…or you could just walk out and ask them, “Hey, what brought you in here today? What are you looking for? What other places did you try in the past?” Talking to customers about their motivations is where you’re going to learn the most. WHAT’S THE JTBD? From the data Dan has given us, I’d say that the struggle for progress is: More about: getting out of a rut, making a connection with someone whose accomplishments I respect, being inspired, being motivated to act, feeling like I’m on the right path, having confidence in what I’m doing, having success rub off onto me, on demand 36  Case Study: Dan and Clarity Less about: getting expert advice, talking with an expert, giving away equity, having a video chat with a mentor, emailing a mentor, mentoring, meeting other entrepreneurs, seeing a mentor live Here are some possible descriptions of the one or more Jobs to be Done Clarity is hired for: Help me get out of an innovation slump with inspirational advice from someone whom I respect. Give me the motivation to act with a kick in the butt from someone I respect. Take away the anxiety of making a big decision with assurance from someone else whose has been in a similar position. These work for me because they don’t describe an activity or task. They describe the motivation that comes before engaging in an activity (i.e. using a solution). Also, notice how these descriptions can be used to describe the other solutions customers had tried in the past (e.g. attending a conference, giving away advisory shares, and using LinkedIn). This is important because a JTBD either doesn’t change, or does so slowly. If a description of a JTBD works for solutions from one hundred years ago, it’ll probably work for solutions one hundred years into the future. PUT IT TO WORK Dan’s case study is a great introduction to JTBD. Here are some suggestions to help you get started today with applying JTBD thinking. Ask customers about what they’ve done, not just what they want. Confirm it if you can. Customers will often tell us what we want to hear, even if it’s partially (or completely) untrue. Customers may tell you that they use your product “all the time,” but they really use it only intermittently. Also, people build easy-to- remember narratives between themselves and the products they use. Phenomena like this are why it’s tricky to ask customers, “What do you want?” 22 and “How can we make things better?” The answer for these problems is to talk with customers about what they actually did, not just about what they say they want. What were their revealed preferences, not just their stated preferences? Even the answers about actual action taken won’t be 100 percent accurate, but they will be a great deal more reliable than their answers to what-if questions. 37  Case Study: Dan and Clarity Understanding how customers have solved problems is a crucial part of understanding their JTBD. Not only does it help you understand what customers expect from a product, it also helps you design features for new products. Ask the right questions to learn how your customers view competition. Accurate models of competition can come only from customers. Any model of competition that doesn’t come from them is invalid. One way of getting the information you need to build a correct model of competition is through customer interviews and surveys. Ask them questions such as the following: What other solutions did you consider before trying the product? What other solutions have you actually used? If the product wasn’t available to you, what would you have done instead? What solutions have the people you know tried or used? How to do interviews is discussed in part IV of this book. Learn what kind of progress customers are seeking. What’s their emotional motivation (JTBD)? Use that to segment competition. Dan learned that Clarity’s customers saw its competition as attending conferences, using LinkedIn, and hiring advisors. These solutions have vastly different functionality and qualities. However, from the customers’ point of view, they appeal to the same struggle: “Get me out of an entrepreneurial slump with motivational advice from someone whom I respect.” Discover your customers’ motivation through comparing and contrasting the solutions that they consider as competition: What do the various solutions have in common? What is different about them? What did or didn’t the customers like about each solution? What would customers do if they couldn’t use their existing solution for their JTBD? What would the consequences be? How are they expecting life to be better once they have the right solution for a JTBD? These types of questions help you understand two things: what customers are struggling with now, and how they hope life will be better when they have the right solution. Put these two together, and you’ll have their JTBD. Ask yourself, “From which budget will my product take away money?” Also ask, “When customers start using my product, what will they stop using?” Dan 38  Case Study: Dan and Clarity learned that his customers were willing to spend thousands of dollars on Clarity calls. This number didn’t come from looking at how much other “talk to an expert” products cost. He learned this by understanding that his product—from the customers’ point of view—was replacing the entire budge of going to a conference. I’ve noted that when it comes to solutions for a JTBD, customers can use only one at a time. When they start using one solution, they have to stop using something else. This helps you understand what the competition is. It also helps you gauge how to price your product properly and figure your revenue potential. Should you charge less or more? You have two big factors to consider: the amount customers are already accustomed to spending on a solution for a JTBD, and the intensity of their struggle. The more they struggle, the more they are willing to pay. Create better marketing material by speaking to your customers’ JTBD. Dan Martell described Clarity as “on-demand business advice.” He also featured access to experts whom customers would recognize. He also positioned Clarity as an alternative to going to a conference: Why spend the time and money going to a conference? Talk with the speaker today! Both of these messages spoke to customers’ motivations and distinguished Clarity as unique. Talk with customers to learn what messages connect with them. It can be as simple as asking them to describe why they like your product. Sometimes, you have to probe deeper and ask them questions such as, “Before you bought our product, how did you know it was right for you?” The best promotional material, however, comes from speaking directly to their struggle. Focus on delivering emotional progress (getting a Job Done). Don’t focus solely on functionality. Dan mentioned a list of people who had tried to create solutions similar to Clarity. They failed—and Clarity won, because Dan designed and marketed it in a way that spoke to customers’ emotional motivation. The Clarity clones thought of themselves as “talk to an expert” products; they were focusing on functionality, activities, and tasks. But Dan focused on the emotional quality—that is, customers’ JTBD. He knew that customers wanted to be motivated and inspired by someone whom they respect. This made Clarity stand out, and it’s why Fundable acquired it. Clarity’s former competitors, however, have already been forgotten. Your guiding star in understanding your customers’ JTBD is their motivation to better their lives. Focus on that. Focusing on functionality will distract you. 39 5. Case Study: Anthony and Form Theatricals What’s the JTBD? Put it to work What Job might someone use theater for? I had never asked this question before, but Anthony Francavilla had. For the past few years, Anthony has been applying JTBD principles to figure out the answers to that question. Theater has been around for thousands of years. Shouldn’t we know the reasons that people attend the theater? Maybe. But maybe not. Anthony has managed and produced theater for ten years. In 2012, he cofounded Form Theatricals, whose mission is to help productions grow and be successful. This is particularly challenging in the theater world. Many productions are run by actors or writers who often don’t have much business experience. They also have little to no experience innovating around customer motivation. This is where Anthony and Form Theatricals come in. JTBD has helped Anthony figure out how to learn what really matters to theatergoers; what customers do and don’t consider as competition to theater; and how a theater production could improve its shows for patrons, increase profits from ticket sales, develop new types of theater products, and reduce the cost of operating a show. Why look into JTBD? Anthony knew that interviewing theater patrons was the key to improving a show. But what’s the best way to interview people about a show they’ve just seen? To find out, he sought advice from someone who specializes in interviewing customers. Anthony said, I got together with this guy, Boris, who specializes in ethnographic interviewing. I said to him, “I have this problem with a client. People don’t like the show, but it’s selling well. I want to interview customers, but I don’t know what I should be asking them about.” He said I could talk to them and try to find out what Job these patrons are trying to get Done. He asked me if I had heard about JTBD. I told him I hadn’t. He explained it to me. Then, he told me about some sources online where I could learn more. I also signed up for the JTBD Meetup that’s run here in New York. 40  Case Study: Anthony and Form Theatricals After looking into JTBD a bit more and learning about some of the tools associated with the principles, it didn’t take long for Anthony to start gathering powerful insights. Studying what customers consider as competition helps you reveal what pushes them to change. It also helps reveal their JTBD. Anthony applied some JTBD thinking to his next client: a children’s theater company. To begin, he interviewed parents who had taken their children to the company’s show. He wanted to know why they chose this particular show. Did they consider any other activities for their children besides attending the theater? He told me, “We interviewed a bunch of parents. We learned that the options they had considered [as alternatives to attending the theater