Do you know what your product is hired for? Jobs to be Done can help.
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Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is a product innovation framework that I come back to over and over. I’ve led JTBD workshops probably 100 times by now, and I know it’s impactful because inevitably I hear product, marketing, and sales people start to use JTBD terminology in their strategy and planning meetings.
Jobs to Be Done is theory for understanding what motivates customers to buy your product. You can think of it this way: users “hire” software to help get their job done. Every person has their own situation, motivation, and expected outcome, and sometimes they “hire” products to help them accomplish those jobs.
“Job” is shorthand for what an individual really seeks to accomplish in a given circumstance.
Olivine Workshops: Jobs to Be Done
If video is your preferred mode, watch my talk on Jobs To Be Done.
Here are 3 real world examples that will help you understand JTBD and start think differently about how you build and market products:
Innovating on an existing mature product: McDonald’s
McDonald’s wanted to increase its milkshake revenue. They tried everything— ran focus groups, tried new toppings, hired experts to experiment with pricing. Nothing moved the needle. Enter Clayton Christensen, godfather of Jobs to be Done. He and a team of researchers posted up in a McDonald’s lobby and found that half of all milkshakes were purchased before 8:30am.
Curious because they thought milkshakes were for dessert, not breakfast. 🤔
The next morning, they hung out side of McDonald’s and asked everyone who came out with a milkshake: “What did you hire that milkshake for?”. *Blank stares*
“Ok let me ask it another way: when you don’t buy a milkshake what do you do instead?”
Some of the answers were:
A bagel, but it was hard to eat with one hand
A Snickers bar, but his wife found the wrapper
Donuts, but the sugar got everywhere
Turns out, everyone was getting a milkshake for a quick breakfast on their long car commute. They could sip the shake with one hand, no mess, and it kept them occupied while they drove to work.
So rather than flavors, toppings and pricing experiments, they:
Streamlined to 3 flavors
Added protein and made the formula thicker
Set up an express register just for milkshakes in the morning
Milkshake revenue went up 7X. At their scale, I’m sure they would have been happy with a 7% increase, but they got 700% instead!
Entering a crowded market: The Infatuation
If you had asked me 10 years ago if there was room for another restaurant review company I would have said not really. Yelp and Google Maps had it on lock down. But I was wrong.
The Infatuation, a restaurant review website dedicated to situational restaurant guides, burst onto the New York restaurant scene in 2009 and has been steadily growing since. They are now in 50+ cities around the world, in 2019 they bought Zagat, then in 2021, they were acquired by JPMorgan Chase & Co.
In hindsight, I can see the opening through the lens of Jobs To Be Done:
Yelp, is generally used for finding cuisine-based restaurants. I.e. “what’s the best Thai food in San Francisco?”
Google Maps is generally used for finding location-based restaurants. I.e. “where’s the best place to get dinner before our show in South Beach?”
Sure, Yelp and Google Maps have other features and use-cases, but they each serve a primary job-to-be-done.
But The Infatuation is all about situation:
Where can I sip margaritas on a rooftop bar for Cinco de Mayo?
Where should I take my future in-law’s to dinner when meeting them for the first time?
What’s an offbeat dinner spot that won’t be mobbed and overpriced for Valentine’s day?
The Infatuation really shines when you don’t care about the cuisine or the location, but your job-to-be-done is finding the perfect restaurant vibe to suit your situation.
Building a worse product to do a better job: Intercom
We all know that it’s not always the best product that wins. Lots of factors come into play — marketing, timing, trends…
But let me tell you about when a worse product did a better job.
Early Intercom days, the user map was getting tons of product engagement but no one was sure why.
Maybe people were traveling to Australia for a conference and wanted to host a meetup with their local customers? That didn’t seem like a frequent enough use case to warrant so much engagement.
They wanted to improve this feature further, but before they did, they wanted to make sure they understood the job it was being hired for. So the product team asked customers, and the answer surprised them.
Turns out customers weren’t using it as a map. They were using it to impress people:
They would tweet it out to show that they had active users around the world.
They would put it in their fundraising pitch deck to show traction.
They would put it on a monitor in their conference booth to get people to stop and chat.
If the product team had understood this to be a regular map, they would have spent all sorts of engineering efforts making it more accurate with topography and landmarks.
But instead they removed most map details and made it a brand-agnostic gray. They added a share/export button and viola! People started sharing it even more, and Intercom attributes a good deal of its early word-of-mouth growth to this map.
In this case, a worse “map” did a better job of impressing people.
Ok fine, but this is a marketing newsletter. How does this product innovation framework impact marketing?
When you understand your customer’s situation, motivation, and expected outcome, you can create messaging and campaigns that specifically speak to that.
For McDonald’s. it’s the difference between “family time is sweeter” and “commute breakfast solved”.
