Your customer has a task they are trying to accomplish. For example, a dad buying a minivan wants to safely deliver his daughters (and all her friends) to their activities and back home again. When that dad comes to your car lot, that is his job-to-be-done. Yet many businesses treat that customer as if he were there to buy a car. Buying a car is painful, it requires your customer to outlay cash. Being able to easily fit his daughter and her friends in the car, to listen to their talk and laughter, that is the experience he wants from his purchase.
In my work with clients on human-centered design, I have found that customers have two jobs to be done. There is the functional job, the task they need to complete to fulfill their obligations. The dad in our example is driving his daughter around the neighborhood to soccer practice and sleepover parties. That is his functional job. He also wants to stay connected to his daughter and get to know her friends. And he wants the ride to be safe and comfortable. These are his emotional jobs. A well designed minivan experience will fulfill both the functional and emotional needs of the customer. This is the experience that will make the difference between the minivan just serving a purpose (and any old minivan will do) and the dad loving his ride.
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Creating Your Customer’s Job-to-be-Done
To really understand both the functional and emotional needs of your customer, you will want to dig deeper into what motivates them. What does success mean to them? What outcomes do they want to avoid? With my clients, we explore these questions with their customers for both their emotional job and their functional job. A metric of success for our dad who is driving his daughter and her friends around might be the number of seats available and whether the doors can be controlled from the front. An outcome to avoid? Perhaps he wants to avoid having to get out of the car each time he picks up or drops off. These are his functional motivations.
The emotional motivations will require that you dig a bit deeper, and perhaps observe your customer as they complete their task. If we go for a ride with our dad as he runs the girls to practice after school, we might observe that they sing along to the radio. But if the road noise from the minivan is too loud in the back, his daughter turns the music up so high that he can’t hear what they are saying. His emotional metric of success is being able to follow and contribute to the conversation. Outcomes to avoid? Road noise and acoustics that make it difficult to hear the person in the back row.
The Job-to-be-Done matrix provides a beacon for every person in your business who is part of delivering the experience to the customer. As you create personas for your customers that capture their psychographic profile, creating a Job-to-be-Done matrix for each key customer is an easy way to ensure your design will deliver a wow experience to everyone in your target. Just as important, it will help you determine who you won’t be designing for. Note I said key customers – there will be others who will purchase a minivan who aren’t on this list but that’s okay. Don’t be fooled into thinking you have to design for everyone; then your design will appeal to no one.
Focusing the Team on the Experience
One last thought. Designing a good experience may seem obvious to you, just common sense things that you already incorporate in your solution development work. While everyone on your team will be passionate about delivering a good experience to your customer, you may be surprised to find that their definition of good experience varies quite a bit. If you want your customer experience to be memorable, it will need to be consistent. Back to our minivan experience, it is just as important that the car dealer and the purchasing transaction deliver on the promise of the safe, comfortable, fun experience as does the car itself. Design is as much about collaboration, getting your whole team behind the experience you deliver, as it is about delivering wow.
How have you used your customer’s job-to-be-done to design amazing experiences in your business?
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