Kim, Jack and Celia were planning their customer deep-dive workshop scheduled for this Friday. They would spend the morning learning how to interview and observe customers, and then at lunch, conduct a few interviews to put their new skills in practice. “What will we do with the information we collect?” asked Jack. “How do we analyze our insights into something usable?”
What is a Job-to-be-Done framework?
Kim responded, “What we are looking for are the pain points our customers encounter as they journey to complete their task.” She had been studying the use of capturing job-to-be-done and journey maps for innovation. The job-to-be-done framework centered on the customer’s goal and what success … or failure meant for them attempting to complete their task. And the journey map helped to detail the steps the customer took to reach their goal.
While many companies mapped touch points in the customer’s experience with their products, this approach was too company centric and only revealed potential improvements in the solutions supplied by their own company. They were seeking real innovative ideas. The customer had a job or a task they were doing, and Kim knew her team needed to walk through their journey with them. The customer would use different solutions that they created themselves or bought from other suppliers to help them along the way. This was the ecosystem that Kim wanted to explore to discover the innovations that would provide the most value to their customers.
“I agree,” said Celia. “And I think we know a bit about our customer’s journey already.” As the manager of the innovation team, she knew it was important that they leveraged their collective knowledge. “How do we capture our existing knowledge yet stay open to learning from our customers?”
Capturing the Details
“At the beginning of our workshop, we should collect what we already know in a job-to-be-done matrix. Just as important, we should collect assumptions we want to test and unknowns we want to explore. That will help the team understand why the interviews are so important,” said Kim. She went to the board and drew a table. She labeled the rows, “functional job” and “emotional job”.
“This is what our customers are trying to accomplish,” said Kim. “Their functional job is their task to be done. Their emotional job is what is motivating them to do the task well. For example, a mother fixing breakfast is feeding her kids before they go off to school – that’s her functional job. But her emotional job is to feel confident that she is setting them up to have a good day.”
Job-to-be-done captures what tasks customers are doing, and why they are doing it.
“I get it,” said Jack. “We want to know what they are doing, and why they are doing it.”
“So what are your columns?” asked Celia pointing to the other cells in the matrix.
Kim labeled the first column “desired outcome”. This is where they captured their customer’s goal. The next two columns she labeled “measures of success” and “outcomes to avoid”. “For both their functional and emotional jobs, what does successful completion mean? What do they want to avoid? Where is there conflict between the two?” she said. “For example, functional success might be nourished kids, but an emotional outcome to avoid is tears, so our mother will look for breakfast food that is healthy and her kids will enjoy eating.”
“This is great,” said Jack. “It will focus the team on the customer task and what success means to them.”
“And I can see how we really don’t know the answer to that question – what success means to our customers,” added Celia. “Looking at this before we start interviewing will be key to keeping us open to new insights and listening for the pain points we can help them with.” She stood up. Now that they knew the agenda, it was time to engage the team and share the excitement.
Have you worked with a Job-to-be-Done framework? Share your experience with us.