RESULT OBTAINED
Canonical method
Jobs to be done: understanding why customers choose an offer
What must be established
A useful analysis keeps its controls visible.
- 01
Describe the situation in which the need arises, not the customer’s profile.
- 02
State the job without naming a product: the situation, the progress sought and the expected outcome, with its functional, emotional and social dimensions.
- 03
List every solution the customer hires today for this job, in-house workarounds and doing nothing included, before choosing which job to serve.
Decision reference
Make the next choice more explicit.
DECISION SUPPORTED
What progress is the customer trying to make in a given situation, and against which solutions does the offer really compete?
DELIVERABLE TO KEEP
One sheet per job: situation, statement, dimensions, competing solutions, reasons for hiring and firing, and the decision on which job to serve.
NEXT ELEMENT TO EXAMINE
Needs-based segmentationExplore →What the customer hires, and why
Buying an offer means hiring it to get a job done. If it does the job well, the customer hires it again; if it does it badly, the customer fires it and looks for another solution. The job can be small, filling a waiting time, or considerable, finding a more fulfilling career. It is never merely functional: it also carries an emotional dimension, what the customer wants to feel or avoid feeling, and a social dimension, how the customer wants to be perceived. Above all, it depends on the situation. The same person does not hire the same offer on a rushed morning and on a quiet Sunday, and their characteristics, age, income or sector, predict poorly what they will choose. Profiles and correlations describe who buys; the job explains why, at that moment, one offer wins over the others. It is this causal explanation that makes it possible to design an offer that gets chosen, rather than an offer that resembles its buyers.
- Hiring and firing
- Situation rather than profile
- Functional dimension
- Emotional and social dimensions
State a job that guides a decision
A useful job is written in one sentence: when a given situation occurs, I want to make a given progress, in order to obtain a given outcome. It names no product and no solution, which makes it stable: solutions change, the job remains. It must be broad enough to matter and precise enough to steer a choice. Simulated example, taken from the site’s running case: when a breakdown stops my production line, I want to restore activity as quickly as possible, so as not to miss a delivery subject to penalties. Its functional dimension is fast recovery; its emotional dimension, not living through the anxiety of a stoppage without knowing when it will end; its social dimension, not being the one who let the ordering customer down. The persona does not replace this statement: it describes a person, the job describes the reason for a choice in a situation. Two customers with identical profiles can pursue two different jobs, and two opposite profiles the same one.
- When, I want, so that
- No product name
- Stable when solutions change
- Persona and job distinct
Redefine the competition, then choose the job to serve
Starting from the job changes the list of competitors. To restore a stopped line, the customer can hire a maintenance contract, an in-house technician, a competitor’s on-call service, or do nothing and pay the penalties: doing nothing is often the first competitor, and the most underestimated. Each solution is hired for some reasons and fired for others, and these reasons are gathered in interviews with customers who have just switched solutions, rather than by asking what they would like. What holds the customer back must also be named: habit, the cost of switching, the fear that a new solution will do worse. The decision then consists in retaining the job and the situation in which the offer can be hired in preference to the alternatives, and writing down the jobs given up. The neighbouring pages take over: needs-based segmentation measures the poorly served outcomes of the retained job, the customer value map places the offer against the alternatives, the value proposition writes the promise.
- Every solution hired
- Doing nothing as a competitor
- Reasons to switch and to stay
- Job retained and jobs set aside
DECISION ASSET
Jobs to be done sheet
Each job starts from a situation, is stated without a product name, names its three dimensions and lists every solution the customer hires today.
Situation
- Input
- Moment and context of the need
- Control
- When does the need arise?
- Output
- Situation described
Job
- Input
- Progress and expected outcome
- Control
- Free of any product name?
- Output
- Job statement
Dimensions
- Input
- Functional, emotional, social
- Control
- Are all three named?
- Output
- Complete job
Competition
- Input
- Solutions hired today
- Control
- Is doing nothing counted?
- Output
- Job retained
- Christensen, Hall, Dillon and Duncan, Know Your Customers’ Jobs to Be Done, Harvard Business Review, 2016 (opens in a new tab)The customer hires an offer to get a job done; functional, social and emotional dimensions; the situation matters more than the profile.
- Christensen, Cook and Hall, Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure, Harvard Business Review, 2005 (opens in a new tab)A critique of demographic segmentation and product extensions, in favour of the jobs customers are trying to get done.
MOVE FROM ANALYSIS TO YOUR DECISION
Test the preference, credibility and defence of the positioning
MOVE FROM ANALYSIS TO YOUR DECISION
Test the preference, credibility and defence of the positioning
RETURN TO THE DECISION SYSTEM
See the canonical definition of marketing strategy→