The Size of the Job to be Done Depends on the Customer and the Company
Chapter Four: Principle 3—Customers need the Whole Job to Get Done
Dear Friends,
Today we delve into one of the big challenges for experience strategists: how to prioritize which job to be done is the most important for a company to focus on. And I show how chapters two and three relate to chapter four.
Some have asked why I started with situational markets and point of view before focusing on jobs to be done. Hopefully, this post will help clarify.
The Size of the JTBD Depends on the Customer
Before we define big jobs and small jobs, let’s remind ourselves of two things. First, of all of the needs that customers have—and most of the time, there are many—the most important ones to focus on are those that will help your company grow. It is through situational markets that companies grow. Therefore, before you do any work to prioritize the jobs your customers want to have done, you should understand the size of the situational market for the need.
Too many experience strategists spend too much time focused on the wrong jobs for the customer and the company. So, before you prioritize the various jobs to be done, do the situational markets analysis and make sure you are focused on the biggest opportunities.
The second thing to make sure you have in place before focusing on the jobs to be done is your company’s point of view. The point of view makes the business model compelling, but it also helps you think about how to get the job done for the customer. It’s the point of view that guides innovation and planning. Your point of view helps you know when you should focus on AI and how you should plan to embrace it, for example. Your point of view provides clarity about what success looks like.
With its situational markets understood and a point of view in place, a company is now ready to start looking at the variety of jobs to be done to determine which needs they will address first. Having clarity about both ensures that innovation and experience strategy are aligned and can work together to advance the company’s objectives.
I like to think about the difference between a need and a job to be done this way. People have lots of needs, some they are aware of. Others are not as obvious, even to the person who needs them. All needs arise out of situations, or changes in situations. But sometimes the customer cannot see the need because they have become used to their situation.
A job to be done is a clarified need that the customer is willing to hire a company to do—and, more importantly, that the company can profit from.
Let’s imagine that Studio A creates romantic movies and TV series. Studio A’s strategy document might look like this:
Situational market: When couples want to watch a romantic movie/TV show on a Friday night. Market size in the United States: 80 million situations per week.
Point of view: Open-ended Plots. In the near future, people will want much more unpredictable plots with clever action and open-ended but happy-ish endings.
Need: To feel strong bonding emotions with your partner
JBTD: emotional and social jobs to be done
Help us (couples) feel romance and intrigue through enemies-to-lovers plots
Help us feel romance and uncontrolled laughing through forced proximity plots
Help us feel romance and nostalgia through childhood sweetheart plots
Help us feel romance and be amazed through impossible love plots
Help us feel danger and temptation through forbidden love plots
Help us to feel the struggle between people in love triangle plots
Notice that the ‘need’ does not suggest the solution, which in this case is a plot type. But the job to be done does. The emotional and social jobs of feeling something specific with someone else are directly linked to something the company is know for: plot creation. The customer will hire the studio to fulfill emotional and social jobs that have to do with the movie plot, but they won’t necessarily hire the studio to fulfill the same emotional and social jobs in a video game.
Although the customer may never say the words, “Help us to feel the struggle between people in love triangle plots,” the experience strategist should articulate the job to be done this way. Doing so, provides clarity for writers, producers, directors, and the hundreds of other people who are involved with creating a beautiful movie/TV story.
The Size of the Job to Get Done
Over the years, I’ve worked with many companies who struggled with the size of the job to be done, both definitionally as well as from an execution standpoint. For example, you might look at Studio A’s strategy above and think the ‘big job to be done’ is to create romantic movies with open-ended plots. After all, that’s the category that all of the other jobs fall into. Or, you might say that the big job to be done is to feel strong bonding emotions with your partner. That’s the broadest need stated within the strategy, far broader than creating romantic movies.
Others might argue that adding the ‘through forbidden love plots’ to the end of the job statement makes the emotional and social jobs of ‘help us to feel danger and temptation’ makes the job statement too limited or small. Couldn’t an enemies-to-lovers plot do the same thing? Why limit the job statement?
These questions become even more pronounced when UX teams and customer support groups are involved. Is a task like searching for the right movie to fit the mood a big job to get done or a small job to get done? If someone calls customer support to ask for help because their subscription has been canceled, is that a big job or a small job to get done?
Companies want to know what the big job to be done because it helps them to prioritize innovations. So, how do we decide such things? Here are three approaches.
First, let the customer determine the size of the job to get done. Ask the customer. Find out what is most pressing for them, what looms large, or what missed opportunity they wish you’d see. Try to see the size of the job to be done from the customer’s perspective. Many years ago there was a huge internet company called Yahoo!. (Okay, so they are still around, but bear with me.) If you are my age, you remember that Yahoo! was a juggernaut—and the place that people went to search for websites. Yahoo! didn’t have a great search engine, but they believed they had the best email, communities, content, and brand. Ergo, they didn’t really care about that small start-up called Google. They also didn’t see the end user as their customer. Their customer was the advertisers for whom they were serving up eyeballs.
But for the end user, search was the most important thing. And Google had a much better product. Search, which Yahoo! defined as a less important job to be done, was the biggest job to be done. Yahoo! had lots of complaints about their search offering—even before Google came on the scene. But they didn’t pay attention because search wasn’t what they thought was the big job to get done. They could have simply paid attention to Google’s growth and copied their strategy. But they didn’t.
The second approach for determining the size of the job to get done is to choose the descriptor that summarizes most of the other jobs to get done. The healthcare industry is basically a business category defined by the big job to get done: help me improve my health. The education industry is the same. (The manufactured goods industry, however, isn’t defined by the job to get done. So be careful with industry categories.)
To use this approach, first, you identify all of the jobs the customer wants to get done—that you can help them with—then you create a pyramid. You place all of the smaller category jobs to be done on the lowest level. Often times these are tasks the customer needs to get done to accomplish a larger goal. Then you identify the next level jobs to be done—the subcategory jobs to be done, or so to speak. And then, you identify two or three big jobs to be done at the top of the pyramid. You might be able to even identify one overarching job to crown the pyramid.
This approach only works if it’s grounded in customer insight. You must know your customers to prioritize jobs to be done. Otherwise, again, you can end up like Yahoo!, who probably would have made searching for things on the internet a lower-level task.
The third approach lends itself best to the world we live in today. We might call this period of history the intelligent experience economy. People love smart and genius technologies because they empower them. They also change customer expectations for how many big jobs the customer expects the company to do for them.
Let me say that again: Gone are the days when companies could do one or two jobs for customers well and be successful. Because of intelligent experiences, consumer expectations are dramatically greater. Most companies will need to be proficient in many important jobs to be done in order to survive. I wrote about this phenomenon in 2015 in a chapter I called, ‘A watch is not a watch.’ It used to be that if you were a watchmaker, all you needed to be good at was telling time. Today, most people who buy watches are actually buying smartwatches that do far more than tell time. Their expectations for other solutions are just as sophisticated, maybe more so.
So here’s how the third approach works. Again, it requires insights into what your customers want. The biggest jobs to get done are the ones that solve for many situations that most people encounter and require the most resources. Thus, to identify the big job to be done, the strategist must:
Count the number of different situations where the job arises
Multiply the number of different situations by the number of people who experience those situations (situational market analysis)
Score the results based on the level of complexity or resources required
For example, every day millions of different situations arise where billions of people need to search the Internet for something. Creating a simple search engine that can accurately support all of these people and situations is very, very complex. It would take a company like Google to get the job done.
Therefore, it is the functional task of searching for something that is the big job to be done for Google, and very few other competitors. Which seems obvious but goes against the grain of what most experience strategists and marketers (and CEOs, honestly) think. We tend to value strategies that focus on emotional, social, or aspirational jobs. Such job types are very important and deeply meaningful, but for a company like Google, they may not be the big job to get done.
To be continued…