INNOVATION MANAGEMENT WITH JOBS-TO-BE-DONE
“People don’t want a 1/4 inch drill; they want a 1/4 inch hole“. This famous quote by Theodore Levitt in 1962 shifted the focus of innovation from the products themselves to the jobs that customers are trying to accomplish, transforming the way companies think about product development.
Building on this idea, Anthony Ulwick1 and Clayton Christensen2 played a significant role in popularising the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework. Today, JTBD is a key approach in innovation management, helping companies focus on customer needs rather than product features, and driving the development of more relevant and marketable solutions.
JTBD is solution-agnostic, emphasising consumer needs rather than product features. It considers functional, emotional, and social aspects, providing a comprehensive view of what drives customer behaviour. This stability makes JTBD a lasting foundation for innovation, allowing for a clearer understanding of customer needs across an organisation.
Developing JTBDs requires groundwork like in-depth customer interviews, behaviour analysis, and reframing existing products. These efforts help identify JTBDs, which guide the next steps—creating marketable solutions and final products.
WHY THE VALIDATION OF JOBS-TO-BE-DONE IS IMPORTANT
Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) are vital in directing an organisation’s resources toward developing marketable solutions. Given the significant investment involved, it is crucial to ensure that the selected JTBDs represent the best opportunities for market success. While methods like in-depth interviews effectively identify these needs, they often fall short in validating or quantifying their market impact. Therefore, validating and quantifying JTBDs is essential to focus on the most promising opportunities, reduce risk, and increase the chances of success.
THE CHALLENGE OF MEASURING JTBD RELIABLY
The simplest way to validate different Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) is often through surveys that collect responses from a representative sample. Typically, closed-ended questions with rating scales are used to gauge the importance and acceptance of various JTBDs. This seems straightforward, but in practice, it can present challenges. For example, consider the job of “maintaining cardiovascular health“. When asked to rate its importance on a scale, most consumers would likely say it is important—after all, who wouldn’t agree? However, does this job truly reflect a priority in their daily lives? And how does that compare to other jobs tested alike, i.e. will it truly measure the differences that eventually may determine the allocation of resources in the organisation?
This limitation highlights why alternative techniques are necessary to measure the true significance of a job in people’s lives. Instead of asking consumers to respond with a number on a scale, we ask them to share their story. Storytelling is a more natural way for people to express their thoughts, as our brains are wired to respond to and engage with narratives.
To gather these insights, we reframe the JTBD with what we call a “story-cue.” In the cardiovascular health example, we might phrase it like this:
“We all want to maintain a healthy cardiovascular system. However, our genes and lifestyle choices can increase the risk of heart disease or stroke. Wouldn’t it be great to have a solution that helps keep our cardiovascular system healthy? What story or anecdote comes to mind about your own experiences, feelings, or ideas? Please share in detail.”
This approach typically yields a diverse range of responses (from “never thought about it” to heartbreaking experiences) that provide a more authentic reflection of the role a specific job plays in people’s lives.
To enable easy comparison between different JTBDs, we ask respondents to evaluate their own stories based on positivity, relevance, and willingness to share with others. These responses are then aggregated into a Job Performance Score. By comparing all these scores across our normative database and between different JTBDs, we can confidently identify the most promising opportunities for further development.
HOW STORYTELLING CAN FUEL THE INNOVATION PROCESS
Since these evaluations are usually conducted with large sample sizes, the richness and variety of shared stories offer an additional benefit to the innovation process. These narratives bring potential future customers to life, revealing their emotions, motivations, and specific occasions when they encounter the job. Unlike in-depth interviews, which often provide more limited perspectives, this approach captures broader variations that can inspire not only solution development but also effective marketing strategies which we reveal quantitatively by letting respondents classify their stories further, e.g. in terms of situations they were in.
IN SUMMARY
Validating JTBDs is crucial to ensure that resources are being allocated effectively for the next steps in the innovation process. More importantly, it must be done reliably, using techniques like our storytelling approach. This method not only offers a more accurate way to assess JTBDs but also helps to inform and guide future product development and marketing directions by bringing emotions, feelings, occasions and needs much closer to the organisation involved in developing solutions for the selected JTBDs.
1 e.g. Anthony W. Ulwick, “Turn Customer Input into Innovation”, Harvard Business Review, 2002 or “Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice”, 2016
2 e.g. Clayton Christensen “The Innovator’s Solution”, 2003
