Jared Ranere, a Growth Partner at thrv, talked about how Jobs-to-be-Done answers questions like "what is a customer need?" "Who is your real competition?" and "What does it mean to be "satisfied?" in a way that aligns your development team around your customer. It also gives you precise, measurable customer needs, and helps you know if your feature idea will deliver customer satisfaction before your team writes a line of code.
57. Estimate the
departure time
Set the route
Drive to the
destination
Assess if the
destination will
be reached on
time
Reset the
route
as needed
Park the
vehicle
JTBD: Reach a destination on time
58. Estimate the
departure time
Determine
how much
time to allow
for vehicle
preparation
Determine
how much
time to allow
for atypical
travel
conditions
Determine
how much
time to allow
for errands
along the way
Set the route Plan the stops
Set the
departure time
Decide
whether or not
to make the
drive
Walk to the
vehicle
Prepare the
vehicle for the
drive
Drive to the
destination
Make planned
stops along
the way
Assess if the
destination will
be reached on
time
Reset the
route
as needed
Park the
vehicle
Walk to the
destination
JTBD: Reach a destination on time
60. A need is a measure of speed &
accuracy of executing a job step.
61. Estimate the
departure time
Determine
how much
time to allow
for vehicle
preparation
Determine
how much
time to allow
for atypical
travel
conditions
Determine
how much
time to allow
for errands
along the way
Set the route Plan the stops
Set the
departure time
Decide
whether or not
to make the
drive
Walk to the
vehicle
Prepare the
vehicle for the
drive
Drive to the
destination
Make planned
stops along
the way
Assess if the
destination will
be reached on
time
Reset the
route
as needed
Park the
vehicle
Walk to the
destination
JTBD: Reach a destination on time
62. Thursday, June 27
6:41 AM 100%
Friday, June 28
Team Meeting 8:00 - 9:00 AM1h
My Location
Pick up tickets
1h Dentist 12:00 - 1:00 PM
90m
Customer Interview 2:00 - 3:30
PM
90m Dinner Meeting 6:30 - 8:00 PM
Groceries
Home
15m Drug Store
90m Gym
Meet Cindy
1h
Quarterly Review 10:00 - 11:00
AM
Map Optimize
110. Job Step: Monitor the list of potential new customers
Reduce the time it takes to determine the % of leads that will convert to
paying.
Need 4
9.3 2.1
16.
5Job: Acquire new customers
Comments (20) Tasks (8)Features (3)Comp Features (2)
Software
112. 1. Jobs-to-be-Done Sprint
Day Module Output
1 JTBD & Customer needs Job Map Hypothesis
2 Competitive Analysis At least one weakness
3
Idea Generation &
Messaging At least one new idea
3 Days, 5-10 people, Software Subscription
114. 3. Growth Phase
Every product idea validated
Engineers & designers know the why; make great
decisions
Product Managers effortlessly win resources
Profitability through growth
Swift response to changing landscapes
Ongoing, Your Execution Teams, Software Subscription
thrv Growth Partner
117. Job Step: Plan the stops
Minimize the time it takes to determine the optimal sequence for planned
stops.
Need 28
9.1 2.7
15.
5Job: Reach a destination on time
Comments (20) Tasks (8)Features (3)Comp Features (2)
118. Job Step: Plan the stops
Minimize the time it takes to determine the optimal sequence for planned
stops.
Need 28
9.1 2.7
15.
5Job: Reach a destination on time
Comments (20) Tasks (8)Features (3)Comp Features (2)
Customer Need
119. Job Step: Plan the stops
Minimize the time it takes to determine the optimal sequence for planned
stops.
Need 28
9.1 2.7
15.
5Job: Reach a destination on time
Comments (20) Tasks (8)Features (3)Comp Features (2)
Job & Job Step
120. Job Step: Plan the stops
Minimize the time it takes to determine the optimal sequence for planned
stops.
Need 28
9.1 2.7
15.
5Job: Reach a destination on time
Comments (20) Tasks (8)Features (3)Comp Features (2)
IMP
9.1
SAT
2.7
OPP
15.5
121. Job Step: Plan the stops
Minimize the time it takes to determine the optimal sequence for planned
stops.
Need 28
9.1 2.7
15.
5Job: Reach a destination on time
Comments (20) Tasks (8)Features (3)Comp Features (2)
Team Input & Analysis
122. Job Step: Plan the stops
Minimize the time it takes to determine the optimal sequence for planned
stops.
Need 28
9.1 2.7
15.
5Job: Reach a destination on time
Comments (20) Tasks (8)Features (3)Comp Features (2)
Competitive Analysis
123. Job Step: Plan the stops
Minimize the time it takes to determine the optimal sequence for planned
stops.
Need 28
9.1 2.7
15.
5Job: Reach a destination on time
Comments (20) Tasks (8)Features (3)Comp Features (2)
Value Prop & Roadmap
124. Job Step: Plan the stops
Minimize the time it takes to determine the optimal sequence for planned
stops.
Need 28
9.1 2.7
15.
5Job: Reach a destination on time
Comments (20) Tasks (8)Features (3)Comp Features (2)
Budgeting & Execution
I’m Jared Ranere, a Growth Partner at thrv. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or via email and you can follow us twitter. Let’s talk about failure.
How many people here have heard of JTBD or jobs theory? We’re going to talk about what JTBD is and how can you use it to launch high growth products.
[react to what people said about having heard about it or not] Jobs-to-be-Done is a theory popularized by Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School. The core idea is that your customers are not buying your products, they are hiring your products to get a job done.
And the struggle to get the job done is what causes a new purchase. When customers struggle with a job, they look around for solutions that can help. With the jobs-to-be-done method, you can precisely articulate that struggle and use it to build new solutions that take market share.
So why use JTBD now? The methods are built on a decade of research, and they have an exceptional track record of helping companies launch high growth products. But to understand why JTBD can lead to high-growth products, we need to talk about the opposite thing:
How many people here have worked at a failed business? How many have developed a product that failed? How many have had at least 1 failed release? It didn’t meet your growth expectations.
Well, you’re not alone.
We can look at the start-up world as representative of new product launches, 63% of start ups fail to return even 1x their capital. This high failure rate is true for most companies and new products. Why is this? What is the cause? ASK AUDIENCE.
This has been well researched. David Garvin from HBS found that the difference between successful and unsuccessful innovation was….
And after analyzing over 100 startup failures, CBinsights found that the number one reason for failure was that there was no market need.
This brings up the two most important questions for PMs: what is a customer need? What is a customer need? We will come back to this question.
Some people say the goal of product managers is to ship. But shipping doesn’t matter if you ship the wrong thing. So I propose the goal of product management is to satisfy customer needs better than competitors in your market. Can we agree on this? I mean, this is why we build products, right?
This brings up the two most important questions for PMs: what is a customer need? What is a customer need? We will come back to this question.
We’re going to answer that question tonight and show you how to….in order to generate high-growth ideas. And we’re going to do so with a story…
To show you how we do this, I’m going to tell you a story called: How to Beat Apple & Google in the Maps Business.
You might think it’s crazy to even consider competing with the two most valuable companies in history, but this story will show you how to do it with JTBD and how you can apply this method in your market.
Imagine we have a room full of Product Managers, it looks a lot like this one. And we have to compete with Apple and Google for their company to survive. So what do we do? We sit down, think hard, and try to come up with a really brilliant idea, right?
Wrong. The first order of business is to identify unmet customer needs. How do we do it?
Well we know our goal as product teams is to satisfy customer needs better than competitors in a market. This is how you win in any market, whether it’s a B2C, B2B or medical market. This brings up two important and fundamental questions.
The first is: What is a market? Customer needs exist within a market, so we first need a good definition of a market.
The traditional market equation is usually some variation of product price * buyers. This is the textbook definition of a market, and companies, product managers and investors use it all the time.
And this seems to make sense. For example, in 2007, a product team at Microsoft did just that. They calculated that the the iPod market was huge: $30 billion based on $150 price and 200 million iPods sold. This was a great opportunity for them.
Does anyone own a Zune? Why did the Zune, like most new products, fail to take market share? MSFT has a ton of resources: a ubiquitous OS, an enormous and talented team of engineers, massive distribution, a huge marketing budget and they were entering a $30 billion market.
Or were they? Microsoft launched a product into a market that evaporated. The Zune failed because there is no such thing as the “iPod” market.
Customers don’t want iPods anymore than they want LPs, cassettes or CDs. These are all products that will change over time.
Customers want to get a job done, and in this case, they want to create a mood with music. This is a JTBD and it will remain stable over time, never changing.
And just like customers don’t want CDs or iPods, they don’t want a quarter inch drill…
This idea goes back to the beginning of JTBD in the 1960s and Theodore Levitt’s article, Marketing Myopia. The concept is as true today as it was in the ‘60s.
And its true in any market, B2B
Medical…
And of course, in today’s story about the maps business. Drivers don’t want them.
This is true in your market as well. Your customers don’t want your product, they want to get their job done.
So who is the customer?
In JTBD, the core customer is the job executor, it’s a person who needs to get a job done in either a personal or professional setting.
At a fundamental level, JTBD helps you define your market from your customer’s POV, independent of changing products or technologies.
But is the market big enough to build a product for?
We can use jobs to size markets based on the customer’s willingness to pay to get the job done. This is how we can understand the perceived value of our product and more accurately size growth opportunities. Often it reveals much bigger opportunities than we expected.
In order to size markets, we ask job executors what they would be WTP to get the job done and we plot this on a need curve of WTP vs. the number of underserved customers. **** The area under the curve is the market size. ***** The need curve helps us identify if there is a bigger premium or low cost growth opportunity in the market.
To beat Google and Apple Maps we might find that there is a premium market of people who are struggling to get the job and actually willing to pay for a new product that gets the job done.
Now we have a more stable definition of a market…
And we can use it to define our market in which we want to beat Google & Apple. It’s not the “maps” market. Drivers hire maps to reach a destination on time.
And we’re on our way to achieving our goal, which brings us to our second important question.
What is a customer need? Does everyone at your company agree on what a customer need is? Most companies and product teams don’t have an agreed-upon definition of a customer needs, which is a huge problem since satisfying needs is the goal and the key to growth.
Without an agreement on a needs, most product teams use inputs like these into the product dev process. PM teams use customer requests for features, sales requests, their own ideas, technology ideas, and new channel ideas, for example, as inputs.
These are all highly variable product inputs that change over time.
Product teams use these variable inputs to guide product development and launch products and features.
With this traditional process, when the new product or feature fails to generate revenue growth, the team is left to guess, iterate and pivot using more variable inputs. This is a flawed process.
And it doesn’t work. It is expensive, inefficient and risky. Because trying to hit a moving target is exceptionally hard.
JTBD is different because the customer needs in the job are stable and do not change.
A customer need is a metric…
Every job has about 100 customer needs that relate to speed and accuracy.
Now that we know what a market is and we know what a customer need is, we can begin the process of beating Apple Maps and Google Maps.
Map apps are being hired by drivers to help them reach a destination on time. This is the customer’s job. We have now defined the market from the customer’s point of view. Not “maps” but “reaching a destination on time.”
Next we need to identify the customer needs in this job.
To do that, we first identify job steps. Every job has steps that follow a 6 step outline.
This makes sense because a job executor needs to define what they need to accomplish, prepare to execute the job, execute the job, monitor how the execution is going, modify the execution if necessary, and conclude the job.
For example, the job of getting to a destination on time follows this pattern.
In total there are 16 steps for a driver to get to a destination on time. We identified these steps by interviewing drivers, the job executors. And we can teach you how to do these interviews.
We use the job steps to identify customer needs.
More specifically, a customer need is a measure of the speed and accuracy of executing a job step.
For example, we know that drivers need to plan the stops for their day. This is a job step in getting to a destination on time.
This is an example of typical day in a busy professional’s life. It includes meetings, appointments and errands.
To identify needs, we interview customers, the job executors, and we ask them what is difficult, frustrating or time consuming about executing the job step.
In this example, customers told us that on a busy day with meetings, appointments and errands, it was difficult to determine the optimal sequence to make all the planned stops.
[click for animation]
So we know that the job executors need a solution to minimize the time it takes to determine the optimal sequence.
In this example, customers told us that on a busy day with meetings, appointments and errands, it was difficult to determine the optimal sequence to make all the planned stops. So we know that the job executors need a solution to reduce the time it takes to determine the optimal sequence.
We structure customer needs with a direction a metric and a goal, so as a product team you know exactly what your product needs to do for customers. And every customer need, like a job, is independent of any solution.
for example…
Here is another example of a customer need
Every job has 10-16 steps, and every step has 5-10 needs. So jobs are complex. They have about 100 customer needs.
And this is an important concept because customers don’t want to cobble together disparate solutions, for example using separate planning, routing and parking apps. They want to get the whole job done. Getting the whole job done for customers, is how companies create defensible competitive advantage.
Now that we have defined and identified our target customer’s needs, we need to know which ones are unmet. What is an unmet need? Our product team should prioritize the unmet needs because they represent struggle and remember the struggle in getting the job done causes a customer to purchase a product.
In JTBD, an unmet need is one that is important to the customer but poorly satisfied by current solutions in the market. We survey customers and ask them the importance of each need and their satisfaction with each need.
If 91% of drivers said this need was important, we give it an importance score of 9.1.
If only 27% of drivers said that their current solutions satisfied this need, we give it a satisfaction score of 2.7.
This customer need has high importance and low satisfaction, which we can plot on a chart with all the other needs in the job.
Each point on this chart is a customer need in the job, and it clearly shows that customer’s are underserved by current solutions because they have needs with high importance and low satisfaction.
To prioritize unmet needs, we calculate the difference between the importance and satisfaction scores for each need.
This difference, weighted for importance, creates an opportunity score that enables us to prioritize each customer need in the job.
Any need with an opportunity score of 10 or higher is an unmet need. We now have an unambiguous and measurable definition of an unmet customer need. This shows exactly what your product team should target to create customer value.
As we know, the struggle to get the job done is what causes customers to make a purchase. The unmet needs give your product team quantitative targets to help customers overcome their struggles.
[repeat what you heard and segue into how this will show them how to reach those goals]
Our two competitors, Apple and Google seem incredibly strong. So how do we identify competitor weakness?
Has anyone seen or made a chart like this before? You analyze your features against your competitors’ features. If we’re missing some we build them to catch up. When we have more features, we win, right?
Wrong. Customers don’t want features. They want to get a job done.
We find weaknesses by analyzing where a competitor satisfies a need slowly or inaccurately.
For example, this is an unmet need because drivers struggle to determine the optimal sequence for stops in a busy day.
We can use this need to analyze Apple Maps and Google Maps. How do they help us optimize the sequence of planned stops? You have multiple meetings, appointments, and errands in your day. How would you determine the optimal sequence using these apps? [get someone to answer]
It is a manual process of entering different destinations, determining the best routes, changing information on your calendar and iterating until you determined the optimal sequence. It is a manual and slow solution even if you could do it successfully at all.
And when we measure the time it takes to do this with Apple and Google Maps it is minutes, possibly hours. You could end up in an infinite loop and give up.
This is a competitor weakness based on an unmet need in the customer’s job-to-be-done. **** And this is just one weakness based on one need. There are 106 needs in this job.
[repeat what you heard and segue into how this will show them how to reach those goals]
So let’s brainstorm. This’ll be fun. What’s the first rule of brainstorming?
There are no bad ideas. But this is ridiculous because there is literally an infinite supply of bad ideas in the world. I have 3 or 4 before breakfast every day.
We don't brainstorm. The goal for your product team is not to generate a lot of ideas, the goal is to generate the best ideas to satisfy the unmet customer needs.
And by knowing the unmet needs, we have stable, quantitative, objective criteria for judging ideas.
So let’s generate an idea right now. We know customers struggle to determine the optimal sequence for their day. How can we help them overcome this struggle?
When we start with an unmet need, the idea almost generates itself. We will call our feature idea Sync & Optimize and it will enable a user to sync their calendar and optimize the sequence of stops.
Our new product will include an optimization algorithm to determine the best sequence for the user based on their meetings, appointments, and errands. Click optimize…
And it will automatically and instantly organize your day to optimize your travel and schedule.
We have reduced the time it takes to determine the optimal sequence from minutes to seconds. This is measurable customer value.
Because customer value is getting the job done faster and more accurately.
And we measure customer value by calculating how much more satisfaction the product idea will deliver to the unmet customer need. This is how we help de-risk investment in your product roadmap, by measuring customer value before your team builds the features.
We use customer value to more accurately project your revenue and profitability growth because market share is a function of getting the job done better.
With JTBD you can identify and size larger market opportunities. And you can prioritize unmet needs in the job to generate better ideas to deliver more customer value. All of this leads to accelerated revenue growth with less risk.
We offer training, services, and software to help companies execute JTBD successfully.
thrv helps you satisfy customer needs…We’re with you from identifying your customer’s job to creating a risk mitigated road map to launching your product and iterating on it. Our goal is not to teach you Jobs Theory or give you a killer powerpoint. Our goal is to help you build products that satisfy customer needs….
It starts with training. Here are all the modules we offer.
We can also help you execute to ensure you get great results on the first try. Here is our full menu of services.
The software aligns your team around the customer’s job and the customer needs so everyone always knows why they are building what they are building.
We offer training, services, and software to help companies execute JTBD successfully.
At the end of a sprint you know how get from a Job to an Idea and you can even build your new idea while you identify and validate a full set of market opportunities and a risk mitigated road map in Phase 2.
At the end of a sprint you know how get from a Job to an Idea and you can even build your new idea while you identify and validate a full set of market opportunities and a risk mitigated road map in Phase 2.
At the end of a sprint you know how get from a Job to an Idea and you can even build your new idea while you identify and validate a full set of market opportunities and a risk mitigated road map in Phase 2.
JTBD is extremely powerful, but it includes is a lot of complex data and analysis, which is why historically JTBD has been hard to used. Excel and PowerPoint are not good tools to coordinate all this information and analysis across product teams. We built thrv to help your team from getting lost in spreadsheets and presentations.
Our software, helps teams to the JTBD analysis and generate customer, competitor and market insights. And it helps them build and execute a product roadmap that gets the customers job done better.
The thrv Need Object puts your customer’s need front and center, since satisfying needs is the goal of a product strategy.
The Need Object also puts your customers need in context, so you team also understand your customers job and the job steps.
And each need object has the imp, sat and opportunity scores, so you team can quickly identify which needs are unmet.
Every object in thrv contains a live comment thread, so when you team is giving inputs and doing the analysis, you are capturing value input and analysis that will help your team work more effectively together.
And when you team is doing its competitive analysis, this is captured in thrv as well. So if anyone on your team is looking at the a need, they will understand your competitor’s weaknesses.
And the goal of thrv is to help your team build a high growth roadmap and differentiated value proposition, so every features in your roadmap and is connected in thrv to the need it satisfies.
And you team can build a roadmap budget and execute with thrv by defining the tasks required by your development team to build the features to satisfy the needs in the job.