It’s not enough to have a strong vision or a single great idea. To successfully innovate—in a way that doesn’t mimic every other competitor—you need to see the range of opportunities open to you. A serious customer-centric view of the landscape will tell you what routes contain latent opportunities for you to exploit. It can also lead you away from uncomfortable pain points associated with current approaches and guide you through the pitfalls of getting customers to act in unfamiliar ways. Importantly, a true customer-centric approach will pinpoint the ways in which a new solution has to excel over existing offerings and lead you down the right paths to making money.
THE CENTRAL ROLE OF JOBS TO BE DONE
All over the world, people go about their days getting things done. Much of what they do is aimed at satisfying a collection of short-and long-term objectives that they see as being related to their well-being. The many decisions that they make throughout the day—which toothpaste to use, whether to drink coffee or tea, what product to buy for their company—are all part of satisfying these objectives, as each person defines them.
But what if people know only part of what they want? Or—even more radical—what if they don’t really understand why they want what they want? While such confusion at first glance seems like a recipe for innovation disaster, it is precisely in this knowledge gap where opportunities for new growth exist. Throughout this section, we will answer such questions as: How can companies use this knowledge gap to attract new customers or launch new products? How can figuring out the known and unknown drivers of consumer behavior give companies an advantage in the marketplace? And if people themselves don’t know what they want or why they want it, how can someone else figure it out?
Just because everyone dreams of a new car, it doesn’t mean everyone is dreaming of the same new car.
This process for finding growth opportunities is the product of 12 years of our own research and experimentation, which builds on further precedent before then. The core premise is the intuitive but not so obvious idea that by digging into the “why” of people’s actions, you can uncover the set of reasons—emotional, psychological, and practical—that drive people to behave in certain ways rather than in others. Ultimately, people are just trying to get things done in their lives, whether they are making a purchase for their own use, collaborating in a business-to-business transaction, or consuming a government service. They can employ a wide range of solutions to get these jobs done, so concentrating attention on solutions used—as marketers typically do—is incorrect. It is the jobs that really matter. Once you understand what jobs people are striving to do, it becomes easier to predict what products or services they will take up and which will fall flat.
While not the only requirement for successfully innovating or growing, identifying the range of jobs that current or future customers are trying to satisfy is central to any innovation strategy; it guards against pursuing phantom opportunities and grounds the innovation in smart data. The Jobs to be Done approach—which is explained in detail in this section—creates a powerful method for creating breakthrough innovations again and again.
GETTING RESULTS
The Jobs to be Done framework succeeds because it focuses innovators on the right questions rather than having them jump directly to devising solutions. This can be counterintuitive. After all, countless stories celebrating genius emphasize the moment of problem-solving insight. But it is actually the framing of problems that often leads to breakthrough ideas. Companies can waste thousands of hours and risk undertaking bad projects because they miss the critical—and often underappreciated—step of laying out very clear and rigorously defined problem statements.
Breakthroughs come from reimagining problems, not from creating an incrementally better solution to a well-understood challenge. To help people look at their challenges in a different way, we tell them to dig into the underlying “why” of consumer behavior and not just focus on the “what.” For instance, parents may choose to bring their children to a movie on a Saturday afternoon, but the underlying job is to keep the kids entertained. A movie is just one possible way of satisfying that job. Job drivers—the underlying context that makes certain jobs more or less important—will influence customers’ choices in how they satisfy a job. In the movie example, the age of the children or the weather that day might make a difference in how the job of entertaining children is satisfied. The movie theater’s true competition is not merely other cinemas but also playgrounds, arcades, and other diversions. While offering a discount on ticket prices or a better array of snacks might help compete against the cinema across town, these solutions ultimately represent a superficial way of thinking about competition. A better way to win might be to set up a small indoor playground or to offer a space for socializing with dates after a movie ends. By understanding the real motivators of behavior, a company can uncover new markets and previously ignored levers of innovation at its disposal.
MAP OF THE SECTION
This section of the book shows how to construct the Jobs Atlas—the overall look at the landscape that is a prerequisite to plotting routes to any specific solution and indeed may reveal destinations you have previously overlooked. Chapters 1 through 3 provide the tools for understanding what jobs your customers are looking to get done, why they prioritize some jobs over others, and what pain points prevent them from being satisfied with the solutions they currently use. Chapters 4 and 5 build on today’s landscape to explore how to create solutions that correspond to a customer-generated definition of success, as well as what obstacles stand in the way of buying or using a new product. In Chapters 6 and 7, we look at how to capture value from that change. This includes understanding how expensive new products can be and how new business models can be used to increase value for both the customer and the company. We also explore how to take a broader view of competition, looking from the customer’s eyes rather than an industry lens.
We urge you not to skip chapters but to look at each part of the process as a key element toward building a well-rounded view of the opportunity. Equally, as you execute projects, we urge you not to jump to creating solutions before laying out this opportunity landscape in detail. While you will inevitably think of ideas as you learn more about the market, jot them down, and don’t tempt yourself to fall in love with any particular notion. By the time you are done, you should have an abundant array of solutions stemming from a full understanding of the landscape. They may even appear obvious to you, until you realize that you didn’t have these ideas before you started the process.