Jobs-To-Be-Done theory as a tool to validate to your ideas
Last week I connected with another Indie Hacker @typeofgraphic and he shared with me a useful framework for describing and modelling the problem you're trying to solve and evaluating the value of your ideas in relation to that problem. It's called Jobs-To-Be-Done theory and was developed by Tony Ulwick. The core idea is intuitive -- innovation becomes much more predictable - and far more profitable - when it begins with a deep understanding of the job the customer is trying to get done.
Here's the hypothesis
If a product team could know in advance what metrics its customers were going to use to judge a new offering, it could optimize the product to address those metrics - and predictably deliver a winning solution.
Outcome-Driven Innovation
- Innovation is a process of finding solutions that address needs
- Tackle needs before finding solutions
What is a customer need?
- Solutions are always changing but a need is constant
- Input received from the customer must remain valid over time
- Job theory: instead of asking how to make a better solution, ask about the underlying process the customer is trying to execute
- The underlying process remains stable over time. It can be broken into steps and you can figure metrics stakeholders use to measure success along the way
- Those metrics are called desired outcomes. These are the metrics stakeholders use to judge the value of our product because decision-makers buy products to get jobs done.
- People buy products and services to help them get a job done. The job - not the product - is the unit of analysis
- A job is stable over time allowing product teams to come up with a set of needs that is stable over time
- Customer needs: the metrics stakeholders use to measure success when getting a job done
- Needs can be unmet, overserved, table-stakes
- Segments are groups of people that struggle in unique ways to get a job done
People don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.
Using jobs theory to model needs
- Define the market: job executors and job-to-be-done
- Uncover the customer needs related to the job-to-be-done
- Quantify the degree to which each need is under/overserved
- Discover hidden segments of opportunity
- Develop a data model based off prior steps to formulate a growth strategy
The data model aligns teams with a common language and understanding of customers and their needs - driving customer-centric and data-driven decision-making across the organization.
The data model can be useful in
- Business model
- Marketing
- Product portfolio management
- Product development and design
- Customer experience
The "Desired outcome" statement
The perfect need statement has these unique characteristics and is called a desired outcome
- It is stable over time
- Tied to the job-to-be-done
- Metric customers use to measure success when getting a job done
- Measurable/controllable in the design of the product/service
- Solution agnostic
- Predictive
- Research-ready
- Cross-functionally applicable
A desired outcome statement is a structured statement defining how customers measure value and how a company can create it.
It should take this form:
Direction of improvement + Performance metric + Object of control + Contextual clarifier
An example would be: When trying to listen to music, a listener may want to “minimize the time it takes to get the songs in the desired order for listening”.
This level of granularity in defining a need is critical to establishing valuable input into the innovation process.
Outcome-based segmentation
The only way to find segments of customers with different unmet needs is to segment the market around unmet needs. Outcome-based segmentation reveals under- and overserved segments, their size, and which outcomes to target for growth.
I just wanted to share some thoughts around jobs theory. I found it quite compelling and I hope that you find this useful as well.
Here are the resources I used to gather my notes about the topic.
All these trends are actual due to many people desire to have job in this field. For instance, when I decided to become more qualified, I realised that I need to gain experience as junior.
Therefore, once I followed the recommendation of my friend and used this source https://app.uxcel.com/jobs where I found a new job. By the way, it's cool to have well-paid one because it's really motivate to go achieve new goals.
I wish you to find something you will love either.
Managing data as an asset
According to a NewVantage Partners executive survey, only 24% said they had “created a data-driven organization.”
Check out 10 reasons why your organization isn’t data driven: https://bit.ly/3RDyDuM