What Airbnb's jobs-to-be-done model means for SaaS products

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast where the hosts mentioned Airbnb's 12-star hotel strategy. I found that to be fascinating.

Here's how the story goes: in 2014, Airbnb (allegedly) asked its employees to envision what an ideal 5-star hotel experience should look like. Employees talked about standard perks such as premium amenities, Jacuzzi bathtubs etc.

Subsequent requests were to visualize a 6-star hotel experience, 7-star, 8-star and so on. Finally, at the 12-star mark, folks wanted the experience to start at the point of departure. They asked to be chaperoned in a limo to the airport, flown to their destination in a private jet and get a red-carpet welcome at the hotel. So what was the purpose of this exercise?

Airbnb wanted to identify the ceiling of customers' expectations and then use it as a mile marker to measure how far they need to go to satisfy their userbase fully. What's eating me ever since I heard the story is how best to replicate this exercise for other product categories?

I think doing it for the hospitality industry was relatively straightforward. There's a standard rating in place, and customers generally have a similar idea of what to expect from an establishment that falls in a particular category.

For SaaS products, we could leverage the jobs-to-be-done model. So, if customers were paying someone to perform your SaaS product's job, what would their expectations look like for various salary levels?

For example, if you were to replace Gmail at your office with a mailman, what would you expect from the mailman if you were paying them $100/yr? How about $1000/yr? $10000/yr? 100000/yr?...

Again, the goal here is to identify the best of the best in your product category. That's the ideal state. Now it's time for you to work backward. After all, you can only start planning your journey after you've some idea of where you're headed.