Updating Jobs To Be Done for the Digital Customer Experience Age

One of the brightest moments in the customer experience and innovation movements was Clayton Christensen’s conceptualization of Jobs to be Done (JTBD). He had a profound insight (I can easily imagine an innovation seminar participant musing, “Ohhh, so a customer is really trying to do a job!”) Ethnographic research of social media consistently reveals that customers’ main motivations for buying products/services is accomplishing useful or meaningful things in their lives. I admit that this sounds laughable because it is so obvious, but I’ve been among enough marketing and product development teams to know that even today few understand this and even fewer act on it. Their unintended lack of customer focus thwarts teams' ability to help customers improve their lives (and companies’ revenues).

Marketing and product development teams' unintended lack of customer focus thwarts teams' ability to help customers improve their lives (and companies’ revenues).

I’m happy to see that JTBD has grown into a robust framework that includes several types of quantitative and qualitative research. Like most customer experience-related research, though, JTBD research tends to overlook digital social data as a serious source of customer insight, so here I’ll summarize how you can end-run your competitors by using digital social to conduct better research.

First, What Is Jobs To Be Done?

JTBD refers to a customer/user’s desired result of using a product. Theodore Levitt is credited with saying, “people don’t want a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole.” The idea is to shift teams’ focus to the situation in which quarter-inch holes are most needed. So the drill functions in a support role, if at all. 

JTBD refers to a customer/user’s desired result of using a product. Theodore Levitt is credited with saying, “people don’t want a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole.”

Major proponent @StrategyN has this insight: “While most companies innovate by trying to improve their existing products (creating a better quarter-inch drill), the innovation process is dramatically improved by instead trying to find better ways to create a quarter-inch hole (to get the job done). The implication of this thinking is profound: stop studying the product and instead study the job that people are trying to get done.”

Enter Ethnographic Research on Social Media

I developed ethnographic/social by accident while conducting research to back “social business strategy.” Having consulted in disruptive change and innovation before veering into social networking, I instinctively focused on the “end demand signal,” which is the job. Since digital social data is so rich with context and meaning, JTBD pours out of its results.

In practice, although I see the value of frameworks, I use them with caution because I’ve seen that they can too often develop into “ends in themselves” in which teams become slaves to them. I’ve seen that the key insight of JTBD is that people don’t like buying things, and this is a bitter pill for product/service teams to swallow. But here’s the sugar to help it go down: when you let go of that egocentric desire (I know, I have it, too!), it allows you to be far more open to what customers really want. You can start to understand them from their points of view. This opens up a new world for customer experience and innovation.

So, people are willing to buy a product/service, even enthusiastically, when they think it will help them accomplish something personally meaningful to them, and this can be quite unexpected. I feel, though, it’s better to discover it ahead of competitors and substitutes!

How to Use Ethnographic/Social to Distill JTBD 

Based on twelve years of client feedback across all kinds of businesses, I have learned that digital / social is a fundamentally different kind of “data” because its context is groups of user/customers collaborating among themselves on JTBDs. So imagine holistic data from a focus group that’s directed by users, not your client. IRL, it’s not practical to have hundreds of focus groups, but I find and curate hundreds of online collaborations. Here’s how:

Start with personas. Although they are out of fashion, they are very valuable because client teams can relate to their conceptualization of their customers, and clients have hard data to determine who are their best customers (i.e. customer lifetime value, cost to serve, etc.). Create, test, and iterate advanced searches that discretely identify each persona. In most cases, I recommend starting with 3-5 personas. I bookmark, tag, and curate each, and it’s easy to do “persona sprints” in which we iterate them until they are quite precise.

Digital/social is a fundamentally different kind of data because its context is groups of user/customers collaborating among themselves on JTBDs.

Then follow an analogous process for customer journeys. I usually start with a basic pattern of “before–during–after” personas’ use of clients’ products/services. Then we subsegment journey stages. We end up with searches that identify each journey segment and/or touchpoint. The customer/user “experience” emerges in striking detail, in customers’ own words, when they are collaborating with customers with the same or adjacent JTBD.

A very important point here is that the personas we rough out function as straw men, and we develop personas and journey stages based on real data, which I quantify. We quantify what touchpoints personas use (remember, these are client’s most valuable customers).

When studying journeys, JTBD are everywhere, and we create searches to discretely identify them as well. Keep in mind that ethnography doesn’t bias customer/users as does asking them questions directly via focus groups or surveys, or even following individual customers/users around in field work. That said, these methods all have their strengths, and I’ve found that ethnographic/social is very compatible with primary research. 

So JTBD is transformational for firms, but when they focus on it instead of products and services, they dramatically cut their risks because jobs are where the puck is going; let your competitors maintain their product/service focus while you constantly know where the puck will be. Here’s StrategyN again: “Design a business around a job-to-be-done. Rather than designing a business around a product that is certain to become obsolete, companies should design a business around the job-to-be-done. This way the company will always be focused on creating the solutions that will get the job done best. This will result in longevity, as the company will be more likely to disrupt itself.“

References

• For a deeper dive on how to use digital ethnography to iterate personas and journey maps, see The Digital Ecosystem Audit.
• Jobs-To-Be-Done Theory and Methodology, StrategyN
• Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing, the original HBS article
• How to Boost the Power of Your Customer Journey Maps (part of this LinkedIn series)
• More JBTD references, my library