Jobs Theory- The story of Innovation and customer Choice

For companies around the world -Innovation has been a top priority and a top frustration!

 “Competing against Luck” by Christensen Clayton provides a provocative framework on innovation and Growth. The book provides a comprehensive explanation of the “Jobs” Theory , why it is predictive and most important ,How to use it.

Innovation or Growth is not a matter of Luck or a game of Chance, it is a matter of understanding the Customer’s “Jobs”. Customer’s don’t buy product or servicers they hire them to a “job”. If they do a satisfactory job then they will be “hired” again if not they will be “fired”. If the product or service is  doing a great job then it will be rehired again and again and also the customer would be ready to pay a “premium “ for it. What a simple analogy to explain the enigma of Innovation or Growth.

Organizations spend time and money compiling data rich models that makes them masters of description but failures at prediction. The data tells us about what the customer is doing but not why the customer is doing?? Who would have imagined that a service that makes travellers pay to stay in a stranger’s spare bedroom would be valued at more than Marriott, Starwood or Wyndham Worldwide? Airbnb did it!! The “jobs” Theory focuses on the customer’s struggle for progress and then creating the right solution and attendant set of experiences to ensure you solve your customers job very well, every time.

When you look at situations from the “job” lens you realise that why a customer hires a product or service has nothing to do with their individual demographics, preferences or even the satisfaction scores. A one-size-fits- all solution would work for none. The data that companies analyse are focussed around either product or customer- not how well the product is solving the customer’s job. Even customer satisfaction metrics which reveal whether a customer is happy with a product or not, don’t give any clues as to how to do the job better.

The jobs Theory framework is organised as follows:

Focus should be on the progress and not on Products- the progress a customer is trying to make in a particular circumstance. A powerful insight at the core of the theory is that customers don’t buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress. The “job” is defined as a the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. The idea of circumstance is intrinsic to the definition of a job. A job can only be defined- and a successful solution created- relative to the specific context in which it arises. Usually the innovation quest is typically followed in the following four primary organising principles like- Product attributes, Customer Characteristics, Trends & Competitive response. Whereas in jobs theory the circumstances mean – the specific context. A job also has inherent complexity like Social and emotional dimensions. Customers social and emotional needs can far outweigh any functional desires.

Successful innovation enable a customer’s desired progress, resolve struggles and fulfil unmet aspirations. They perform jobs that formerly had only inadequate or non-existent solutions.

From a job’s theory perspective, the competition is seldom limited to the products that the market chooses to lump into the same category. When asked if Netflix was competing against Amazon the CEO Reed Hastings replied that “Really we compete with anything that you do to relax. We compete with video games, drinking a bottle of wine (that’s a tough one), playing board games or even sleep!!”

The jobs in Wild- How you define the business you are in , who your competitors are and what is the size of your market will be transformed post the application of job theory!

Some questions to ponder on are :

·     What are the experiences customer seek in order to make progress.

·     What obstacles must be removed

·     What are the social, emotional and functional dimensions of the job to be done.

Deeply understanding jobs opens up a new avenues including jobs for “non-consumers”. The consumers who choose to hire nothing, rather than something that does the job poorly and that is a very BIG opportunity!

Job Hunting- The barriers to progress or frustrating experiences are the first clues of the innovation opportunity. Innovation is less about producing something new and more about enabling something new and important for the customers.

Job hunting can be done by observing- Noncustomers, or people employing a workaround or ‘compensating behaviour’ . The job is so important and they are so frustrated that they are literally inventing their own solutions! How customers use the product can be a great insight for innovation.

How to hear what your customers don’t say – Customers hire or fire products based on how well it is doing the job but rarely can they articulate their requirements accurately or completely. It is almost always their pathways to purchase are more elaborate and their motivations are more complex than they can describe! Before a customer hires a new product the company must understand what he’ll need to fire in order to hire yours.

Building your Resume-  New Products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable.

Creating an experience and paying a premium price for the same involves not only understanding the job, but also the right set of experiences for purchase and use of that product, and then integrating those experiences in the company’s processes.

If you can successfully design the job with the required richness and complexity, over time you can transform your company’s brand into a Purpose Brand. A purpose brand  just pops into customer’s mind when they have a job to be done- heard of the phrase   “ Just Google it”

Integrating around a job- Competitive advantage is conferred through an organisation’s Unique processes: the way it integrates across functions to perform customer’s job. Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from the hundreds and hundreds of small decisions of how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t be easily copied.

What gets measured gets done. Creating the right metrics around customers job is hard , but so important. From its inception, Amazon has laser focused on three things to solve customer’s jobs- Vast selection, low prices and fast delivery- and designed processes to deliver them.

How you solver a customer’s job will inevitably change over time.; you need to build in flexibility to your processes, to allow them to continuously adapt and improve the experiences you deliver.

Keeping your eyes on the job-  It is critical to keep the eyes on the job to be done. Sometimes companies lose sight of it and lose track this usually happens because the companies fall into believing the following three fallacies: The fallacy of Active vs Passive data, The Fallacy of Surface Growth and the fallacy of Conforming data.

Jobs Theory provides a Causal explanation for why customers will embrace some innovations and not others, as well as a language for understanding deeply the insights about customers that really matter. It is complementary to and completely compatible with, design thinking. The language and thought process of jobs provides a powerful set of tools and developing the deep customers insights required by design thinking and for inspiring solutions that customers will actually want to purchase and use.