Applying the job to be done theory

The job to be done theory has been helpful for my organization to better understanding the positioning of our technology products and services to the internal organization.?This concept has uplifted the quality of dialogue with our customers. We are still early in our journey, but hopefully some of these ideas and questions will help you get started on improving your own product strategy.

Why a customer is leaving? – A critical piece of information to help guide your product strategy is why customers are leaving your product.?It starts with creating a signal on when this occurs, so you can start gathering the feedback.?Then through the feedback gathering, you need to understand if the underlying job changed or did the customer find a better product.?We are still in the process of building this feedback loop, but the theory has helped us recognize just how critical this customer feedback is to your future product strategy.

What other complimentary jobs exist? – When you start to increase your dialogue with your current customers, looking for area where the customer is unhappy is a great source for new market growth.? However, not every customer job to be done should be pursued.?Looking for opportunities that are a good marriage of the job to the existing processes and resources of your organization is the key.?For our organization, this forced us to step back and look at what processes contribute the most to successful product offerings.?It turns out to be our research and development of new technologies, which is now driving where we invest internally but also where we are looking for new jobs that can leverage this capability we already have in place.

Can your product be profitable? – This is probably one of the hardest questions to answer.? What also makes it a difficult question is that it cannot be answered fully until you launch a product to your customers.? We have decided to evaluate profitability for internal product offerings by asking customers where they would be willing to pay extra for certain capabilities. For instance, are you willing to pay us to implement the product for you or would you rather just do it through self-service for free??Would you pay extra if we made the product do X or Y??Asking these questions help us control our costs and it helps drive ruthless prioritization of product features or internal capabilities.?It is easy for a customer to say yes to new features when everything is free.?But we all know that nothing is free.

I hope these three questions surrounding the job to be done will help you get started on your product journey and uncover more opportunities to delight your current customers and find new ones.