A Practical Guide To Jobs-To-Be-Done World

One of the most interesting, valuable and rare things in marketing is bridging theoretical knowledge over practical application.?

That’s exactly why I loved Jim Kalbach’s latest book, “Jobs To Be Done playbook”. It is written for people who want to insert JTBD in their day-to-day work, by a man who has actually used the stuff he writes about.

Jim Kalbach has a background in design, design strategy and customer experience. So far, he is the author of 3 books and currently Chief Evangelist at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard.?

In this article, we’ll share with you all the practical applications of JTBD that Jim talked about in our interview. As he said, JTBD principles offer a flip of thinking and can be used by every company, even across departments.?

JTBD in simple terms

Jim kickstarted our interview with a famous quote from a Harvard business professor:?

People don’t want a quarter-inch drill;

they want a quarter-inch hole.

And explains himself: “The most fascinating thing about JTBD is that 180 degrees flip of thinking. Instead of saying, “I have a problem to sell, so buy it”, say “Tell me the problem that you have, and I’ll create the solution for it”.

In other words, start with understanding the outcome, the holes and then work backwards towards your product, your technology, the drill. It’s not about the means or the technology. It’s about the end, the outcome that people want.?

As he mentions, JTBD predicts adoption for the products and solutions that you bring to the market. People tend to “hire” solutions to get a job done better and more complete. So if you begin with the reason why people might adopt your solution, you will have a better chance of success.?

What’s the JTBD of coffee??

Jim uses this catchy example to demonstrate the whole JTBD way of thinking, practically.?

In any product that offers solutions, there might be multiple answers on the job it gets done. In the case of coffee, there are many jobs it helps people do. From waking up in the morning, to social interaction, such as meeting with friends. For some people, coffee even works as a daily habit or a ritual.?

If we analyse the “waking up in the morning” purpose and formulate it in the JTBD language, it would probably end up phrased like this:?

The coffee helps you get energy in the morning.

As Jim points out, the important thing about this phrasing is that it’s not attached to any solution, market, or industry, exactly because it starts from a human standpoint.?

If we start investigating how else do people get energy in the morning, we will quickly end up with answers like: exercise, splash cold water on their face, or jump into a pool, drink beverages like tea, smoothies, or kale e.t.c.?

So does coffee and kale compete? Not in a typical industry definition. But from a JTBD perspective, all the above absolutely compete with coffee. People want to get energy in the morning, so any solution that helps them get energy in the morning, potentially competes with coffee.

That’s just an example of the flip of thinking that JTBD can provide.?

JTBD future proofs your thinking

Jim continues: “Another advantage of jobs thinking is that you become technologically independent by not mentioning any product or solution by name. And this gives you stability over time. The means by which people get their jobs done, will change over time. That’s a fact. But the job is the same, and the process of that job is more or less the same as well. So, If you can be technologically independent, that also future proofs your thinking.”

For instance, the way we used to listen to music during the last 100 years has changed, in terms of technology. Despite that, the job and the process are more or less the same!

There might be some slight variations in how people carry out that job, depending on the technology. But the way we listen to music over the last 100 years has not changed. Only technology has changed.?

So, Jim believes that JTBD helps us see beyond our own products and technology, beyond our own brand. Not only does it help us focus on the human problems that we are trying to solve, but it also points out the route of opportunities that we are trying to find in the market.

Let’s go through the 3 key points of JTBD that Jim Kalbach presented during our interview.

POINT 1: JTBD Seeks to accelerate adoption by seeing your offering from the outside-in, from the individual’s perspective.?

The goal is to change perspective. To start with the objective and work backwards at the technology. To look back at your organisation through the customers’ lens.

Jim continues: “I see JTBD as a language. It’s a way to translate signals, messages, observations and insights that you get from the people that you serve. People don’t talk about things in the terms that you want them to. You have to take their messages and rewrite them. You have to translate them into a regular language that will provide you with the chance to create models and abstract systems.”

Jim uses the diagram below to break down the 5 core elements of JTBD:?

1. The job performer (Who)?
2. The jobs that the performer is trying to get done (What)
3. The process of getting the job done (How)
4. The outcomes, or what people need. This works like a measure of success. (Why)
5. The circumstances, the context (When-Where). Context is important because it sets the frame you will work in.?

These 5 buckets help categorise the insights and feedback you get from the market. With a little bit of practice, the input of each customer can be translated into: Who, What, Process, Outcomes, e.t.c. Once that categorisation is made, you can assemble it in ways that make sense to the brand and the research.?

So let’s take a look at how this language works.?

According to Jim, when formulating job statements, you should follow the rules of Dos & Don'ts below:?

So let’s go over two quick examples to show how this language works. In the next border, we follow a certain classification:

• On the left column, we have insights. By insights, we mean observations and patterns that we have made by talking to people in a given field.?
• In the middle column, we write what JTBD formulation rules does the insight in the left column violate as phrased.?
• On the right column, we reformulate the issue as a JTBD statement.?

As Jim strongly believes, JTBD is very much a language, and it takes a little bit of practice to do this translation. You have to listen to what people say and interpret it back down to the JTBD phrasing.?

POINT 2: JTBD techniques offer a structured language for understanding human needs independent of any solution and across department lines.?

Many techniques have been developed over the past three decades in the JTBD field.

Jim broke down 3 of them, that a product manager could insert into the product development life cycle and put them together in a recipe.?

1. Job Mapping

Job mapping is a chronological sequence of the steps that people take to execute a job. We can use this technique to identify hot spots, or areas of improvement before, during, or after the job that has to be done.

?To extract this information, qualitative research needs to be conducted. Of course, there has to be a translation of what people say, into the JTBD language. Once we have all the job steps, we can put them into a chronological sequence, as in the example.?

The main goal is to try and boil things down to their essence in a way that does not represent any technology.?

2. Roadmap

According to Jim, roadmaps have a bad reputation. They are considered to be predictions of the future that are never accurate. But that’s not exactly what a roadmap does. It just sets a direction. It might not be accurate in predicting dates for deliverables, but it sets a valuable direction in terms of time and sequence.

There are 5 elements to include in a roadmap.?

• Product vision
• Time frames
• Themes - key problems?
• Business objectives
• Disclaimer?

To make the roadmap stronger, you have to determine how you will help your customers get their jobs done better and more complete than competing solutions.

That question switches you from understanding the problems people are trying to solve, to understand the solutions a company has to build in order to solve those problems. So right at this point, there is a switch from the problem perspective into solutions perspective.

3. Job stories

Jim made clear that job stories don’t replace user stories. But they can work perfectly as an input into designing concept development. So, as a next step, he suggests taking the hot spots pointed out by roadmapping and generating them into 3 to 6 job stories.?

Job stories actually describe a pain point you are trying to solve, by using the JTBD language. As a guiding light, Jim suggests describing pain points using the below format.

• “When I..” can be filled with some of the circumstances or the steps customers go through.
• “I want..” works like the customer imperative back to you. Customers want an ability that they currently don’t have. Most of the time, this has nothing to do with a feature.?
• “So that..” is about the desired outcome or what is the outcome customers get from this ability.

These 3 techniques work perfectly as a recipe that a product manager can use to leverage from the JTBD type of thinking.

POINT 3: JTBD is a broad field with many techniques that can be used in innovation and go-to-market efforts to stay focused on customers.?

According to Jim, “There are many advantages in JTBD that can help teams around an organisation. And it’s not just product teams or design teams. It could also be marketing, sales, customer success, support, business development and strategy as well, too.”?

For instance, JTBD can help marketing teams shift the language they use to address the market. In the example below, there are two types of messages before and after JTBD.?

With JTBD language, we can make sure that product development, design teams, and marketing speak the same language. By boiling things down into this fundamental JTBD language, we can actually cross departmental lines easier.?

As Jim suggests, “JTBD is a very practical tool that can be used across departments. Moreover, it can also be used to discover real business opportunities before designing solutions.

Not to mention that it helps continually developing value. With JTBD, you don’t end up in the go-to-market trying to speak louder than the market. You always go back and discover, define and design new value. That is a constant development cycle your business should be in. And JTBD can be used throughout.”

JTBD 5 Principles

1. People want to get their job done, not to interact with your brand.?
2. Jobs are stable over time, even as technology changes.?
3. People seek services to get their job done better and more complete.?
4. Making the job the unit of analysis focuses an offering on real needs.?
5. JTBD isn’t limited to one discipline: it can be applied across an organisation.

Start with the outcome and work back through the technology.

As Jim underlined, “Business opportunity and growth opportunity do not only come from focusing on your own capabilities, your own product, your own go-to-market motions or your own solution. A business opportunity can also come from looking at the outcomes that people want.”

The valuable conclusion Jim shared is that JTBD is not only a product management technique. It’s a type of thinking that anybody in an organisation can benefit from, and can be used across departments. JTBD is a language you can use to convert your business into a truly human-centred company.