When the Real Job to Be Done Eludes Us

This story starts like a bad dream. I'm standing before a crowded room about ten years ago, giving a speech on marketing. Early in my remarks, I describe my organization, explaining how we provide a payments platform and software services to help nonprofits raise money. A man in the middle of the room raises his hand. I ask if he has a question.

"I have your product - a Donate Now button on the home page of my website," he says.

I smile and thank him, appreciating the free product promotion, and turn to my presentation.

But the man has raised his hand again. "Your product doesn't work," he says in front of the 100 or so people in the room. Oh no.

I consider crouching into the fetal position behind the podium. Instead, I apologize and suggest that immediately after my speech, I will troubleshoot and address why our payment processing system isn't working for him.

The man, to my horror, raises his hand a third time. Resigned to the fact I seem to be living one of my anxiety dreams, I give him the floor.

"You don't understand," he says. "You can click on the button and make a donation. The problem is, no one is clicking on my button."

My clouds of confusion (and embarrassment) suddenly parted, and in streamed understanding. This was an entirely different sort of problem. Our services weren't broken. They just weren't solving the customer's problem. I thought my organization was in the business of processing donations. We should have been in the business of fundraising. I thought our product's function was to process a credit card payment. What our customers needed was a product that inspired the act of giving in the first place.

This wasn't a bad dream. It was a breakthrough. My organization went on to solve the fundraising problem with our products and services, and it led to tremendous success and growth for our customers and our button line. (Here's the thriving company today.)

Anyone who knows me has probably heard this story, because it's such a good example of the biggest blind spot in business -- failing to truly understand other people's needs and circumstances, whether it's a customer or a colleague. We assume others think as we do and need what we want. In the process, we can miss important insights, like what customers expect and how they use our product. This myopia leads to flawed strategies and stifled innovation.

It's all too easy to solve a problem that people don't even have.

Clayton Christensen's latest writing and thinking introduces a useful conceptual framework for avoiding this trap: jobs to be done theory. As he explains it:

The jobs-to-be-done framework is a tool for evaluating the circumstances that arise in customers’ lives. Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the “average” customer in their category may do—but they often buy things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve. With an understanding of the “job” for which customers find themselves “hiring” a product or service, companies can more accurately develop and market products well-tailored to what customers are already trying to do.

Back to my example, I thought my job was to provide a payments platform. Fortunately, the gentleman in my audience corrected me by providing the context Christensen describes. My questioner wasn't hiring my company to take a credit card payment. He was hiring my company to help him raise money.

Today, I find this kind of thinking useful for so many things beyond product strategy. It inspires me to be a better listener and observer. You can't know how to help someone if you don't comprehend their circumstances. This applies to customers, but it also applies to relationships and especially parenthood. It's incredibly powerful to try to place myself within that newly gained perspective and question the real job to be done.

In the Harvard Business Review, Christensen describes a friend who was building luxury condominiums for retirees. They weren't selling as expected, until he took this alternate approach to the job to be done. It turned out the problem wasn't the location or the marketing or the fixtures in the shiny kitchens. It was that retirees were anxious about the lives they were leaving behind, especially when it came to giving up furniture like the big family dining table that wouldn't fit in the new condo. So the company enlarged the dining room and provided moving services, storage for belongings and sorting rooms for people who needed time to decide what to keep from their former homes.

“I went in thinking we were in the business of new-home construction,” the construction executive says in the Harvard Business Review. “But I realized we were in the business of moving lives.”

Our jobs are the jobs to be done for others.

Like all wisdom, this sounds so obvious and easy. Of course you should listen to other perspectives. Naturally, you should think about the context in which you operate and the true job to be done. But it's hard. We are wired to filter so much of what is around us. Without this skill of omission, we would go mad with distraction. But in drawing protective rings around our experience, we often choose a circumference that limits our understanding. Over time, we become blind to the barriers we drew, and we imagine the whole world is contained within the small space we created. This is the peril of limited perspective.

If our job is the job to be done for others, we require constant awareness of our own mental frameworks - and the strong, enduring will to step beyond them.