jobs-to-be-done

INNOVATE THE FUTURE WITH A FOCUS ON THE CUSTOMER JOB

Your job is being threatened! And it’s not cheap labor or outsourcing that poses the greatest threat. No, the greatest threat is that your job will simply disappear because a company from outside your industry transforms the market by helping your customers get their job(s) done in a radically new and better way.

The lean startup movement was developed to address an issue that bedevilled many entrepreneurs: how to introduce something new without blowing all your capital and time on the wrong offering. The premise is that someone has a vision for a new thing, and needs to iteratively test that vision (“fail fast”) to find product-market fit. It’s been a success as an innovation theory, and has penetrated the corporate world as well.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently did one of his tweet storms on the topic of Bitcoin, a technology he avidly supports. In 25 tweets, he talked about criticisms people have of Bitcoin. Including this one (#18) about “use cases”: 

I’ve previously written about collecting jobs-to-be-done from customers. Because I was analyzing a broad topic across the entire innovation lifecycle, it was a good way to get a breadth of insight. However, it doesn’t work as well in the more common situation for product managers and innovators: analyzing a specific flow. In that case, there are three requirements for collecting jobs-to-be-done:

In doing some reading this morning, came across a couple examples of practitioners with a customer-centric orientation emphasizing the job-to-be-done. They come at it from different angles, but share the essence *first* understanding what the customer is trying to get done first, *then* getting down to design and development.

Consumer Edge Insight conducted a survey of consumer perceptions about 20 different fast food restaurants. Specifically, how are they ranked by consumer perceptions on different attributes, such as:

On Twitter, I asked a question.

I asked it, as I had a conversation in recent days with a fellow from a large corporate. Customer-centricity was recently adopted as an internal mantra, but the manifestation of that was…wait for it…sentiment analysis.