JTBD Playbook: How is this Different than What I Thought I Knew?
The beginning of a long story
Introduction
There's a reason so few people know about the true Jobs to be Done, and even fewer that know about Outcome-Driven Innovation®️. It's because it was held too close to the vest as an asymmetrical advantage where a handful of people weren't interested in new business models, just the invention itself.
This is why consulting hasn't changed.
Everything you'll find in here are pieces of a puzzle that when put back together will not look anything like what you've known in the past. We are living in a time of acceleration. And those who don't get on board are going to be left in the dust.
Overview
There’s an analogy that is so simple I should have forgotten it by now. But 10+ years after reading The Leader’s Handbook, this (as with many other topics in the book) has stuck with me. While I intend to dive fairly deep - from the perspective of a Jobs-to-be-Done noob - this simple concept is a foundational part of the way I think:
Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end
More specifically, whatever area of improvement you’re focused on, something has to happen before you execute the function in that area, and something has to happen after you execute the function in that area.
Take meetings as an example. Meetings have an objective. That’s why we have them (supposedly). They could be used to present findings, or conduct a preliminary discussion to establish action items, or they could be to make a collaborative decision, and so on. But I think we can agree on the following truths:
There are things that must be accomplished before the meeting, which are inputs into the meeting
And there are things that need to happen after the meeting
There are things that must be accomplished during the meeting to support its objective, and not simply the meeting itself.
I know, it sounds simple. The problem that I’m going to discuss in this playbook, however, relates to an observation that most innovation outcomes (which are primarily incremental) are focused on that middle part of the problem-space and ignore the opportunities to improve the adjacent parts (they're actually found at a different level of abstraction). The integration of these parts will lead us to explore the impact, and threat, from non-traditional competitors.
Video conferencing systems, for example, focus on the execution of that middle part. When you’ve made the perfect video conferencing platform, what’s your growth path?
Component stereo systems focused on the middle part because listening to music is a single execution step in a larger Job-to-be-Done. The chain of music solutions over the past 40 years was a lesson in continual disruption and the gradual reduction and ultimate elimination of the consumption chain. What if you had a method for seeing this progression before anyone else?
How much did big music hardware brands invest in streaming music solutions?
The examples I use in this playbook may not align to the product category you deal with. I usually stick close to home, as I'm sure you do. The beauty of this methodology is that you're not researching solutions. You're also not studying a solution industry (necessarily). You're concerned with the consumers or customer (or potential customer) that might benefit from future solutions these industries provide. We're not just studying the what, when, where and how. We're trying to understand why in a way that gives us extreme confidence in our understanding.
Many of you are tasked with making improvements in areas of innovation that we typically call the consumption chain . Every product has a consumption chain, which is essentially a series of other jobs that are made available by the brand to help the customer with regard to various aspects of the life cycle of product ownership.
You've also heard these jobs called customer journeys (there is also the brand-side of these which are called company pathways). However the difference is that when we talk about journeys we separate them out and study them in greater detail than most UX professionals do. But that's a topic for another post.
Core functional jobs research completely abstracts away any consideration of solutions. What we're trying to do here is to analyze a problem space in such a way that there is no single solution today that gets the entire job being studied done. Otherwise, why study it at all?
In fact, the products of today are typically addressing a single step (aka Mini-Job) in the job that innovators should be studying. Real breakthroughs are not going to be found studying a mini-job that is reaching maturity, you need to raise the context. In that regard, the job that you are currently addressing on a day-to-day basis is essentially a mini job itself.
If your goal is to find organic growth pathways that are currently invisible to you and your competitors, then this is the way that you need to think going forward. But that does not mean you have to think like me, or anyone else. All I ask is that you base your problem-solving on a set of foundational principals that I'll get into later.