The Theory of Jobs to be Done: the Customer is Always Right!

A recent book called Competing Against Luck (co-authored by Clayton Christensen, the disruptive innovation guru), turns over on their collective heads how we view the products we sell and the companies we represent. It’s not so much about the features and benefits of our products, but more to do with how they solve our customers’ needs. In other words, it’s not about our product, but almost entirely about our customers. Just as Kodak could not give up its profitable film business and adjust to the growing digital media, just as Toys-r-Us could not stop selling toys and missed the turn to creating enjoyable customer experience and an online presence to match, just as Microsoft was so intent on selling Windows for desktops that they missed the trend to mobile 10+ years ago, and many more instances where companies have become so focused on what they are selling that they’ve missed out on transformative change happening around them--often to find out too late that not only have they missed out on huge business opportunities, but also their very survival may now be in question.

So, Mr. Christensen’s rather unwieldy Theory of Jobs to be Done says that companies succeed when they help customers perform better at whatever it is that they are doing. And companies fail whenever they lose sight of what that job is. As such, the jobs are defined by the customers that hire companies to do it for them. At the extreme, the jobs get expressed in verbs (Google) and nouns (Uber), and not adjectives and adverbs! Some of the most successful companies in the world are those whose names have become verbs synonymous with the job they help you do. This is so intuitive, yet it is rarely applied as once companies reach a certain size or a level of success, they often turn inward and forget how they reached their customers so successfully in the first place. They continue doing more of what they had been doing so well—and fail to listen to what their customers are now saying. Companies get organized around their own products and functions—and not around the jobs to be done for their customers.

So, how does a company avoid this pitfall? First off, is to become an expert on whatever it is your customer is doing, as much as being an expert on your own product, and then be able to understand and bridge the gap between the “job to be done” and the “job it will do”. Secondly, a company’s internal processes need to revolve more around the “job to be done” and less around the needs of the company. And finally, listening to the customer is as much about asking the right questions as it is about getting answers—and herein lies perhaps the greatest challenge of all.

Has the growth at your company stalled or plateaued? For a fresh perspective and objective analysis, reach out to us, we probably have the right questions for your solutions!