Jobs-to-be-done is a popular method to inform product and service innovation-design, and market entry or growth strategy.
A job is a functional task or activity that defines what a person / customer is trying to get done. Desired outcomes are the metrics of performance or need that customers value when undertaking a job and when evaluating their ability to get the job done to their satisfaction given their skills and knowledge, and with the product, service, technology and brand resources used.
Usually, both jobs and outcomes are stated independently of “solutions” - actual products, technologies and services. By demarcating needs (job and outcomes) from solutions in this way and by measuring the set of outcomes for their importance and satisfaction in a survey, the method seeks to provide more reliable, prioritised measures of customer need to drive predictable innovation.
As well as jobs and outcomes, a typical study captures jobs that are related to the core job (“related jobs”) and also “emotional jobs” – how customers feel during and after the job has been performed.
Umio thinking – from jobs-to-be-done to flows-to-create
Jobs and outcomes are most useful for directing product and service innovation. By producing a prioritised list of needs, the method helps R&D, design and strategy teams to find hidden opportunities and/or validate existing ones. It supports needs-based market segmentation, new market entry (targeting under- or over-served needs), product positioning (on outcomes), pricing (potential satisfaction), competitor analysis, and technology development or acquisition. Nevertheless, there are some limitations:
1. Jobs thinking sees the customer’s world as a series of time-bounded discrete tasks and activities – broken into further linear process steps (a journey) - which does not reflect the more relational, interactional, contextual and messier reality of actual experience.
2. The method promotes a causal association between functional jobs and outcomes and discrete emotional states, mediated by a solution. Yet neither an association (a functional task or activity does not always produce or precede a particular emotion) nor a discrete singular intensity of an emotion necessarily exist.
3. People’s affective states always pre-exist a job-to-be-done and as such, condition how, whether and when a job is even undertaken; they can constrain or enable future action and possibility. Hence, understanding affects (sensations, feeling states, impressions) that form and variously stabilize (or stick / limit) actual experience as well as affective capacities, dispositions and tendencies to act or to affect is a more fruitful space for enquiry.
4. Affects forming experience arise, persist, flow and transition via human interactions in material-spatial and social-cultural flows bearing agential relations and forces of human (actors, ideas, meanings) and non-human (objects, environment) entities. Understanding these assemblages of affect production, differentiation and recurrence precedes and informs the innovation-design task.
5. Umio does this by framing purpose, learning and design for a focal context of real experience flow (e.g., obesity, pain) and then exploring the experience ecosystem of the production, differentiation, recurrence of affects forming flows of different experiences (affects and affective capacities) for that context, as well as the tendencies of method, design, organisation and action presently deployed to address it. Doing so reveals new paths and possibilities for the more fundamental creation or transition of any flow of real experience (with disease or any human context).