What is job theory and how can it be applied to your business?
Monday night I was sitting on Zoom in my virtual entrepreneurship class. We had two amazing guest speakers coming to join us, Rebecca and Jonathan Jackson. They are founders of a company called customer illuminated. CI is a boutique consulting firm that specializes in customer discovery and validation. They help startup founders, entrepreneurs, R&D departments, and PMs find product-market fit.
I want to start my own business after college which is coming up pretty soon. Customer discovery and empathy development matter to me because I want to genuinely know my customer's wants and needs so that I can tailor my offering and value proposition to them. Not only will customer discovery help in terms of marketing to my customers but it shows product-market fit. As students in the Entrepreneurship minor at Western Washington University, we learn about evidence-based entrepreneurship. This means we learn how to find evidence that supports product-market fit before launching a product or service.
Rebecca and Jonathan came into our virtual classroom to discuss Jobs to be Done (JTBD’s) and customer empathy interviews. This article highlights their discussion points and gives examples of how to implement the JTBD theory into your venture.
Jobs to be Done is a theory founded on the theories of Harvard professor Clayton Christensen.
Jobs to be done is part of job theory which is a concept that helps us focus on the customer perspective. It helps us ask the question “what is it that other people want?” other people meaning a potential customer.
The definition of a JTBD is a particular type of progress a customer struggles to make in a distinct context.
So now let’s look at a classic example of how Clayton Christensen’s team used the JTBD theory with milkshakes.
There were mysterious sales of milkshakes at Mcdonalds early in the morning. The Mcdonald’s marketing team wanted to discover why this was happening. They went out and conducted customer interviews and surveys, took what they gathered, and implemented it. They changed their milkshakes to match exactly what those customers were saying they wanted. However, McDonald’s has zero changes in sales and couldn’t figure out why.
Mcdonald’s hired Clayton Christensen’s team to come in and figure out why their method didnt work and get to the bottom of the mystery.
After interviewing the people buying these milkshakes early in the morning Christensen’s team discovered:
- They were going on long boring commutes to work.
- It took them 23 minutes to drink the milkshake.
- The milkshakes kept their stomachs full.
After figuring out these motives they were able to clearly understand why these customers were purchasing milkshakes early in the morning. Now, using the JTBD framework we can walk through this process in four steps from the customer’s perspective.
#1 Distinct contract
- Customers had a long boring drive to work
#2 Particular Progress
- Feel entertained
- Feeling engaged with the world
#3 Barriers
- Can only eat with one hand at a time
- Arrive at work looking clean
#4 Hard Stop
- Complete while they arrived at work
- Kept them full past 10:00 AM
Looking at this information it is time to create a JTBD statement from the customer’s perspective with this information. “I want to feel entertained while filling my stomach on my long boring drive to work.”
With this information, the Christensen team was able to make changes to the McDonald’s milkshakes.
Here is what they did:
- Added tiny chunk of fruit to give variety and jerk the customer awake while driving
- Have free-standing milkshake machines that the customer could pay at in the store
- Thicker milkshakes so it would take the customer longer to drink and less likely to spill
After this example as a class, we were able to write down our own JTBD statement for our ventures. Rebecca and Jonathan had s write ours in the chat function of Zoom and they chose one to work with. They ended up choosing mine and we were able to use a JTBD statement framework to revise it.
My first iteration from my customer’s perspectives was as follows: I want to feel engaged and acknowledged while being in virtual spaces.
This was good but it included an ‘and’ which shouldn’t be there. I learned the reason for this is because the JTBD statement needs to address only one customer motive, mine had two. We ended up taking out acknowledged and focusing on the term engaged.
My second iteration: I want to feel engaged while being in virtual spaces.
This was stronger yet, there should be no mention of modern technology in the JTBD statement. I learned that the reason for this is so this JTBD statement can be sustainable for a very long time. After learning this we changed it one last time.
My last and final iteration: I want to feel engaged while being physically separated from others.
Now that the statement is complete I can use this statement for customer interviews and empathy development. I can also use different words instead of engaged and conduct A/B testing.
From my learning, a JTBD statement can allow us to get to bottom of customer motives and understand their purchasing behavior. A JTBD statement can also help pinpoint a value proposition for a product or service.
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Written by: Schantell Hummel, WWU E & I Student