Jim, Beat and Yann met customer focus enthusiasts for an online event to discuss how to take customer-focused jobs-to-be-done thinking from a spark to a wildfire in an organization. Three key lessons stood out.
1. The first rule of the jobs-to-be-done club is: Don't talk about jobs-to-be-done. Just do it! Jobs-to-be-done enthusiasts run the risk of falling into the same trap that the logic they love so much is supposed to save them from: they think and talk about the solution, not the job. As jobs-to-be-done enthusiasts, jobs-to-be-done itself is a solution! So we shouldn't talk about jobs-to-be-done if we want to inspire others, but about how jobs-to-be-done can help in this situation. The label is secondary.
2. There is no one way - what counts is what makes sense The purpose of jobs-to-be-done is to solve a business problem, i.e., to create a useful, meaningful innovation. Jobs-to-be-done is thereby a logic, a mindset, or a way of thinking. There is no one way to apply it. From the perspective of a pragmatic practitioner, both Jim and Vendbridge are not dogmatic. Whether you apply jobs-to-be-done in a hypothesis workshop, conduct qualitative interviews, or use quantification methods depends on what makes sense. Sometimes an inside-out hypothesis is good enough; for resource-intensive decisions that need to be justified to management, more robust results are often needed.
3. Co-creation: Doing jobs-to-be-done together To spread jobs-to-be-done throughout your organization, as many people as possible in the organization should be able to participate. Jobs-to-be-done and the various tools Vendbridge and Jim have developed are like an open invitation to people in many different teams and departments. Jobs-to-be-done is a way of thinking, talking, and creating where everyone can participate and co-create - from UX to management to engineers.
We hope you enjoyed the discussion as much as we did!
Couldn't be there?
Here's the recording to watch the exchange again: