The Jobs-To-Be-Done
Four words that are going to change your life.
It’s a joy and delight to introduce you to four of my most favorite words in the English language: Jobs to be Done.
These words are going to change. your. life.
But first, a [brief] history lesson:
Jobs to be Done (JTBD) originated as a customer-centered development practice, with the premise that when considering what to build (technology products, specifically), start with the job your customer is doing (what are they hiring your tool for)?
Jobs-to-be-Done is a framework for defining, categorizing, capturing, and organizing all your customers’ needs.1
Within this framework, starting with your customers’ needs is how you define your internal roadmap, and “what it is” that “needs to be done.”
Charles Revson, Founder of Revlon articulately defines [some of] the JTBD at his company as: "In the factories we make cosmetics; in the drug stores we sell hope.”2
Meaning: Each part of Revlon's business is executing on a different job that “needs to be done” to serve the product lifecycle or customer need. That JTBD then informs what matters to the success factors, and staffing (sanitation and safety; aesthetics and appeal).
Clarifying the jobs to be done can elucidate what to prioritize, and the minutiae involved with the work. It can guide decisions, de-mystify the abstract, and, perhaps most critically, inform the who that will be most effective in accomplishing the what.
→ different pots demand different lids, amiright!?
Beyond this, one of the greatest superpowers of JTBD is how the framework enables and normalizes the constant that is change.
I was introduced to Jobs to be Done at Square:
As a company with a highly aligned business model (Square’s revenue came from taking a processing-fee of customer transactions, so quite literally: the more money its customers made, the more money Square made), and one that quite literally existed to serve and support small businesses, Square was obsessed with understanding the JTBD of running a business that took entrepreneurs away from the reason they started their business in the first place (i.e. few Florists opened up shop for the purpose of reconciling inventory).
So every year, in pursuit of creating the annual roadmap, a large group of company leaders would align on the JTBD (the things that customers wanted and needed) alongside other company priorities (perhaps infrastructure scale, or technology migration) to define the body and sequencing of work for the four quarters ahead.
Then, from the roadmap (what's being built, how, when), they’d sort out the who that is doing the what: the internal JTBD based on the JTBD for the customer.
The absolute key here is that the internal JTBD are determined human-agnostically: take the people (their emotions, preferences, and predilections) out of consideration, and instead staff based on the needs of the work to determine who should do which jobs.
A side effect of this arrangement is that people-organization and responsibility-assignment shifts can be frequent! When the needs of the business change, workers (and work style!) need to flex to accommodate.
At Square, newcomers often found this norm jarring and unsettling (because remember: change is hard), but once they got used to it, and more accustomed to the rhythm, most people found it to be quite…reasonable. And because change is constant (in life, as well as at work), building these skills became a useful practice to take far outside the walls of the office.
And now for the story that truly taught me value of JTBD:
In the Fall of 2019 when Square was undergoing the arduous and multi-step annual planning process, we were looking ahead to a big 2020! (Weren’t we all!? 🙄)
…and then COVID stopped the world in its tracks. Square’s business began for the purpose of serving small businesses, and – as described earlier – had a revenue model directly correlated to the transaction volume of its customers. Since many of Square’s customers depended on foot traffic (coffee shops, hair salons, quick-serve restaurants, etc.), COVID shut off their revenue immediately, which stopped Square’s at the same time.
At first, there was shock and uncertainty, but once the dust started to settle and it was clear that we’d be living in a different world for more than just a few weeks (LOL remember when we thought it might just be a few weeks!?) the leaders at Square took the bold step of FULLY REVISITING THE ANNUAL PLAN!
You see, one of the benefits and straightforward realities of a business model that directly aligns company revenue to customers' revenue, is that incentives are aligned to ensuring our customers were solvent, and could resume making money stat.
So rewrite the plan, we did, with that focus.
To heck with our original ideas: Square knew it was important to prioritize the customers’ new needs above all else. It wasn’t a matter of pride, progress, or previous plans; rather, what would enable small businesses to survive in the new normal.
As a result, products like QR codes stayed on the roadmap, and features like curbside pickup were added in.
On one hand, this decision to completely rethink the year’s work was wild. On the other hand, it was the only logical, sensical plan.
And so that's what we did: focused on what Square’s customers needed and built the things that best enabled their revenue → the JTBD. And with this pivot, Square thrived. (Want proof? 👀 check the SQ stock trends for Q220-Q321)
And to the previous point: the greatest gift of this logical decision-making, IMO, is the clarity and reason it affords for communicating and managing the strategic shifts that were expected to cascade throughout the organization.
My job was in Talent Acquisition, and at the time I was managing a team of recruiters whose jobs, in the most basic sense, were to fill open roles. Some members of my team were initially confused by the overhaul of open positions, and didn’t fully understand why the company had shifted its hiring strategy.
They would say things to me like, "Candidates like these were getting interviews just a couple of weeks ago, why aren’t the hiring teams interested in them anymore?" or “I thought we discussed that hiring for full stack developers was the priority, why am I now being asked to recruit for hardware engineers?”
(Note: these are imprecise examples for the sake of abstracting specifics)
In any event, the original sourcing plans were based on the previous roadmap; once the JTBD for the customers changed, so too did the staff augmentation plans needed to support the new strategy.
In this way, JTBD helps every employee stay customer-centric: whatever the function – you're not doing “things” (finding people, sending emails, crunching numbers...whatever the responsibilities of the job) just for the heck of it, but instead to ensure every employee takes on work that ultimately serves the customer.
These strategic pivots came to serve as teaching moments on the “why” we were doing what we were asked to do: what are customers asking for? How will these developments serve their businesses? How did we choose to prioritize these features against other options? What’s the impact to our business if we neglect to achieve these objectives?
And in this way, JTBD helped to make the change objective: it wasn’t about justifying preference, precedence, or whim; it was strictly about serving the customer.
This made it easier to ride the waves on the ship as it turned: it's not personal, it's about the customer; and assignments against JTDB were organized by what the company needs, and how the deployment of individuals’ talent would add the most value.
I certainly struggled to acclimate to a JTBD culture: sometimes I got what I wanted in the reorgs, but more often, I didn’t; sometimes the cards dealt were quite literally the opposite of my preferences.
My solace and confidence came from the fact that assignments were informed by: what the company critically needed, and what I was great at. And, as long as I was willing to put my ego aside, seek to understand the business objective, and rise to the occasion of the JTBD, everyone would win – the company, my teammates, my business partners, and me.
I won because the outcome of consistently acing my assignments (by leveraging my strengths, seeing the opportunity in every project, and putting my ego aside to knock it out of the park) I was able to ride the tide of change and growth toward the destination I was seeking to go. Even if, perhaps, the journey to get there was different than expected.
In a JTBD environment, the JTBDs serve the customers and therefore the collective success of the company and its employees. So when all employees accomplish their respective JTBD, the company hits its goals and everyone benefits: the ship reaches its destination, and so do its passengers.
“All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory.”3
https://strategyn.com/lp/the-jobs-to-be-done-needs-framework/#:~:text=Take%20your%20understanding%20of%20customer,understand%20the%20relationship%20between%20them.
https://medium.com/verygoodcopy/what-are-you-selling-really-29a9dd88d163
HTWFAIP, pg. 187