In this episode of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio, hosts Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek pause an intense two-day client working session to tackle a question raised on the #JTBD hashtag: can you summarize a job-to-be-done in 140 characters or less? They are joined by John Palmer, who worked with Bob in the early 1990s to help create the Jobs-to-be-Done framework, along with colleagues from The Re-Wired Group.
The conversation digs into why defining and naming a job is a design task, not a marketing or research exercise. You will learn why John describes jobs as “the market’s future tense,” how an icon or image can express a job more powerfully than a sentence, and how the demand framework and hiring framework come together to define the work a customer is really trying to get done.
Key takeaways
- A job is the market’s future tense. Jobs name a void that does not exist yet. They become real only when an innovation arrives to fill it, so defining a job means describing a future reality, not today’s product.
- Naming a job is a design task, not a marketing task. Distilling a job into a short phrase, icon, or image takes an artist’s eye. It is half art and half science, expressing both what is there and what is not.
- A job has emotional, social, and functional dimensions. Saying the job of a phone is to communicate misses most of it. The real job wraps all three layers together.
- Demand and hiring are the two sides of a job. One side is where demand comes from and the forces that shape it. The other is how customers shop for and hire a solution. Their intersection defines the job.
- You define the void by going to the edge of the market. Studying people who switched recently maps the current edge, which lets you extrapolate over it into the void where disruption happens.
Can you summarize a job in 140 characters or less?
Chris: Hi, and welcome to the latest edition of Jobs to Be Done Radio. I’m Chris Spiek, and as always I’m here with my partner Bob Moesta. I’m also here with a group of guys who are actually in the middle of a working session on a jobs to be done project, and we thought it would be a good time to record our latest edition. I’m here with Herman Folks and Bob Barrett who are both with The Re-Wired Group. And also John Palmer who is a colleague of ours. John along with Bob Moesta could probably be referred to as one of the people who actually was one of the creaters of the Jobs to be done framework. We’re gonna go through a couple topics here and just see where our conversation takes us.
Chris: The first thing I wanted to explore was something that was brought up on Twitter under the hashtag of #JTBD is the idea of summarizing a job in 140 characters or less. We had this notion that once you understand the essence of what a job is, you should be able to set the complex language aside, and distill it down to one very descriptive sentence or phrase, that clearly articulates the job that the user has. John, you had some ideas around whether that’s flawed or not or whether we should strive to achieve that.
John Palmer: I think it’s absolutely the right concept. Just to give you the way I think about it, is that, jobs are filling a void. Jobs are the market’s future tense. They don’t exist until you bring an innovation in to fill the void. What you are trying to define, name is the void. You need new words, so now is the time to take the reality of the market surveys that led you to identify what the jobs are and create, if you like, a bold and revolutionary new concept over here; that would be in opposition to the reality of today. The opposition is going to be the new reality of tomorrow that you’re going to create when you go after this job. Here’s where you’ve got to put your designer hat on.
John Palmer: If you were a poet you’d be writing poetry. If you were a painter you would be painting your most brilliant painting. Now what you’ve got to do is bring in a new way of seeing the world. You’ve got your reality of the market research that you’ve done as the basis. Now, can I put my job hat, on and look at that reality to see how it’s in some way distorted and how the job would make it right. Jobs are a new icon, a new symbol, that you’re going to be bringing into the market, a new way of thinking about the market that will, in fact, show the short comings of the products that are in the market today.
Concept · The basics
A job is the progress a customer is trying to make
A job-to-be-done is the progress a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. It is not a product, a feature, or a demographic. John’s framing here adds a useful twist: a job names something that does not exist yet, a void in the market waiting for an innovation to fill it. Defining the job is how you describe that future before you build it.
“Jobs are the market’s future tense.”John Palmer
Demand and hiring: the two sides of a job
Bob: When we talk about it, there’s really two sides to it, right? The first side is, the demand side. Where is the demand created and how is it created. What are the factors that focus on the demand, right? The second part is really the hiring framework of, how are they going to go about hiring to solve that problem or job? It’s the intersection of those two things, which is, the demand and the hiring that creates the function of the job. Like you said, it’s the void, but I can’t actually define the void into the next thing of what they’re trying to get done.
John Palmer: It’s evolutionary.
Bob: That’s correct.
John Palmer: OK. Defining a job is going to be a process. It’s gonna start with, first, this big idea, this big new idea, this big new icon, that you’re going to bring into the market. Let me give you an example, a good one. We’re doing a project in children’s obesity. Have we addressed children’s obesity? We know that the mom has the emotional stake in the game. She will do nothing short of offering herself to make sure her children have the best future. But, the food market has conspired to take her off course with convenience foods, with healthy foods. Foods aren’t healthy, human beings are healthy. Mom is trying to make her kids healthy. That’s the new symbol. What we need is an icon for the job that mom has to do if she’s gonna get her children back into wellness or to make sure they stay in wellness.
John Palmer: Let’s think about what I mean by an icon. Let’s think about a painting. Let’s think about Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving painting, if you can remember that. You’ve got a mom bringing food that she cooked by herself, on this platter, to a table filled with children or younger people around the table and it expresses all the values that the job is meant to express: nourishment, care, the emotion, family and values. Teaching the children what is good, ‘It’s not fast food children, I made this.’. I’m not going to give that job a name right now, but that would be the next step.
Attendee: John, earlier we were talking about the distinction between treating a sickness versus treating a wellness. Could you elaborate more on that for us?
John Palmer: Yes, well there’s a good example. That the problem with food, the food market and the food industry, is it’s been all about trying to come up with convenient food, whole meal replacement, taking mom out of the picture. Whereas it should be all about instilling these values into the upcoming generation. Those young people around that dining room table. About what the value of food really is. As we take off, it’s nourishment; it’s good values; it’s looking after yourself; it’s avoiding the bad stuff and eating the good stuff and being well. That’s why jobs are a revolutionary concept and they should revolutionize markets. When Bob says disruption, he’s got the right word. I know he’s not a fan of it but he’s revolutionary and jobs are revolutionary.
Bob: The notion is, when you focus on sickness, the competition is different, it’s all about the symptoms, it’s all about focusing on not necessarily making progress on the holistic side. What you find is that you solve one problem and create another without looking at, again, wellness. Part of it is being able to understand the cohesive part of jobs as opposed to the isolating part of jobs. So we get back to, the job of a phone is to communicate, that’s not it. All jobs have an emotional, social, and functional piece to it. It’s the wrapping of all of that together that helps you have a better value system of how to manage, design, build, and launch new product.
The phone, the void, and a job’s time orientation
John Palmer: Let me build on the phone. The phone when it first came in was called the speaking telegraph because that’s what it did. It took information at that time was only available on telegraph and converted it into voice. When it came into the market, it became an anti-environment, if you’d like. A new way of seeing the limitations of talking to people only on your street. It allowed people to spread their network. It came in, soon after that, the car which allowed society to have some entropy to it. The telephone was an enabler of that, so people could stay in touch.
Chris Spiek: There is a time orientation to the job, I think, is what you’re saying. At the time that it was created, the job that people had that was to be done was to connect us better than we’re connected now. Whereas if we look at phones today, there’s still an element to that, but to say that your Iphone’s job is to keep you connected, probably doesn’t do a good enough job articulating . . .
John Palmer: . . . the new iconic symbol of that icon.
Bob: It doesn’t also resonate with the demand that’s out there, what else you want to do. What else it can do. It doesn’t actually have the hiring framework, it’s a limitation around the hiring framework because you hire for a lot of other reasons besides just instability to communicate. It gets back to Kano’s stuff that the whole idea communicating is become basic quality but issue is the new performance quality and the excitement quality all changes as we talk through this because of what your reference point is and what you’re try to get to.
Chris Spiek: Can you talk through Kano, in 30 seconds, just to give people an idea of what that is?
Bob: Dr. Kano is a guy from Japan who mapped out, kind of, the way performance characteristics handle for quality. The notion is that, if you think about something being fully executed on and I do it awesome or I don’t do it at all, how satisfied is somebody? The notion is, if you think of brakes on the car, right? The thing is, if the brakes don’t work I’m dissatisfied but if the brakes work awesome and I can stop in five feet and they’re so big and they have all this ventilation and all these other things. The fact is, people aren’t more satisfied, because the brakes work. As you start to look through and experience in what people are trying to get done and understand basic quality or basic performance or excitement qualities, you don’t need to over-invest in the brakes because at some point I can make the car stop, but I now hurt gas mileage. And gas mileage is a performance characteristic. Part of it gets back to being able to understand, in the moment, as they’re looking to make progress, what is their definition of progress? What is their hiring criteria and what is creating demand for them? Kano is a lens that we use to help us, at least from a design perspective, help make the trade-offs of what’s important and not important. Was that fast enough?
Chris Spiek: Very fast.
Naming a job is a design task, not a marketing one
John Palmer: I would just add that naming jobs is a design task. You’ve gotta put your designer hat on.
Bob: That’s right. It’s not a marketing thing, it’s not a sales thing. It’s not a research thing.
John Palmer: No, it’s not solving an equation. You’ve gotta design, you’ve got to be an artist. You’ve gotta think of what’s not there and express it.
Bob: I think it’s half art, half science. I think it’s half of what’s there and half of what’s not there. It is being able to articulate those things together that create what the job is.
“I think it’s half art, half science. I think it’s half of what’s there and half of what’s not there.”Bob Moesta
Concept · The Four Forces of Progress
Demand, hiring, and the forces that shape a switch
The demand framework asks what forces will shape what customers want next. The hiring framework asks how a shopper sells themselves on a new idea and what criteria they use to hire a solution. These map onto the four forces that drive every switch: the push and pull that create demand, and the anxiety and habit that shape whether a customer hires the new thing.
The tools: demand framework, hiring framework, and the edge
Chris Spiek: What are the tools that you use? I’m hesitant to introduce the word design, demand framework, and hiring framework because we just jotted them up on the way forward, earlier. Once we put them into this podcast they’re, kind of, everywhere, but I think that we should at least talk through them. What are the tools that you would use to design that jobs language?
John Palmer: The hiring framework is all about how the shopper and all customers have to be shoppers first. How the shoppers sell himself or herself on a new idea. We’re in a self-serve market, a self-serve world where people have the information to make up their own mind. What are the criteria for hiring the suitable job candidate. That’s the hiring framework The demand framework is, what are the forces that will shake demand in the future? We’re talking about what’s next. What’s not today, what could be tomorrow. What are the forces that will shape the could be, might be, should be, will be? That’s what demand framework is about.
Bob: The way we go about doing that though is we do interviews about last consumption moments to be able to understand how they connect and then play it out. What we’ve been doing pretty much all day today, is dimensionalizing, listening to interviews, listening to people and consumers speak but really spending the time to dimensionalize, what are the forces at play? What are the criteria that are hiring by and understanding from a technology independent perspective, how do they go about finding, hiring, using, and consuming new things.
There is a catalog of actual interviews along with analysis available here.
John Palmer: Just to build on that. OK, Bob is a big gun and taught us this. You’ve got to look at the edges of markets. We go right to the edge with current behavior and now we have to go and peer over the void. That’s where the job definition comes in.
Bob: I think it’s an important notion that we look at it as going to the edge by looking at people who have switched recently. Then, that defines the new edge that allows us to extrapolate to over the edge and into the void. Part of it is, even by understanding the edge, we believe that you can make progress without understand the void, but the whole thing of peering over and seeing the void is where the disruption happens.
Concept · The Switch Interview
Interviewing the people who recently switched
The demand and hiring frameworks are built from interviews about real “last consumption moments.” The Switch Interview reconstructs the timeline of an actual purchase so you can hear the forces in the customer’s own words, then dimensionalize what you find. Studying people who switched recently is how the team maps the edge of the market before peering over it into the void.
Dimensionalizing demand: pattern recognition and progress
Chris Spiek: So what is that? Is that guesswork? Is it looking at the data and . . .
Bob: It’s pattern recognition at the end of the day. For me, it’s all about dimentionalizing and seeing how things connect causally. Having a causal and descriptive way of looking at the market and looking at demand. To be able to look and say, here’s how things are going and why things are going that way. To be able to understand how it affect choices and value propositions. Ultimately, what’s the value proposition.
Chris Spiek: So, if I can understand what forces are acting on a consumer at the moment that they make a choice, I can start to put things into the equation that says, if you chose this, it would be more progress than what you’re using now or consuming now.
Bob: That’s correct. So, part of it is being able to, again, dimensionalize based on their behavior. How much of the situation drives it. How much their history and reference point drives it. How much the current product set and choices drive it and understanding, kind of, how it works. It’s the mechanisms. Ultimately, John and I have talked about the mechanisms of value is trying to understand those mechanisms of value beyond the product.
John Palmer: The value I would like to emphasize here is the value of making progress. Making progress in life. Making progress in you personality. Making progress in your persona. That’s the language of jobs. It’s the language of progress.
Bob: It’s progress making movement that we’re trying to understand. What are those progress making acts that people take and where’s a bold progress making action. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do with jobs.
Chris Spiek: There’s one thing that we might actually need help with from other people is that we always throw around the word dimensionless. We’ve talked about this a lot in past podcasts but there’s a certain art to creating a dimension and being able to listen to. Whether it’s a recorded phone interview, an online video interview, or a face-to-face conversation and actually be able to visualize, write down, and record an energy or dimension that is acting on a person, as they describe a situation to you. That’s one thing where we throw that word around a lot, and I think people that listen and follow jobs think that’s the secret sauce or the black box, but that’s one thing that I think we need to work on, as far as, a method.
Attendee: My suggestion is maybe we take some of the warm-up stuff we have from one our recent ones on people moving; and we slow it down and we actually kind of pin-point and show basically, here this part, stop it, talk about the dimension. Here’s what the dimension looks like and then basically, help people dimensionalize the behavior and the movement.
Chris Spiek: It won’t be a step-by-step process on how to identify dimension. At least their will be examples that people can follow.
Attendee: Right.
John Palmer: Just to say, I think that today, for instance, from the few projects that we went around, this in commonality of cross-markets that are very, very diverse, I think that you can come back with some pretty clear starter kit for how to describe what these dimensions are.
When does a company need a jobs lens?
Attendee: John, I had another question. I’m kind of curious at what point in a business life cycle do they need to gauge the jobs to be done paradigm.
John Palmer: I don’t think that it’s a life cycle. It’s a growth orientation. Is the company gonna play out the historical sales curve, the historical processes, the historical information. Are they going to go get a fresh lead on the market about what’s not there. Then, come up with the jobs map against which they can innovate. It’s their readiness to be revolutionary in their own right and say, we’re going where no one else has gone by going after tomorrow’s market.
Bob: The thing is, is that it gets back to sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation. I think that the fact that you can use jobs to help you in sustaining, but the reality is, the ultimate thing is it shows you where you can disrupt the market, where there’s non-consumption. Where people want to consume but they’re not. Or where the boundaries are for the market to be able to say when do they move into a different category or when do things really compete in the same spaces. What happens is most of the work we do, we help people see way beyond their categories, so they’re not thinking about packaged goods. They’re not in the juice aisle anymore. What are juices used for? They compete with milk and all over the store. You start to realize that we’re software like CRM, they say it competes with excel, it competes with all these other things. You start to realize that it [paper and pencil].
Concept · Non-consumption
Disruption lives where people want progress but get none
The biggest opportunities sit in non-consumption: places where people want to make progress but currently do nothing because every option falls short. A jobs lens reveals those struggling moments and the real boundaries of competition, which is often far wider than a product category. Juice competes with milk. CRM competes with a spreadsheet.
Bob: Part of it is to recover true competition where the boundaries are and where is the next leap they are willing to make. It gets back to when a lot of times people engage is when they’re at the edge and they’ve tried everything and nothing is moving the needle. We’ve launched 15 new products and we’re just treading water and we’re not really making any difference. We’ve got excess capacity in this technology and we’ve got these kinds of things, but we can’t crack what’s next. So, people will engage us to help figure out what’s next and then how to design products to make sure that we can tap into that demand.
Chris Spiek: The other pattern I think we’ve identified over the past is that we have a lot of top companies and industries hiring us. It’s typically the number one player in a category that has been able to innovate in the past, do line extensions, revisions and iterative improvements to their product up to a certain point. Then they’re feeling some force, whether it’s competition or regulation or something that’s impacting their position where they come back and say, we need a completely new way of thinking and a new way to innovate around new ideas. We can’t just continue on the path that we’re on.
Bob: What’s interesting is that those top companies that have some notion of the innovators’ dilemma. They know going up market and they’ve been trying to go up market. They’re either getting there but they’re hitting the ceiling that they know they need to go down market. They don’t know how to go down market and they don’t know how to find down market, and they don’t know how to make the trade-offs to make the products or services work down market. That’s what the job framework helps is to be able to say, how good does it really need to be to disrupt and cause people to switch or people who don’t consume to consume. What’s the minimum we have to do to stay profitable. Most people want to over-engineer the product for the low end and it doesn’t work.
Chris Spiek: Awesome. As always you can follow me on twitter @ChrisCBS follow Bob @BMoesta. I’ll post everybody else’s info up their as well. I’d say if you’re looking to keep up with the latest trends in jobs to be done follow the JTBD# on twitter. If you’re new to this and you want a lot of background information, go to therewiredgroup.com. We have the jobs to be done page there with a lot of great resources. We’ll see you next time.
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