Unlocking growth strategy through Jobs To Be Done research

Background

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a useful framework for informing strategic direction, and identifying opportunities for innovation. Much has been written on Jobs To be Done, but a great starting point is this fantastic HBR article.

We’ve conducted several Jobs To Be Done studies for clients now, often for Strategy or Product, to guide efforts.

Recently, our client wanted to understand over 300 jobs across various property journeys.

Approach

Testing 300 jobs becomes problematic at best, particularly when JTBD approaches require one to ask both importance of a job, and satisfaction of achieving said job. Moreover, there is a distinction between how strategists / marketers / businesses define a ‘job’, and the way in which this can be accurately articulated and tested with consumers.

To navigate these challenges, we approached the task with three solutions in mind.

Firstly, we understand the journeys consumers were on, and explored their ‘jobs’ grounded within a relevant journey. Careful balancing of study design ensured one person was only asked from the perspective of one journey. This took our list of 300 jobs, and reduced it to a far more manageable set of just a handful of jobs per person. We grouped these jobs up for a given journey into stages, which helped break the survey experience up for respondents. This meant rather than an endless cycle of ‘importance and satisfaction’, or a single screen of three dozen ‘jobs’, they were taken on a journey of stages, leading to better pacing of survey experience and less fatigue.

Secondly, we ensured each ‘job’ was phrased in a way that consumers could understand, but allowed us to back this out versus the way the organisation was approaching defining jobs. This bridged the gap between strategy and consumer in a way that captured accurate data, to guide efforts.

Third, we brought it all back together in a series of powerful deliverables. This meant not only could we understand a particular journey and tasks, but we could compare all 300 jobs versus each other. By thinking mindfully and strategically through the deliverable, we allowed our client to move from the macro of comparing all jobs to identify under and over-served jobs, to the micro of a particular journey, and further again among specific demographic cohorts.

Result

The study resulted in a powerful strategic tool, allowing our client to identify over 80 under-served jobs, which are already being acted upon.

It has informed a strategic roadmap for the near and future, guiding efforts within specific journeys, and among particular demographics.

The results now live up in physical form in a ‘war room’, populated with post-it notes and ideas, a living strategy document, and are represented in a rich deliverable that allows further analysis as needed (even down to specific jobs within a stage within a journey for a particular demographic).