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Improve Your NPS with Jobs-to-be-Done


If you're looking for ways to improve your Net Promoter Score, Jobs-to-be-Done can help you determine what to do to transform your detractors to promoters.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an extraordinarily popular and quite effective technique for measuring customer satisfaction for a product or service. A business surveys its customers asking, "On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being 'extremely unlikely' and 10 being 'extremely likely,' how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?"

The customers who answer 9 or 10 are your "promoters." Those who answer 0 to 6 are "detractors." Your Net Promoter Score is the difference between the percentage of respondents who are promoters and the percentage of respondents who are detractors.

The business now has a single number indicating customer satisfaction. Improving the number is likely to improve customer retention and growth--a higher NPS should lead to more referrals.

But, how do you know why your detractors won't recommend your product?

What is causing their dissatisfaction?

And what can you do to your product to improve customer satisfaction?

You can use Jobs-to-be-Done to answer these questions and figure out precisely how to change your product to transform detractors into promoters.

Why are your customers using your product?
To know why your customers are dissatisfied with your product, you need to know why they are using it in the first place.

According to Clay Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who popularized Jobs-to-be-Done Theory, "Your customers are not buying your product, they are hiring it to get a job done." Their struggle to get the job done with their existing solutions leads them to hire a new product that they believe will get the job done better. If the new product does not get the job done better, the customer will fire it.

In this context, a "job" is not necessarily an occupation. It's any goal that a person wants to achieve in their personal or professional life.

To determine if a job represents a good market opportunity and is something you can align your team around, you can use the following criteria:

  • A succinct statement with a clear action verb and direct object e.g. "acquire customers," "buy a used car," or "restore artery blood flow."
  • No solutions in the job statement. If you include a solution in the job statement such as, "Play MP3s," then you focus your company on a technology instead of the customer and you risk missing big innovations that are possible from new technologies such as streaming music.
  • A job statement should stand the test of time. Take "create a mood with music" as an example. People have been trying to do that since the first noise was made by the first human and will continue trying to do it forever. "Buy a used car" will go away whenever people stop owning cars, but cars have already been around for over a hundred years and will likely last at least a couple of decades more. The projected time horizon of the job's existence helps you determine the level of risk in your market.
  • A large number of people (or at least a small number of people who are willing to pay a lot of money to get it done), should wake up in the morning on a regular basis thinking, "I need to get this job done!" If your job statement doesn't pass this "wake up in the morning" test, it's likely that the job is not important enough for anyone to use a product to get it done better.

Sometimes the job (the goal your customers are trying to achieve with your product) is obvious.

For instance, if salespeople are using your CRM, it's pretty clear they are trying to "acquire customers" and "retain customers," two clear jobs.

Sometimes it is less clear. What job does Slack serve?

In such cases, interviewing your customers is a good way to determine the job.

You may find your product is being used by your customers to serve multiple jobs. This makes your situation a little more complex and the way to deal with it is another topic for another post.

What is causing customer detractors to be dissatisfied?
Now that you've figured out what job your customer is hiring your product for, you need to determine your detractors' problem. Why are they dissatisfied?

More often than not, their problem is that your product is not getting the job done well enough. Your detractors are not achieving their goal as quickly and as frequently as they would like, and they are blaming your product for not helping them.

Let's imagine we're on the product team for Google Maps. Users are hiring our product to "reach a destination on time," among other jobs. Knowing our users blame us for being late to their appointments is not enough information to understand what to build to turn the detractors into promoters.

We need to be more specific.

Fortunately, we can break a job down to precisely identify where the struggle is occurring and how severe it is in the market.

First, we list the job steps, which tell the story of how the job gets done, independent of the existing solutions in the market. All jobs have six categories of job steps.

All jobs have six categories of job steps.

For example, here are 6 steps in the job of "reach a destination on time," one for each category:

For example, here are 6 steps in the job of “reach a destination on time,” one for each category:

You can hypothesize the job steps in a job by thinking through the last time you tried to execute the job and taking note of what you had to define, prepare, execute, monitor, modify, and conclude. When you find yourself thinking about the products you used to do those things, ask yourself why you used those products until you get to a statement that does not include a solution.

In all there are sixteen steps in "get to a destination on time:"

Next, we identify the customer needs in each job step.

The needs are the actions the job executor must take in order for the job step to be completed successfully. The faster the action is completed and the more accurate the outcome of the action, the more successful the job step will be and the more satisfied the customer will be. In other words, needs that can only be met slowly and inaccurately with the existing solution will cause the customer to be dissatisfied.

We can hypothesize the needs by taking note of the variables in each job step that could cause the process to go off track. For example in the step of "plan the stops," the variables are:

  • The sequence of the stops
  • Where the stops are
  • The number of stops
  • The routes between the stops
  • Open times of locations where you need to run errands
  • Wait times at the locations
  • How long it takes to park at the locations

If your customer cannot quickly and accurately determine this information, she cannot plan her stops in such a way that she will reliably reach her final destination on time. The job will go off track, causing anxiety.

To validate the job steps and needs, you can interview job executors. To validate your assessment of whether or not the job executors are dissatisfied with their ability to meet the needs, you can survey job executors on their importance and satisfaction of each need.

To figure out why your detractors, specifically, are dissatisfied, you can have them take your needs survey. The needs that have low satisfaction ratings will give you a precise problem to solve that will increase the satisfaction of your customer and turn your detractors into promoters.

How to improve customer satisfaction
Now that we know the problem--the unmet needs in the job-to-be-done--how do we come up with a solution that will be good enough to turn our detractors into promoters?

The first step is to analyze the existing solutions in the market--not just your obvious competitors but any product, service, or manual process someone can use to get the job done. Instead of doing a feature to feature comparison between your products and your competition, you look at how long it takes to satisfy the unmet needs in the job and how accurately customers can do it with the existing solutions.

The speed and accuracy of satisfying the need with the existing solutions is the benchmark you need to beat with your new product or feature idea. If your new idea is not faster and/or more accurate than the benchmark, there is no reason for job executors to switch to your solution. Time to think of another idea.

Once you do have an idea to satisfy the need faster and more accurately, you can check-in with your customers at various intervals in your product development process--idea stage, prototype, post-release, etc. Ask them how satisfied they are with their ability to meet the targeted needs with this new feature. If they answer with more satisfaction than they did before seeing the new product or feature, then you are on your way to transforming the detractors to promoters.

NPS is a useful tool for tracking customer satisfaction. However, to take action against the results, it's extremely helpful to have a method like Jobs-to-be-Done to specify the cause of the dissatisfaction and create a plan to turn your detractors into promoters.


Posted by Jared Ranere , 0 comments

Marketing to Customer Needs and What Cicret Can Learn from Salesforce

identifying customer needs

If you haven't already, take a look at the Cicret Bracelet video. In just over two years, it has over 25 million views on YouTube. It's a water-resistant bracelet that projects your smartphone's screen onto your arm. Advertised as a "tablet for your skin," the not yet released Cicret Bracelet is clearly garnering attention.

But will people buy a Cicret once it's launched? In other words, will sales grow as fast as their YouTube views?

In order to answer such questions at thrv, we use Jobs-to-be-Done, a product innovation theory popularized by Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School. The key idea is, "Your customers aren't buying your product, they are hiring it to get a job done."

The question that leads to understanding Cicret's potential is, "What job would you hire the Cicret Bracelet to do?"




In order to sustain its growth, Cicret will need to take a lesson from Salesforce and expand beyond satisfying needs in a consumption job to getting their customers' functional jobs done better.

Wait! What are consumption jobs and functional jobs?
Consumption jobs are the tasks required to use a product.

For instance, to "consume" a smartphone, you have to:

  • Purchase it
  • Set it up
  • Learn to use it
  • Interface with it
  • Maintain it

These are all "consumption jobs." They are important, and companies have seen rapid growth by making progress against them. However, consuming a product is always in service to some larger goal a.k.a. "a functional job."


  • Acquire customers
  • Reach a destination on time
  • Sell a used car
  • Curate music
  • Enable secure data use
  • Restore artery blood flow

Markets exist because people need to execute functional jobs.



Salesforce is a great example of a company that went to market with a focus on serving needs in a consumption job. As the first cloud CRM, it didn't require an on-premise installation. Salesforce got the "install" consumption job done far better than its competitors.

On-premise software installations were slow and expensive. To "install" Salesforce, its customers just had to create an account on a web site. The Salesforce "installation" took minutes, blazingly fast in comparison to the days or weeks it took to install their competitors' software.

Salesforce made this advantage a central part of their marketing, calling for "the end of software" and making "no software" a key part of their logo.

In the process, Salesforce enjoyed hockey stick growth and invested the proceeds in getting the functional jobs ("acquire customers" and "retain customers") done better than their competitors by adding key functionality through product development and acquisitions.

Cicret can follow the Salesforce playbook by focusing its launch message on the needs in the "interface" consumption job, rather than its novel product features ("tablet for your skin"). If it works, they can follow-up on their early success by investing in satisfying unmet needs in the functional jobs.

How does knowing the job and needs help Cicret with marketing?
Philip Kotler, a marketing expert at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management says, "Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit."


What is a customer need? Do your colleagues at your company agree on your customers' needs?

Jobs-to-be-Done defines a need as "a metric customers use to judge how quickly and accurately they can execute a job." We structure each need with a direction, metric, and goal. To identify them, we interview people who are trying to execute the job, asking, "What's difficult, frustrating and time-consuming about executing the job?" This definition, structure, and method for identifying needs gives teams an unambiguous, measurable problem statement around which everyone can align.

What need does Cicret serve?
We can articulate the key need the Cicret Bracelet solves as:

"Reduce the likelihood that the conditions of your environment prevent you from using your phone."

This is a need in the consumption job "interface with a smartphone," and the Cicret Bracelet does it better than any other product so far.

The bath tub shot at the beginning of Cicret's video positions their product as serving this need. If the marketing continues in this vein, it could achieve high-growth at launch.


  • You're playing basketball and the phone is next to your gym bag. You're waiting on an important email, but instead of running over to your bag to check your phone, you can bring the screen up on your arm during downtime on the court.
  • Your cycling to an unfamiliar destination, which means you need the help of a navigation app. It's inconvenient and unsafe to pull out your phone, but the Cicret Bracelet allows you to glance down at your arm each time you need to check directions.
  • You've just arrived at a concert. You're looking for a friend, but it's crowded and you don't want to drop your phone on the ground when there's a human stampede around you. Simply text your friend right on your arm with the Cicret bracelet.


How does Cicret beat the competition?



Meanwhile, Cicret will need to keep their attention on Garmin and Apple as they develop fitness trackers and health apps that depend on smartwatches. This work leads the way to smartwatches getting functional jobs done. If Cicret fails to get functional jobs done better, instead of following Salesforce's path, they will fall far behind the competition.



Posted by Jared Ranere , 0 comments

How to Respond When Google Enters Your Market


Entrepreneurs and companies have been taking steps to solve the parking problem for some time now. There are many parking apps out there, yet no clear winner. It's still extraordinarily difficult to park in major cities. Drivers are frustrated. Any company that can make it fast and easy to find a parking spot is likely to grow very fast.


The parking difficulty icon is certainly a cool function on its own, but it's part of a much larger goal. To understand this larger goal, let's consider the parking difficulty function through the lens of the Jobs-to-be-Done Theory, which was popularized by Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School. Christensen says, "customers aren't buying your product, they are hiring it to get a job done."

What job would someone hire the parking icon to get done? Well, it helps drivers park a vehicle. But, why does anyone need to "park a vehicle?" Unless you're a valet or you live in a city with street cleaners requiring alternate side parking rules, you don't wake up in the morning thinking, "Gee, I have to park my car today!" The reason you park a vehicle is so you can go to your destination. So "park a vehicle" is a job step in this larger job: reach a destination on time.

With Google now making moves to address problems with parking, what can car-parking apps like SpotHero and Luxe do to stay successful? After all, if Google gets this job step done along with many of the other steps in the job, it won't be long before people stop using SpotHero and Luxe for parking because Google is getting the whole job done for them.


Know The Competitive Landscape
Using Jobs Theory, we can define the market based on the customer's job-to-be-done, which is "reach a destination on time." Reaching a destination on time is a functional job, meaning that it is a key goal or task that people need to accomplish in their personal or professional lives. The market for the job of reaching a destination on time exists because many people need to execute this functional job frequently. The company that gets this job done better for customers will win the market.

We also know that "park the vehicle" is just one of the job steps in the job of getting to a destination on time. At thrv, we've identified 16 total steps in for the job of drivers reaching a destination on time:


Obviously, this broadens the competitive landscape. It's crucial for companies like SpotHero and Luxe to see and address this risk. Because bigger companies that are fulfilling other job steps may come in and start fulfilling their job step as well (i.e. Google), which could put them out of business.



How Google Maps Extended Their Lead

With Maps, one of the world's most used apps, Google is already tackling other steps in the job of reaching a destination on time, such as:




And Waymo, Google's self-driving car, eliminates at least these three steps:

Considering everything Google is doing to complete the job of a reaching a destination on time, it's clear the company has a lead. The launch of its parking difficulty icon puts them even further ahead of competitors. No other solution completes the job better than Google's overall ecosystem.

Ask The Right Questions




Are you working on a job step that much bigger companies will target soon because they're already fulfilling other steps in the job?




Improve and Expand on the Existing Job Step

The key to doing this lies in recognizing and solving customer needs. If you don't define and identify these customer needs, then you are guessing about what they want. A customer need is a metric customers use to judge how quickly and accurately they can execute a job-to-be-done. For reaching a destination on time, there are lots of needs that must be satisfied.

For instance, let's look at job step 15, "park the vehicle." For this step, we've identified 11 needs. Satisfying more needs for this parking job step will help parking apps grow profits with less risk. These needs are:



Solving more needs of the parking job step quickly and accurately could allow you to have sustained success. It could also set you up for acquisition by a big company. For example, Waze served the need of "reduce the time it takes to determine if an alternate route should be taken to save time due to unexpected travel conditions" within the job step "reset the route as needed" so well that Google decided to purchase the map app for $1.2 billion in 2013.


Get More Job Steps Done

  2. Use existing assets to tackle other jobs. While working on parking, a company may have developed other technology or operational assets that can get steps in other jobs done. For example, Uber is using its assets to tackle the job "get something to eat" with UberEats. This job is adjacent to their primary focus.


Final Advice
Doing just one job step that in a larger job may not be sustainable. Your competition will likely threaten you from many angles--the other job steps in the job. But, remember there are three moves you can make to stay ahead:





Posted by Jared Ranere , 0 comments

8 Signs You Need a Product Development Framework

8 signs you need a product framework


But, a company can also be dragged down by a lack of clarity: about decision-making, goals, and what's causing goals to be missed. This condition can cause a downward spiral of guesses, failures, frustration, and a lack of trust that leads to more guessing and so on.

Here are eight signs that your company is on the verge of a downward spiral and tips on how a strong product development framework, such as Jobs-to-be-Done, can rescue you.

Sign 1: Missing Revenue and Profit Growth Goals
When your company is failing to hit its growth goals, be it revenue or profits, it puts strain on every team.

Revenue problems put stress on the sales team first. If only they could sell better, the company will earn more money.


Sign 2: Disagreement on Customer Needs
To get growth back on track, the product team needs to ensure that their product is satisfying customer needs better than the competition. This raises an important question: What is a customer need?





Sign 3: Road maps Prioritized by Fierce Debate and Negotiation

product framework



Under the stress of such an environment, you may resort to answering easy questions, "Do I like how this feature looks?" or "Will I feel better if I give my colleague her way and get this meeting over with?" rather than the most important question, "Will this roadmap satisfy customer needs better than the competition?"

Sign 4: The HiPPO Rules
The HiPPO is the "Highest Paid Person's Opinion." It's a fast way to decide what should be on the road map, but is it the best path to growth?


But, in larger companies, the highest paid person may be far removed from the customer's problem or perhaps has never experienced it. Her primary activity could be managing people and nowhere in the job description did it say, "Must have experienced our customer's problem." If that's the case, what she likes and doesn't like could be wildly different from what's useful to the customer.

Sign 5: Shiny New Object Syndrome Leads to The Disposable Road Map

Do you let the shiny new objects steal your focus and cause you to throw out your road map? Or do you have a clear criteria for whether to adopt new capabilities or discard them as mere distractions?

Maintaining agility with your product road map is a virtue, but it has limits. If you find your road map is ripped up so often that you never finish a feature or you're constantly releasing half-baked features that never get their planned iteration cycles, you've got a problem.


Chasing the shiny new objects and constantly changing the road map are indicators that your team disagrees on what the customer needs are. You're likely using the proxies mentioned above (sales requests, new tech, etc) to determine what to build and as they change, your road map changes.

Sign 6: Launches Met with Crickets

product framework
You know when you put something out there, loud and proud, and all you get in response back is...crickets?



Sign 7: Feuding Product and Marketing Teams



If this sounds like a familiar pattern, you have a communication breakdown between your product and marketing teams that a framework can help solve.

Sign 8: Reinventing The Decision-Making Wheel
Last week you presented a deck with designs your stakeholders loved. Two weeks ago you assessed the impact of a new idea on your team's KPIs. Three weeks ago the executives were compelled by the user problem and approved your plan.

To prepare for the next defense of your road map, you've been meeting individually with various stakeholders, trying to determine what's on their minds.


The Solution

The key idea behind Jobs-to-be-Done, a framework based on the theory of the same namepopularized Clayton Christensen, is that your customers are not actually buying your product, they are hiring it to get a job done. This is important because your customer's struggle with the job is what causes them to look for a product and make purchase.







When you adopt Jobs-to-be-Done at your company, decision-making meetings can get pretty boring. The criteria is almost always "does the proposition on the table satisfy the targeted customer need in the job better than the competition?" You may have an interesting conversation about what you can do to have an even better idea, but the criteria remain the same.

If you've seen one or more of the above signs at your company, you're not alone. Many teams have experienced these problems. Fortunately, there is a solution. Find a framework that works for you. And contact us at thrv.

Posted by Jared Ranere , 0 comments

YP & Yahoo! Executive Melissa Burghardt Joins thrv

thrv, LLC (thrv.com), the first and only jobs-to-be-done product management software, today announced that Melissa Burghardt has joined the company as a Growth Partner. For thrv's customers, Melissa brings 20 years of experience driving products & strategy at companies including YP, OpenX, and Yahoo!.

As a Growth Partner, Melissa will partner with businesses in applying Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory in thrv's software. "I am thrilled to join the thrv team to help businesses accelerate their revenue and profitability growth by leveraging jobs-to-be-done," said Melissa. "Having partnered with thrv as a customer, I was really impressed with the team, as well thrv's methodology and unique software for applying JTBD. I saw first-hand how a product team can use thrv to bring JTBD to life within their own organizations."

"We are extremely excited to have an executive as experienced and intelligent as Melissa join the thrv team," said Jay Haynes, CEO and founder of thrv.


About Melissa: Prior to thrv, Melissa was responsible for YP's Advertising products for local businesses, including product strategy, product management, product marketing, analytics and yield management. Prior to YP, Melissa was Vice President of Partner Services at OpenX where she was responsible for the company's US publisher relationships. Before that, Melissa spent almost 10 years at Yahoo! in a variety of leadership roles in the US and in Europe. Previous to Yahoo!, Melissa worked in Silicon Valley gaining entrepreneurial experience at a data storage systems start-up and at the management consulting firm Mitchell Madison Group. Melissa holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

About thrv: thrv, LLC (thrv.com) is the first and only product management software for enterprises based on the jobs-to-be-done method. thrv provides training, services, and software to companies looking to implement the jobs-to-be-done method in order to accelerate their revenue and profitability growth. thrv's software transforms product management into a customer-centric and metric-driven practice.

About Jobs-To-Be-Done: Jobs-to-be-done (also known as Jobs Theory and JTBD) is a framework popularized by Harvard Business School Professor Clay Christensen based off the concept that customers are not "buying" products, they are "hiring" products to get a job done. As a result, companies and product teams can use JTBD to focus on how customers struggle to get a job done, and design products and services accordingly.


Posted by Jay Haynes , 0 comments

Pitch Like a Startup to Win Budget at Your Big Company

Many people think that only entrepreneurs need to pitch investors and raise money, but the same process is happening every day in big companies. Boards, executives, and stakeholders are trying to determine how to allocate funds just like venture capital firms and angels. As a product manager or department head in an enterprise, you need budget to fund your projects and ideas. Just like an entrepreneur, you need to craft a compelling story that demonstrates your project will generate more money than is put into it.

But what makes a good pitch?

Our Product Pitch Cheat Sheet shows you.

We've combined top venture capital firm Sequoia Capital's Writing a Business Plan--the outline of the story they need to hear to invest--and the Jobs-to-be-Done product development method to generate a clear and concise guide to pitching a product idea.

Sequoia's outline tells you what to cover, and Jobs-to-be-Done helps you answer the key questions that will give you confidence in your material, such as:

  • How do you know your problem is worth solving?
  • How do you know your solution is good enough?
  • Is your market big enough?

Whether you're trying to find budget to launch a new product or initiative, get more resources for your team, or confirm for yourself that your project is worth pursuing, Jobs-to-be-Done can quantify the justification you need to win investment.

After the cheat sheet, you'll find Sequoia's outline with the JTBD guidance under each point. If you'd like to learn how to do all of this yourself in detail, don't hesitate to contact us.

how to pitch with jobs-to-be-done


1. State the Company Purpose
As Clay Christensen says, "your customers aren't buying your product, they are hiring it to get a job done." A "job" is an important goal that a person is trying to achieve in their personal or professional life, such as "reach a destination on time," "acquire a customer," or "overcome diabetes to achieve optimal health."

The struggle people feel in attempting to get their job done is what causes them to look for a new solution--a product to hire. We call people who are trying to get a job done "job executors." If your company gets the job done for the job executors, they will use your product.

A direct and simple way to state your company's purpose is to say what job you are getting done for which job executor.

Here are a few examples:

jobs to be done job executor and purpose statement

Try to make your articulation compelling and, as Sequoia says, "declarative." The job, the job executors and the key struggle should be very clear.

If you have chosen a job that has a lot of job executors trying to accomplish it frequently and the job is famously difficult to do well, it should be immediately clear that when your company achieves its purpose, it will create enormous value.

Finally, remember that your product is not part of your purpose. For example, if you're trying to help small businesses acquire customers, your purpose should not be to "build the fastest, easiest-to-use CRM." Small businesses don't want lightweight CRMs any more than they wanted advertisements in print directories. What they want is to get a job done, so express your purpose in terms that reflect helping people overcome the stress and anxiety associated with getting a job done.

2. State the Problem
Your customer's problem is that their job is complex and difficult to execute quickly and accurately. It could even require the use of multiple solutions.

How do you know if the pain is severe enough that people are looking for a new product to relieve it? Jobs-to-be-Done helps you quantify the pain and gives you a benchmark to know if the problem is worth solving.

The key is identifying the unmet needs. In Jobs-to-be-Done, we define customer needs as "the metrics customers use to judge how well the job is going." The metrics we use are speed and accuracy. If the job is slow and inaccurate, the customer will want a new solution.

You can interview job executors to find out what's frustrating and time-consuming about executing the job. Then, you can survey a statistically significant sample of job executors to determine which needs are the most important and least satisfied. These are your customers' unmet needs.

The unmet needs are the precise articulation of the customer's struggle to get the job done. Since a job is a key goal in a person's personal or professional life (i.e. they need to execute the job frequently and they derive value from doing it well), the unmet needs are problems worth solving--they have great value.

It's rare, but there are times when there are no unmet needs in a job. This means you don't have a problem worth solving. Often this is because you came up with your idea for a solution first and it's for a job that is over-served (the job is important but perfectly well satisfied in the market). This is a problem that's not worth attempting to solve, as no one is looking for a new solution.

But once you've found a collection of unmet needs, you have the problem you need to start a business. In your pitch you can say, "[job executors] are struggling to [job-to-be-done]." Then, you can state the key unmet need(s) you uncovered in the market and intend to serve with your product.

For example, if you were pitching Waze, here's how you could state the problem:

jtbd unmet needs

In this problem statement, the job executors are "drivers," the job is "reach a destination on time," and the unmet need is "reduce the time it takes to determine if you should take an alternate route due to traffic conditions."

Anyone who drove a car before Waze has felt this problem, which means if you state it well, it should resonate. More importantly, if you have executed Jobs-to-be-Done, you will have data to back up your statement. You will be able to show that this unmet need is worth attempting to solve.

3. Show the Solution
When presenting the solution, Sequoia says to "demonstrate your company's value proposition to make the customer's life better." In other words, how is your solution going to serve the job executors' unmet needs in the job and how do you know it will do it well enough for customers to switch to your solution from whatever they're doing today?

Using Jobs-to-be-Done, you can measure the value of your solution. Customer needs are all metrics of speed and accuracy. Consider how long it takes to meet your targeted needs and compare that time to the existing solutions. The closer your product gets to making the job automatic and extremely accurate, the more customer value you are adding.

Instead of talking about the features of your product, frame the discussion of your solution by how quickly and accurately it meets the needs in the job. For example, if the job is overcome diabetes to achieve optimal health and you're targeting unmet needs around reducing the time it takes to determine costs, benefits and risks of available options for the patient, then demonstrate how quickly your product enables patients to meet these needs.

4. Why now
Sequoia recommends setting up the "historical evolution of your category" and then defining "recent trends that make your solution possible."

Combining this with Jobs Theory, this becomes "What has changed that enables you to get your customers' job done better?"

Consider the following examples:

In the examples above, new technologies and changing regulatory environments enabled new and better ways to get the jobs done. If you look further back in history, we see that this has always been true. Think about those people that have solved a job for a large, underserved market at the right time. Some legendary examples include:

  • Karl Benz: The potential of gasoline had just started being explored; people (and things) needed a way to get from point A to point B faster.
  • Frank McNamara (the credit card): Consumer confidence in post-WWII America was rising; people needed to reduce the likelihood that not having cash on hand prevented them from buying what they needed.
  • Jeff Bezos: In 1994, internet usage was growing by 2,300% per month and was an excellent foundation for serving the needs in the job "purchase a product" better than the existing solution of stores and mail order catalogues, which gave birth to Amazon.

During your pitch, be sure to identify recent trends that show why now is the time for your product or service. The people above tackled age-old jobs by capitalizing on technological advancements that made solving those jobs easier and faster.

5. Market size
Don Valentine, Sequoia's founder, has always stressed the importance of the market: "We have always focused on the market--the size of the market, the dynamics of the market, the nature of the competition--because our objective always was to build big companies."

When companies flounder, it's because they try to define the market based on product ideas rather than market needs. Then, they invest too much in the manifestation of their assumptions: their unwanted products. This is a gamble (and almost always a mistake), as it assumes there will be a line of customers waiting to use that product simply because it exists.

Before you take your product to investors, Sequoia says to calculate market size. But how do you do it? You have to carry out research to see how many people need to complete the main or related jobs your product completes. Remember: the job-to-be-done is the market—not the product.

This is why the traditional ways of examining a market are flawed. These include the following:

  • Total Addressable Market (TAM): All units sold in a product category multiplied by the price per unit.
    Served Available Market (SAM): Units sold of a specific product type multiplied by the price per unit.
    Share of Market (SOM): Percentage of customers buying a certain company's products.

These are product-based ways to calculate market size. Jobs Theory teaches you that the target market is the job executors and a job-to-be-done.

As an example, consider the Microsoft Zune, which was an answer to the iPod. Using traditional ways of analyzing market size, Microsoft measured the iPod market, which, at the time, was in the billions of dollars (e.g. 200 million iPods sold x $150 per unit = $30 billion market). But in 2007, the iPhone and Pandora launched, getting the job of curating music done more effectively, and the the iPod market quickly dipped to $0.

Microsoft made the mistake of defining the market based on the product. The market vanished because it was defined by a product. This left Microsoft trying to grab a market share of what was essentially nothing.

Instead, with Jobs-to-be-Done, the market size should be defined based on the customer's willingness to pay to get the job done (regardless of the products currently in the market). To size the market into an accurate dollar amount, survey customers in the market to find out how much they are willing to pay to get the job done more accurately, efficiently, and/or conveniently. The resulting number is termed the securable market—the revenue you can generate by enabling customers to get a job done better.

6. Competition
As Sequoia says, it's "better to identify all the competitors than have the investors discover them afterwards." How do you capture a comprehensive list that is meaningful? Which products are worth including and how do you analyze them to show that your solution can beat them?

The competition is not just similar products. It is any existing solution--a product, service, or manual process--that the job executors use to get the job done today. This view generates a much broader list and a more comprehensive understanding of what your product needs to beat.

You can show how you will beat them by eschewing the traditional feature-to-feature comparison and instead looking at how well the competition serves the needs in the job. Your customers don’t want more features, they want to get the job done, so showing that your product has more features does not demonstrate that people will adopt it.

Let's look at the Nest learning thermostat as an example.

A typical list of competition would include other thermostat companies such as Honeywell and Emerson. The first version of the Nest didn't include all of the features of the Honeywell programmable thermostat and it was far more expensive, so how could you have shown that it would succeed?

First, identify the customer's job by asking, "What job is the customer hiring this product to get done?" In this case, it's to "achieve comfort in the home."

Next look at the needs in the job. One need is "reduce the likelihood of the home being cold when you return to it." How quickly and accurately does a programmable thermostat serve this need? Programming the thermostat takes minutes. The schedule is rigid, so if you get home early one day and forget to turn the thermostat up, you will be cold. The time it takes is minutes and the accuracy is low. The Nest improved upon this need by controlling the thermostat based on your location. It doesn't require programming so it meets the need faster. It's more accurate because it will turn on the heat automatically when you are home.

By showing how much faster and more accurately your product meets the needs in the job, you can show that you will beat the competition.

7. Product
Sequoia recommends you provide a product development roadmap covering functionality, features, architecture, intellectual property, form factor, etc.

Whether your product is far enough along to show a demo or all you have is a road map of your future, be sure to focus this section of your pitch on the unmet needs. It'll frame your story, giving your feature set meaning and showing why customers would switch to your product.

It's critical to demonstrate how early versions of your product will serve unmet needs better than the competition. Otherwise, your audience will question why and how you will get early adoption.

In your roadmap, you can show how even though your product only gets a few needs in the job done today, over time it'll expand to get the whole job done (and potentially expand to adjacent jobs), creating more value for the customer and a competitive moat.

8. Business model
Sequoia's outline recommends discussing your revenue model, product pricing, average value of a customer, sales and distribution model, and customer pipeline list. Here, you must make clear who is willing to pay (and how much).

The examples of Airbnb and Facebook show how viewing your business through the lens of Jobs Theory can help you construct a sound revenue model.

Airbnb generates revenue from the job executors of the two primary jobs the product set out to serve from day one:

1. Travelers finding lodging

2. Residents providing short-term rentals

Airbnb charges a fee on the transaction because the job executors have a willingness to pay to get these jobs done.

Facebook doesn't make money off the primary jobs it originally helped its users complete: students getting to know their classmates and staying in touch with friends and family. Instead, the mountains of user data Facebook collects created an asset to get another job done: businesses acquiring customers. The willingness to pay for this second job done is very high.

When conceiving your revenue model, first research the willingness to pay for the primary job your product gets done. If the job executors are not willing to pay for it, consider whether or getting the primary job done creates an asset that can be deployed to getting an adjacent job done where the job executors have a high willingness to pay.

Final Advice
Jobs-to-be-Done not only provides a rigorous foundation for your pitch, but it also provides a framework for you to determine if your idea is worth pursuing or to find a new idea worth pursuing. However, just because you've learned the language of Jobs, Job Executors, and Unmet Needs does not mean the audience for your pitch (company stakeholders, your company's board, potential investors) knows this language. Abstract your story from the theory to drive your points home. No one needs to know what a job or a job executor is to understand that drivers struggle to reach a destination on time. Use the theory to do your homework and then tell your story in plain English.


Posted by Jared Ranere , 0 comments

How Apple Can Return to Explosive Growth

apple growth



















Apple must focus on the right innovations



apple growth

First, consider the Apple Watch:

  • It looks stylish.
  • It tells the time.
  • It offers faster access to notifications.




  • It manages medical conditions.
  • It shares health information with doctors.
  • It includes sections for treatment plans and updates.




Apple will stay atop the throne








Posted by Jay Haynes , 1 comment

7 Steps to Improve Annual Planning with Jobs-to-be-Done

Serious group of businesspeople having problems at work.

It's the heart of Q4. Product Managers across the land are getting requests for next year's road map as part of a company-wide "annual planning process."

Some of you have talked your way out of an annual plan, "Why bother planning for more than a quarter? Every year I've been here, we've changed everything after 2 months."

Whether you're planning for the next quarter or the next year, you're still on the hook for a plan. The pessimists among us wonder how they can reach an acceptable deliverable with minimal effort. The optimists have hope. Maybe this year we can make a plan that doesn't get overhauled before we finish the first step.

Why do product road maps change so much?

Because the inputs typically used to make a road map--customer feature requests, sales team requests, stakeholder requests, new technologies--never stop changing.

But, your customer's job-to-be-done (the goal or task that causes them to use your product) and the needs within the job do not change. You can use them as the basis for annual planning and vastly improve the stability and reliability of your road map.

Here are 7 steps to using the Jobs-to-be-Done product development method to create an annual plan that holds up throughout the year, delivers on the intended results, and satisfies customer needs better than the competition.

Step 1: Prioritize unmet customer needs
Customer Needs are the metrics customers use to judge how well the job gets done. A need is "unmet" if customers think it is important but not satisfied. Using a survey, you can assign importance and satisfaction scores to each customer need.

Here's an example of a Customer Need:

When creating a mood with music (the job-to-be-done), you need to reduce the likelihood that the criteria for the playlist is too stringent e.g. the songs are too similar or no songs fit the criteria (the Customer Need).

In the job of create a mood with music, there are approximately 100 Needs.

The first step in annual planning is to prioritize the needs by the difference between importance and satisfaction scores--the bigger the difference, the higher the priority. A large difference indicates a large portion of the market is struggling to meet the need.

The result of this prioritization is a ranked list of problems to solve throughout the coming year and strong evidence that solving them will matter a great deal to your users. This list is the cornerstone of your plan.

Step 2: Analyze the competition and generate feature ideas to serve the unmet needs
Now that you have a list of problems (unmet customer needs) your team will tackle, it's time to fill out your plan with solutions.

Look at how quickly and accurately existing solutions (i.e. the competition) meet your prioritized customer needs.

Remember our example:

When creating a mood with music, you need to reduce the likelihood that the criteria for the playlist is too stringent e.g. the songs are too similar or no songs fit the criteria.

If you've ever picked just one band to start a playlist on Pandora, you might find that the criteria is indeed too stringent and all the songs on the list are very similar. The accuracy with which Pandora meets this need is rather low.

This analysis provides the benchmark for your new ideas.

You're looking to think up features that serve the unmet needs faster and more accurately than the competition. They will lead to people hiring your product to get their job done.

To generate ideas, gather a small, diverse group of colleagues from design, engineering, marketing, etc. Write a prioritized need on the board, and ask, "What can we do to serve this need?"

Compare each suggestion to the benchmark: existing features and the competition. If the idea will not meet the need faster and more accurately, toss it.

Keep a list of the ideas that do meet the need faster and more accurately. They will likely have varying degrees of difficulty, but you'll deal with that later with cost estimates.

Think back to when Songza (now Google Music) launched playlists that were hand-curated by music experts. This idea served our example need much more accurately than Pandora. It's an idea that would meet the criteria for "good" in a jobs-to-be-done idea generation session.

Step 3: Estimate new satisfaction scores
For each idea that met the above criteria and got on the list, estimate what the new satisfaction score would be if you surveyed your customers again, after they have been using this new feature. It's a judgement of how much faster and more accurate the new feature will be.

If the existing solutions take days and your new feature only takes minutes and improves accuracy, you can imagine that satisfaction will increase quite a bit. If your new feature is only 1 second faster and the same level of accuracy, you should estimate a rather small increase in satisfaction.

Step 4: Estimate the cost of each feature
Your goal is to satisfy customer needs profitably so before you can prioritize which solutions to build first, you need a cost estimate. This is the one step that is likely not very different from what you do today. Talk with your builders--designers, engineers, etc.--and estimate the resources and time required to build the feature.

Step 5: Prioritize feature ideas by value
Feature value is a function of two factors:

  1. How many more customers will be satisfied with their ability to meet the need with the new feature
  2. How much the new feature contributes to improving the customer’s struggle to get the whole job done.

The first factor can be estimated using the new satisfaction score assigned in Step 3.

The second factor matters because your customers are not just trying to meet one need, they are trying to get the whole job done. If you've done the full research and collected all of the customer needs in the job (usually there are around 100), you'll be able to see what portion of the job you are improving by meeting one or multiple needs with a given feature.

You can use these two factors to calculate the value of each feature idea. It gets a little complex, so get in touch if you want to know exactly how to do it.

After calculating the value of each feature, stack rank your list of feature ideas, putting those with the highest value and lowest cost at the top.

Step 6: Present to stakeholders
Road map presentations to stakeholders are often the most feared meetings of the year.

Product Managers have spent time with each stakeholder, understanding their goals, and collecting feature ideas from them. They've discussed feature requests from customers and salespeople as well as new tech that has come on the scene.

Based on estimated impact upon KPIs and cost estimates, this long list of ideas is prioritized and presented.

The stakeholders look for their ideas and fight for them. Fierce debate ensues. Passionate speeches are given. Horse trades are made.

Hours later, the team emerges from the room, exhausted and demoralized, but the road map is finalized! Everyone is getting something and no one is getting everything.

Those who think they got the raw end of the deal are onto their next mission--destroy that road map on which none of "their" features got prioritized.

Who wants to go through that every year or quarter?

A Jobs-to-be-Done roadmap presentation is very different. Here's an agenda:

  • Remind the stakeholders of the job your customers are trying to get done.
  • Show the unmet needs, backed by qualitative and quantitative research.
  • Unveil the plan--a set of solutions to your customer's most important and least satisfied needs.
  • Demonstrate your calculation for how getting more of the job done generates customer value, drives the willingness to pay and usage of the product i.e. meets business goals.
  • When someone offers a new idea that isn't on the road map, evaluate it--does it meet a high priority need? Does it do it faster and more accurately than our existing ideas? Is the cost lower?

Because you've gone through the Jobs-to-be-Done planning process, you have objective criteria for judging ideas, reducing the need for debate and mitigating the risk of building the wrong product. Since the criteria is driven by your customers instead of your colleagues, it's very difficult to argue against. Is there someone on your team who does not want to satisfy customer needs?

Step 7: Assess new ideas against prioritized needs
Plans fall apart when new information arises that undercuts the premise on which the plan was built. If the premise relies on ever-changing customer feature requests, sales requests, new technology, and stakeholder ideas, it's easy to see why the plan would also constantly need to change.

When plans are built on stable customer needs, the constant flow of new data does not alter the premise and so the plan does not need to continuously change.

Instead you have a simple way to evaluate each request, each new technology, each new idea:

"Does this meet the prioritized needs better than our existing ideas and for similar or less cost?"

If no, you don't change the plan at all. If yes, you don't need to "pivot" or rip up the whole plan. You simply refine your existing plan--solve this list of customer problems--by swapping in a new solution for an old one.

The end of the year can be painful and frustrating if you don't have a clear planning process that aligns your company and leads to a stable, reliable road map. I hope you find these tips for using Jobs-to-be-Done to be helpful with your annual planning.

Don't hesitate to reach out with questions so we can help you go into the holiday season with confidence and have a prosperous new year!


Posted by Jared Ranere , 0 comments

[video] thrv CEO on Building High-Growth Products with Jobs-to-be-Done at Product Tank SF

Jay Haynes, thrv's CEO, gave a talk on Building High-Growth Products with Jobs-to-be-Done at Product Tank SF, the San Francisco Meetup for Mind The Product. Below is the video of the talk.

Watch for the moment when Jay asks, "How many people work on teams where everybody agrees on what a customer need is?" Nobody raises a hand. So, if you've ever felt this way, you are not alone. But, as Jay explains in the video, there is a solution for clearly defining customer needs using the job-to-be-done.


Posted by Jared Ranere , 0 comments

A Step-By-Step Guide to Using Clay Christensen’s Competing Against Luck and Jobs Theory to Launch Great Products, Part 2: Answering The Right Question


This is Part 2 of two-part series explaining thrv's process for executing Jobs Theory. Part 1 is about customer research you can do to define the right question that will drive your product development. This part is about answering that question.

If you've read Part 1 of this series, you know about the first 5 steps to executing Jobs Theory:

  1. Define your customer's jobs: functional, emotional, and consumption
  2. Identify all of the unmet needs in your customer's jobs
  3. Find the unmet needs
  4. Segment your customers
  5. Identify competitor weaknesses

This work leads to defining your question:

What can you do to serve your customer's unmet needs in the job better than the existing solutions?

The next step is to generate great product ideas that answer this question.

Step 6: Generate Ideas
You might have noticed something: in all the steps so far we haven't had any ideas. The traditional innovation process usually starts with product or solution ideas. An ideas-first process is fundamentally flawed because the goal of innovation is not to generate more ideas, it is to satisfy customer needs better than the existing solutions. Jobs Theory enables you to build a needs-first innovation process.

When I was a product manager at Microsoft in the 1990s, we had a "brainstorming" room where our team would go to spitball new ideas. Anything went. As you probably know, the only rule in brainstorming is "there are no bad ideas." This was (and is) absurd. There is a nearly infinite supply of bad ideas.

When executing Jobs Theory, you don't need to "brainstorm" because you have clear criteria to judge product ideas: the unmet customer needs in the job.

When you get your team together to generate ideas, start by writing an unmet need on the whiteboard. Then, ask the room: "What can we do to serve this need?"

It's still helpful for your team to think out of the box--perhaps your product is a website but a chatbot would serve the need much faster--but now, because you are answering a specific, measurable question, you know whether to keep the idea or move on.

If surgeons were your customers and you wanted to help them "restore artery blood flow," you'd ask about the unmet need, "Does the idea help surgeons reduce the likelihood of restenosis?"

If drivers were your customer and you wanted to help them "get to a destination on time," you'd ask "Does the idea help drivers reduce the time it takes to determine if an alternative route should be taken?"

If the ideas don't satisfy the needs, quickly move onto the next idea. If they do meet the needs, keep them on the list.

Push the team to build on the ideas and achieve step function improvements over the existing solutions. Don't let them be boxed in by the limitations of your existing product. The sky is the limit. Later, you can plan your roadmap to get there, step-by-step.

Now that you have a list of ideas that serve the unmet customer need, measure how well they do it--how much they improve the probability of achieving the goal as stated in the need.

Stack rank the ideas based on how much more reliably or faster they meet the needs than the existing solutions. If you see an idea that produces a step function improvement--reduces the time from days to hours, minutes to seconds, etc.--you may be sitting on a gold mine.

Jobs theory enables more efficient, precise, and relevant idea generation. Not only can you ensure all the ideas are relevant, but you can see if they are good enough.

Step 7: Price your product.
Pricing typically uses a combination of inputs, including the cost to make the product (or deliver the service), perceived value, and the price of substitute products in the market. Using this last input can be a fatal mistake for both pricing and market sizing.

To know why, you need to understand a pitfall of traditional market sizing: products and technologies come and go.

Traditional market sizing is based on variations of the following equation: the market = product price * the number of units sold. For example, in 2007 the iPod market was huge ($150 * 200 million iPods sold = $30 billion). Microsoft thought this was a big market and launched the Zune, an iPod competitor.

This is what the iPod market looked like at the end of 2011.


The "market" (defined by a product) went away, which means that Microsoft was looking to take a share of virtually nothing. But, of course, the true market, the customer's job-to-be-done, didn't go away. The iPod may have gone away, but people didn't stop executing the job.

Jobs Theory's definition of a market explains what happened.

There is no such thing as the "iPod" market. Customers don't want iPods anymore than they want records, cassettes, or CDs. What they want is to get a job done, i.e. create a mood with music.

"Price * units sold" is a flawed definition of a market because it can disappear from right under your feet. Defining the market based on the customer's job-to-be-done is much more helpful because the job will exist forever and therefore, the market will too.

To execute market sizing with Jobs Theory, you can look at the willingness to pay to get the job done. Willingness to pay can be measured by asking job executors (and if necessary purchase decision makers) how much it is worth to them to get the job done perfectly. The resulting data can be plotted (from high to low) on a line against the number of job executors. We call this a "need curve."

The area under the curve is the total market size. It will also identify the prices that will place your product at the high end of the market, the low end, or somewhere in between.

In Competing Against Luck, Clay Christensen says, "The reason why we are willing to pay premium prices for a product that nails the job is because the full cost of a product that fails to do the job -- wasted time, frustration, spending money on poor situations, and so on -- is significant to us."

By looking at the willingness to pay to get the job done, you can price your product to target the part of the market that will be the most profitable, and you can measure how lucrative that market will be over time, without the risk of it going away.

Step 8: Create messaging and positioning.
Positioning a product in a market and creating messaging that will resonate with customers is quicker and easier using the job-to-be-done and its customer needs.

When messaging misses the mark, it is usually because the message is focused on the product and its features. For example, Magellan messaged to potential customers that its RoadMate product has a "Wide-Angle Lens" and a "G-shock Sensor," both sophisticated technologies.

But how does a Wide-Angle Lens or a G-shock Sensor help a driver get to a destination on time? What need is it satisfying? If messaging describes the product features or technology, the customer has to figure out on their own how (and if) the features help them get the job done better.

Messaging based on satisfying the job-to-be-done is easier for customers to understand. And because the needs in the job-to-be-done are prioritized based on importance and satisfaction, you can create messages based on the most underserved customer needs in your market.

Step 9: Plan your roadmap.

"Jobs Theory enables innovators to make the myriad, detailed tradeoffs in terms of which benefits are essential and which are extraneous to a new offering."

--Clay Christensen, Competing Against Luck

The unmet needs in the job-to-be-done are your basis for making smart tradeoffs. Each job typically has about 100 customer needs. You can prioritize the needs by calculating the difference between the importance and satisfaction scores. The needs with higher importance and lower satisfaction are top priority. When you're choosing which product features to build now and which to postpone--making tradeoffs--you choose the features that meet the top priority needs.

The same mindset can be used to plan your road map. A great road map will balance cost, today's impact, and tomorrow's promise. During your idea generation, you may have come up with some brilliant ideas that will take a long time to build or be very expensive to execute. This doesn't mean you should ditch them. You just need to figure out how to increment your way to the brilliant idea while meeting customer needs better and better along the way.

This is step 1 of your road map planning: Determine the incremental improvements that will take you from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow, getting the whole job done faster and more reliably than the existing solutions. Step 2 is to determine which of those incremental improvements to tackle first. The criteria for this prioritization is the extent to which the improvements serve unmet needs. You prioritize the work that tackles the most important and least satisfied needs.

Without good customer metrics, such as needs in the job-to-be-done, companies often prioritize their roadmap based on a flimsy projection of business impact, the charisma of people lobbying for the features they like, and the "HiPPO" (the Highest Paid Person's Opinion). All of these methods are subjective and/or based on unreliable premises.

Your product roadmap (and your tradeoffs) should not be prioritized by your team. They should be prioritized by your customer's unmet needs in the job.

Step 10: Mitigate your risk.
Understanding what causes a customer to purchase ("hire") a product can help you mitigate product development risk.

Competing Against Luck points out, "In 2015... one thousand publicly held companies spent $680 billion on research and development alone." And yet, "Most people would agree that the vast majority of innovations fall far short of ambitions, a fact that has remained unchanged for decades."

Once a product enters development, companies spend an enormous amount of capital, time, and resources on building, marketing, and selling the product. Jobs theory can help you avoid product failure and ensure the roadmap will generate the revenue and profit growth needed to justify the investment.

Failure occurs when a product does not create customer value in a market. What is "customer value?"

Customer value is a measure of the difference of customer satisfaction with getting the job done between your solution and the existing solutions. Since the goal is to satisfy customer needs and needs are metrics related to speed and accuracy, you can compare the speed and accuracy of getting the job done with your solution vs. a competitive solution. That difference is the customer value you've created.


Market opportunities exist because a person is struggling to get the functional job done. Improving the speed and accuracy of getting the job done reduces struggle and anxiety, which increases customer satisfaction and the likelihood they will hire your product.

This means you can measure the value of an idea even before you build it. Consider how much faster and more accurately your idea will meet the needs in the job if your idea is executed perfectly. Compare that to the baseline--the current satisfaction levels with each need in the job. You now know if the idea adds value to the market, so you've mitigated the risk of your idea. You still have execution risk, but your situation is a lot better than the risk of executing perfectly on an idea that does not add value in your market.

Step 11: Accelerate your growth.
Steps 1 through 10 are all the preparation steps to launching your product and accelerating your revenue growth. Jobs theory gives you a different lens through which to view your market, your customer, and your competition. It gives you powerful, metric-driven, customer-centric techniques to identify unmet needs and competitor weaknesses. And it gives you the tools to generate great product ideas that customers will pay for and to create messages that will resonate with customers.

Jobs theory is not easy to practice, but it is extremely effective if you make the organizational changes required to execute it well. As Clay writes, "Organizations typically structure themselves around function or business unit or geography -- but successful growth companies optimized around the job. Competitive advantage is conferred through an organization's unique processes: the ways it integrates across functions to perform the customer's job."

If you are interested in learning more about jobs-to-be-done techniques that you can use at your company, feel free to contact me directly.

Posted by Jay Haynes , 0 comments

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