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Video 1: The Importance of Jobs to Be Done

Clay Christensen: There is a theory about causality in innovation that's called the
job theory. It allows us to predict in advance whether customers are going to
buy our product or not.

Doug Davidoff: Whatever it is that you sell, I bet that today, something
happened to somebody that's going to cause them to buy in 18 to 36 months
from now. It happened today. They didn't go on anybody's website. They
haven't done anything yet, but something happened today that is going to go
through a pattern of events that will lead them to buy something in 18 to 36
months.

Hey, it’s Kyle from HubSpot Academy. If you have a well-defined buyer persona, then
you know a lot about the sort of person who tends to buy from you. And that’s great,
but alone, it isn’t enough. Here’s Harvard Business School Professor Clay Christensen:

Clay Christensen: Here I am, Clay Christensen, and as you can see I have all
kinds of characteristics and attributes. I'm 65 years old, unfortunately. I'm six feet
eight inches tall, which means I always cut the head of myself when I go into a
door. I have failed at losing weight for the last 30 years. I married a wonderful
wife, fortunately. I work at the Harvard Business School, which has plus and
minuses. There are all kinds of other characteristics or attributes about Clayton
Christensen, but none of these characteristics and attributes have yet caused me
to buy The New York Times today. There might be a correlation between my
characteristics and the propensity that I might have to buy The New York Times,
but the attributes don't cause me to buy that product, nor do our characteristics
or attributes cause us to buy any product or service. What causes us to buy
products or not is everyday stuff happens to us. Jobs arise in our life and we
need to get these jobs addressed. If you develop a persona, it will give you a
correlation between the characteristics of a potential product and the decision
to purchase a product, but the attributes of a person don’t cause us to buy a
product or service. By their very nature, a statement of correlation brings
unpredictability to the understanding of the market. Whereas understanding,
what’s the customer trying to do, really helps you in a dramatic way.

If you want to understand what your customers are trying to do, you’re going to want to
use something called jobs theory. Jobs theory is a way of digging into why people buy
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products. The textbook example is for power tools: People don’t want to buy a drill —
they want to buy a quarter-inch hole. And jobs theory takes it a step further to say that
they aren’t even buying a hole — they’re simply trying to hang a picture or build a
treehouse or spy on their neighbors. Essentially, people have jobs they’re trying to get
done, and they hire products to do those jobs. If your product does the job better than
any other product, people will hire it over and over again. When you start to look at
your product in this way, you’ll start to learn things about your target market you might
never have otherwise known. Here’s Clay again:

Clay Christensen: The logic behind this is what causes people to buy a product is
there is a job that needs to be done. When they realize they have a job to do,
they can’t not do anything. Every time we have a job arises in our lives
sometimes we can hire something to do the job. Sometimes nobody has
developed a solution to that job to be done, so we just get by. Meaning we do
workarounds because there’s nothing that we can find to do the job. I have to
make do. When we make do with something, when there’s not a product, we
call that non-consumption. People look at people who are buying the product to
get the job done and they think that that’s the size of the market. The real
market includes the people who buy the product, but then there are all of these
people who don’t buy the product because those are too complicated and
expensive. They make with nothing at all. One of the biggest surprises in our
work is the realization that in most markets where we think that the market is
mature and innovation is slowing down, in reality, it’s a vibrant market for non-
consumption. If you just make a product that is affordable and accessible, a
whole new population of people can now realize that, “Gosh, I could buy that
product and it would get the job done for me and I don’t have to deal with all of
the workarounds anymore.” Some of the jobs that arise in our lives are daily
rituals that we can predict and we know how to deal with them. Other jobs to be
done are new and demanding. But when we have a job to do, what causes us to
buy a product is we realize that that's the job. Here's something that is
developed to get the job done. If I put them together, innovation will be more
predictable.

When people buy your product, they are hiring it to perform some job. That seems
simple enough, but the surprising thing is that people might not be hiring your product
to do the job you designed it to do. And if you really want to be a hero to someone,
you need to perfectly match your product to the job they’re trying to do.

To make this idea more concrete, let’s look at a real-life example:

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Clay Christensen: To give you an illustration of how we develop this in a deeper

way, McDonald's approached us. McDonald's is a very sophisticated marketing
company. They have data up the gazoo. They decided that they needed to
innovate in their milkshake product line so that more people will buy milkshakes.
They had data that allowed them to draw a quintessential customer of
milkshakes, milkshake customers. They then would identify this profile of a
milkshake customer. It turns out I fit that profile very well. They would then invite
people who hit the profile into conference rooms and they'd ask them
questions, trying to understand, how could we improve the milkshake so you'll
buy more of them? They'd get very clear feedback. They would then improve
the milkshake on those dimension of performance, and it had no impact on sales
or profits whatsoever. We invited our sales and they agreed that we could try to
approach it in a very different way. That is, there's a job out there somewhere
that arises in people's life on occasion that causes them to need to buy a
milkshake. We need to understand what the job is that causes people to buy a
milkshake. One of our colleague stood in a McDonald's restaurant for 18 hours
one day and just took very careful notes on what time did he buy the milkshake?
What was he wearing? Was he alone or with other people? Did he buy other
food with it or just the milkshake? Did he eat it in the restaurant or did he go off
in a car and take off? It turned out that about half of the milkshakes were sold
before 8:30 in the morning. It was the only thing they bought, they were always
alone and they always got in a car and drove off with it. So we came the next
morning and positioned ourselves outside the restaurant, so that we could
confront these people as they were emerging with their milkshake. In a
language that they could better understand we asked them, "Excuse me, can
you explain what job arose in your life that caused you to come here at 6:30 in
the morning to hire a milkshake to get this ... what's the job to be done here?"
As they would struggle to answer why they came at 6:30, we'd ask them, "Step
back a minute and think about the last situation in which you had the same
situation, needing to get the same job done but you didn't come here to hire a
milkshake from McDonald's. What did you hire to get the job done? One guys
said, "Yeah, I hire donuts to do the job, but I can never hire just one." Another
guy said, "I do bagels, but boy they're dry and they're tasteless, and so I have to
steer the car with my knees while I'm putting cream cheese on." It turns out, one
of them said, "You know, I hired a Snickers bar to do the job but I felt so guilty.
I've never hired Snickers again. One guy said, "You know, I never thought about
it before, but last Friday I hired a banana to do the job, but it doesn't do the job
very well at all. You finish it in less than a minute. But let me tell you, when I go
to McDonald's, it is so viscous, it takes me about 23 minutes to suck it up that
thin little straw. I don't care what the ingredients, all I know is that when 10
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o'clock comes, I'm still full." The job that all of these people were trying to get
done was, "I have a long and boring drive to work and I needed something that
would keep me engaged with life while I'm driving the car. I'm not hungry yet
but I know I'll be hungry by 10 o'clock." So also, part of the job is, I need
something to eat that would keep myself full when 10 o'clock happens. That's
the job that they're hiring the milkshake to do, and that is they have a long and
boring drive to work and they needed to add dimensions of it to keep them
engaged with life. From the customer's point of view, the milkshake does the
job better than any of the competitors. The competitors, from the customer's
point of view, are not just in the product category but they draw from bananas
and donuts and bagels, as I mentioned. When you think about how big the job
is, you have to look at who the real competitors are from the customer's point of
view. They come from very different categories. It turns out that it helped in a
number of dimensions. The first one is, how big is the milkshake market for
McDonald's? How big is the market for milkshakes? It’s a serious question. Who
knows, but the size of the milkshake just isn’t the sum of the milkshakes of
Burger King, Wendy’s and McDonalds milkshakes, but it includes from the
customer’s point of view all of those other attributes of bananas, donuts, bagels,
Snickers bars. When they implemented this insight in the portions of America
where they developed it the size turned out to be seven times bigger than they
had thought when it was marketed only by the attributes. Most markets are
characterized that way. There is a lot of non-consumption. You can understand
how to improve it only if you understand the job to be done.

Fascinating, right? This can have huge implications for the way your company operates.
If you sell milkshakes, and you understand that people are buying your product to help
them get through the morning commute, you can start to specialize in doing that job
especially well. Whatever it is you sell, if you can understand the job your customers are
trying to do — if you can understand it even better than they do and help them do it
better than they thought it could be done — they’ll love you for that. And if your
customers love you, it’ll be that much easier for your sales team to sell efficiently at a
higher velocity.

Video 2: Rethinking Your Competition

Jobs theory changes the idea of competition. McDonald’s isn’t just competing with
other milkshake vendors — they’re also competing with bagels, bananas, and candy
bars. If you have a deep understanding of the job people hire your product to do, it will
completely transform the competitive landscape.
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There are two ways to use this perspective to your advantage. One thing you can do is
start positioning yourself as an alternative to these indirect competitors. An example
Clay gives in his book is the vegetable-based drink, V8. At first, its creators thought they
were competing against other drinks, and that’s hard. Who would want to drink tomato
juice when they can drink apple juice instead? But once they realized that people were
drinking V8 as an alternative to eating their veggies, the brand really began to take off.
Clay concludes:

Just as the milkshake wins the game of commuting hands down against bananas and
bagels, V8 wins hands down against peeling carrots, boiling spinach, and flossing celery
strings out of your teeth. [...] Competing against apple juice is tough. Competing
against celery is like going downhill on ball bearings.

If you can see your competition through the lens of Jobs theory, you can start to choose
your battles. You can focus on the people who need your help to instead of fighting
over prospects who just aren’t that into you.

But there’s an additional advantage Jobs theory offers when it comes to competition,
too. Once you understand the job people are hiring your product to do, you can
partner with other solutions to provide more comprehensive coverage for that job.
Instead of competing, you can cooperate and use your combined strength to dominate
the market.

A few years ago, I saw this firsthand. My wedding anniversary was coming up, and I
wanted to put together a memorable night out for me and my wife. That was the job I
needed to get done, and the number of products that could do that job was
overwhelming: movie theaters, tourist attractions, travel destinations, and so on. But
then I discovered that a local bed and breakfast had teamed up with a fancy restaurant
and a popular theatre to provide a pretty incredible package: a fancy French dinner, a
live show, and a stay in a historic mansion with breakfast in the morning — all for a
single price paid in a single transaction. And did I buy that package? Yes. Yes I did. And
if you think I did any further shopping around before giving them my credit card
number, you’re crazy. I bought it because they saved me the trouble of scheduling out
individual events and cobbling them together myself, and to me that was worth the
price, even though it was more than I had planned on spending.

And that’s the power of Jobs theory: It unlocks a multitude of ways for you to get
people to buy from you at a premium price. Most companies either try to make price a
selling point or keep it a secret entirely. Once you understand the job your customers
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are trying to do, you don’t have to worry about the price because they’ll be willing to
pay it if you do the job well enough.

Video 3: Uncovering Your Customers’ Jobs

So how do you identify the jobs your customers are hiring your product to do? Similar
to the way you develop a buyer persona, you’re going to have to interview some more
customers, but these interviews are going to be very different from the interviews you
do for persona research. Here’s Claire Menke, Senior Manager of UX Research at
Udemy:

Claire Menke: I actually use very different questioning approaches to do both

pieces of research. So personas, we did based on, again demographic and
psychographic, so we first built a survey and then we did a series of interviews
around those core components that separated the different personas and asked
very directed, scripted questions, or semi-scripted questions related to that. For
Jobs to be Done, we followed Rewired's approach and did it based on a
timeline, which is I'm sure an image that you've seen if you've done any research
on Jobs to be Done where basically you start with the first thought, and you sort
of follow their train of experiences and thought processes until they actually
purchase or use whatever that thing is. And for that, I actually had zero formal
script, no questions in mind, basically just trying to follow their energy and
understand, okay, what was important for them in that situation in making that
decision, like what are their hiring criteria, what are their pushes, what are their
pulls, and getting to that just by digging into why why why why why. I see Jobs
to Be Done as almost like a mediation between the person and their
subconscious, so trying to get them to like really dig deep and think about
things that you've never thought about before.

As Claire mentioned, ultimately what you’re trying to get is a timeline or storyboard

describing how a person came to be your customer. Long before they ever talked to
anyone at your company, maybe even before they had heard about your company,
something happened to them that set them on the path of becoming your customer.
You’re trying to understand that pattern of events from when the person first realized
they had a job to do until they purchased your product. You might be surprised how
long the timeline is. It might be 18 to 36 months; it might be even longer than that,
depending on how long they made do with no solution at all.

So when you interview your customers to find out about the job your product is doing
for them, you want to get back to the very first thought that put them on the road to
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becoming your customer. To get there, you’ll have to work backwards from the time the
person bought your product. So ask them — why did they buy it? When they tell you
why they bought it, ask them how long they thought about it before they made the
decision. Ask what it was that made them finally go through with the sale. Maybe they
think it was an impulse buy, but ask them what gave them the impulse. Had they
thought about buying before and not done it? Were they making do with something
else (or making do with nothing at all)? When did they realize they didn’t have to make
do anymore? What was the series of events that transpired from that first realization to
the time they became your customer? Map that out for 10 or 12 of your customers and
then try to come up with a story that describes them all equally well.

Once you have your story, ask yourself: Why are people going through this story? What
job are they trying to get done? The answer will be their job to be done.

What does a job look like? You can use a statement called a job story to describe the
job your customers are trying to accomplish. The format of a job story is as follows:

As a (who the person is),

when I am (the situation that person finds themselves in),
I want to (the motivation or action)
so that I can (the desired outcome).

Here’s an example:

As a morning commuter,
when I am driving to work,
I want to eat a snack
so that I can keep myself occupied during my commute and get through the first
few hours of work without having to stop for breakfast.

Laying out the job this way makes it easier to see why the milkshake won out against
the bananas, bagels, and other morning snacks, but we can go even deeper. In addition
to the job story, there are other job dimensions that help you understand the ways a
person might evaluate your offering as a way to get their job done.

These job dimensions include:

• Functional requirements — What’s the minimum functionality required to get
the job done? A commuter needs to be able to hold a snack in one hand, which
is why a bagel with cream cheese is a bad choice. The snack also needs to last
the majority of the drive, which is why bananas don’t make the cut.
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• Financial requirements — What are the monetary guardrails I need to stay in to

make this financially feasible? If you’re selling milkshakes to commuters, there
are definitely limits to how much your customers are going to be willing to pay
for your milkshake. While it’s true that nailing a job allows you to charge more
for your product, every category has its limits. Know what they are and stay
within them.
• Personal identity — How does this product or service act as a symbol to
represent what I believe about the world? Remember, the commuters who tried
eating candy bars ended up feeling guilty. If you’re in the business of peddling
milkshakes as breakfast food, you might want to look into offering low-fat or
sugar-free or organic or sustainably sourced variants of your product. You want
people to feel empowered by your product, not compromised by it.
• Social appearance — How will others view me while I use this product or
service? If there’s anything embarrassing about your product, you’ve got to
provide a way for your customers to save face. That’s the great thing about
drive-throughs — nobody has to know you’re there.

Once you get an intimate understanding of the job people are hiring your product to
do, you’ll be able to search for other people who have that job to be done. A good
example of this is Paint Nite:

Sean McGrail: Paint Nite is a two-hour event that takes place at a local bar or
restaurant where a local artist walks people step-by-step through a painting, so
even if you've never painted before, you'll be able to learn how to paint a little
bit, and also have a glass of wine.

That’s Sean McGrail, one of the founders of Paint Nite. When Paint Nite started looking
at the sorts of people who were coming to their events, they quickly discovered that it
was predominantly women, and the job they were trying to do was having a fun night
out with friends.

Sean McGrail: Initially, we somewhat fought against that, because we knew that
we were cutting our market in half by only focusing on women. We would try to
put up paintings that would appeal more to men, but we found the cost of
acquisition to acquire them was much higher, and it was just a real struggle to
get men on board. We went with what the marketplace was telling us. That
women really wanted to have a creative night out. We've embraced that, and
now as we've grown the company, we've introduced Plant Nite, and we have
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other event concepts that we're planning in the future that will cater more
towards girls night out and a creative night out with friends.

As Sean mentioned, understanding the job people hire Paint Nite to do has guided
them in designing other products that do that same job. It’s the same concept as that
bed and breakfast teaming up with a restaurant and a theatre to provide a fun night
out, but instead of forming alliances with other companies, Paint Nite is developing
additional products. But all of these products continue to be focused on the same job:
Helping women have a fun night out with friends.

Sean McGrail: Plant Nite came about because what we recognized with Paint
Nite was that it really wasn't about the painting at all, it was about allowing
friends to connect with one another. The painting was just sort of the activity to
get people together. With Plant Nite, we saw that gardening is very popular
with a wide variety of audiences and we knew that we could leverage that and
leverage our current consumer base and our technology and everything that we
had built to date to really form a whole new event concept with a new creative
event to launch Plant Nite.

This approach has worked really well for Paint Nite, which at time of interview was the
second fastest growing private company in the United States.

In addition to uncovering a job you didn’t expect, you might find that different
customers are hiring your product to do different jobs. In the case of McDonald’s
milkshakes, the commuters were only buying shakes first thing in the morning. What
about people buying shakes at other times? Here’s Clay again:

Clay Christensen: One of the jobs in the evening was, “I’m busy. We’re here
coming down a canned dinner of hamburgers and French fries. I am, as a dad,
I’ve been working hard all day long. My son asked me, ‘Can you get me a
milkshake for dessert.’ I just thought, after all of the work I’ve done through this
day do I want to have him have a milkshake and it’ll take him forever to suck it
up that thin little straw.” For that job in the evening, the characteristics of the
job is it has to have low viscosity so that he can suck it up quickly so that I could
get home. The product that is good in the morning, the commute, is at conflict
with the job, that second job to be done in the evening. But there is another job
in the afternoon also which is, “I haven’t had time to talk with my daughter for
who knows how long. I’d like to just sit there and have something between us
that we can jointly do, like a thick milkshake with two straws and we just have all
the time in the world to try to help me convey to my daughter that I love her
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and I understand her.” It’s the case in most markets that there are two or three
or four jobs out there that people might find themselves needing to get done.
The “I want to have time with one of my children to let them know that I love
them,” the product itself is quite similar to the morning commute job, but the
other of the three jobs, which is, “I need to get home,” would be a different
product.

Understanding that different people might hire the same product to do different jobs
can give you powerful insights into why certain customers are dissatisfied with your
offering. If there’s a job that you know people are hiring your product to do but that
your product isn’t designed to do, one of the best things you can do is to make that
clear to people before they buy. Here’s Clay again:

Clay Christensen: It’s a very important idea. It’s even deeper than under or
overselling itself, but rather if I have a job to do, which is the afternoon job for
the father who’s there with his son and the father just needs to get home. They
need a product that is easy to slurp it up versus the mother who wants to have
time with their daughter and it is a thick milkshake. That gives me lots of time to
just have face to face and be sure that I convey to her how much I love her.
These two products are designed for two very different jobs. As the customer, if
I have this job to do, but I hire this job I will judge it as not a very good product
because it was designed to do a different job. We’ve got to be very careful to
tell the customer what they shouldn’t buy this job to do, not just that they
should. Having a brand that pops into people’s mind that causes them to buy
the product that you’re offering when they have the job, but they don’t buy it
when they don’t have that job to do because otherwise we will be judged by the
wrong measure. That’s a very difficult thing to do.

So figure out the job that your product does best, and lean into it. Make sure you have
an intimate understanding of the situation where that job arises, and then find ways to
provide experiences that help people use your product in that situation. And if there
are people in other situations with a different job to be done that might want to hire
your product, make it clear to them that your product isn’t designed to do that job.

Understanding the job at that level can completely transform every aspect of your
business. Marketing will be able to position your products in a way that’s meaningful to
your prospects. Sales will be able to offer insights into a person’s situation and provide
solutions the customer might not have been considering. And the teams designing your
products and servicing your customers will be able to make sure every aspect of your
offering ties back to the job to be done. As Clay said, it’s a difficult thing to do, but if
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you can do it, then you’ll be meeting your customers’ needs in a way that no other
company can.