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Introduction
There’s an analogy that is so simple I should have forgotten it by now. But ten years after reading The Leader’s Handbook, this (as with many other topics in the book) has stuck with me. While I intend to dive fairly deep - from the perspective of a Jobs-to-be-Done noob - this simple concept is a foundational part of the way I think:
Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end
More specifically, whatever area of improvement you’re focused on, something has to happen before you execute the function in that area, and something has to happen after you execute the function in that area.
Take meetings as an example. Meetings have an objective. That’s why we have them (supposedly). They could be used to present findings, or conduct a preliminary discussion to establish action items, or they could be to make a collaborative decision, and so on. But I think we can agree on the following truths:
- There are things that must be accomplished before the meeting, which are inputs into the meeting
- And there are things that need to happen after the meeting
- There are things that must be accomplished during the meeting to support its objective, and not simply the meeting itself.
I know, it sounds simple. The problem that I’m going to discuss in this book, however, relates to an observation that most innovation outcomes (which are primarily incremental) are focused on that middle part of the problem-space and ignore the opportunities to improve the adjacent parts (they're actually found at a different level of abstraction). The integration of these parts will lead us to explore the impact, and threat, from non-traditional competitors.
- Video conferencing systems, for example, focus on the execution of that middle part. When you’ve made the perfect video conferencing platform, what’s your growth path?
- Component stereo systems focused on the middle part because listening to music is a single execution step in a larger Job-to-be-Done. The chain of music solutions over the past 40 years was a lesson in continual disruption. What if you had a method for seeing this progression before anyone else?
How much did big music hardware brands invest in streaming music solutions?
The example I’ve selected for this book may not align to the product category you deal with. It just so happens that I spent 25 years in the Customer Relationship Management tech space, so it is close to home for me. It’s also a technology that most businesses employ; so from a B2B perspective, it’s a very common focus of daily business.
Core Functional Jobs
Many of you are tasked with making improvements in what jobs to be done practitioners typically call the consumption chain. Every product has a consumption chain, which is essentially a series of other jobs that are made available by the brand to help the customer with regard to various aspects of the product life cycle.
You've also heard these jobs called customer journeys. However the difference is that when we talk about journeys we separate them out and study them in greater detail than most UX people do. But that's a topic for the next section.
Core functional jobs are abstracted completely away from any solutions. What we're trying to do here is to analyze a problem space in such a way that there is no single solution today that gets that job done. In fact products of today are typically addressing a single step in a job such as that. In that regard the job that you are currently addressing is essentially a mini job.
If your goal is to find organic growth pathways that are currently invisible to you and your competitors, then this is the way that you need to think going forward.
The CRM Dilemma
A job to be done is an objective that a group of people share in common. Launching a marketing campaign is merely a single step in a higher contact job. We can debate what to call that job but for practical reasons let's just call it developing a qualified lead.
If you think about it, people and organizations have to cobble together solutions in order to develop a qualified lead. How many different tools do you have to use? How many different brands do you need to integrate together? What do you need to actually do before you execute and after you execute in order to be successful?
These are very important questions that CRM vendors do not ask anybody As a result the front end of these processes - these jobs to be done - are left to internal departments and teams, agencies, and other DIY type solutions.
There is no software solution that identifies and prioritizes your customer needs. Yet this is a critical step not only for product planning but for marketing. So how do you identify and understand your target audience if you don't understand their customer needs? Is this someone else's job? Or is it actually part of a larger job that an organization, or an Enterprise, needs to get done collectively in order to be successful?
The entire Enterprise has the same objective, or should have. Therefore they should be working off insights from the same basic high-level job. For practical reasons it's important sometimes to break these jobs up into different functional areas in order to allocate resources appropriately, but over time what's happened is we've lost sight of the fact that it's actually a single job.
And that's the obtuse, arrogant, founders playground
CRM vendors are guilty as hell of promoting solutions that maintain this status quo, and I decided several years ago to address it publicly. But of course nothing has happened. Because who am I? I'm not an industry analyst so what do I know about CRM?
Well, I know that I spent 25 years working with clients in the front office in the areas of sales marketing and customer support, developing solutions for them, integrating their data from end to end, from anonymous prospect all the way through to cash in the bank.
I know many CRM industry analysts that have never done one part of that, not once.
So I'm going to pretend that I know something. And what I know is that there is absolutely nothing about the front end of the true underlying job of developing a qualified lead, for example, that is currently being addressed by any brand or product in the martech landscape.
This is why you see such a large long tail of brands in the martech landscape. There are only so many seats available in the market and for some reason we just keep adding brands that keep doing the same things that everybody else is doing only somehow they can claim it's better. And nobody's buying that, which is why they can't sell any seats.
I've written an entire series on my blog back in 2020 regarding this martech and marketing focus on jobs to be done that I don't need to rehash it here. Just follow the link and you'll be able to go through it on your own; although I must say that I have evolved my thinking quite a bit since then … it's still pretty much on point.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jobstobedone/p/modeling-revenue-development-for?r=4wccx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The Bottom Line
At the end of the day if you are unable to or unwilling to view the world a level above where you operate today then you're probably not somebody who is going to be successful at innovation. The goal of this guide is to help you understand this perspective, to execute on this perspective, and to disrupt your competition in ways that they can't even see while it's happening to them.
As you go through this guide deeper and deeper you'll find more and more on these topics. Use the search feature because I can't guarantee that I will keep this perfectly well organized, since this is a living guide and I'm just going to add things as I see fit, or as they develop, or as I think of them, and so they're going to land where they may. Sorry about that. 😜
Customer Journeys, what are they, orphans?
We talk about the Front-End of Innovation (FEI) a lot in the Jobs-to-be-Done world. However, investigating the problem-space is equally as challenging in the Front-End of Experience (FEE). Most approaches use a solution-space perspective to incrementally improve the … experience.
I believe there is a place where the FEE can work in conjunction with design to make for a more powerful outcome as people and businesses experience the life-stages of product or service ownership.
Let’s take a brief diversion before diving deeper in to Jobs-to-be-Done so you can think about the problem you’re trying to solve for. It’s not always product features!