The Jobs-to-be-Done Framework

I've been involved in product management for a long time now since I was working as CTO in companies with no product managers for the last 10 years.

I recently discovered the "Jobs to be done" approach and did some research about it. It's about understanding the intrinsic motivation of people to purchase a product or perform an action.

The broad idea is best summarized by a quote from this HBR article:

The idea is that correlating customers based on characteristics is a poor way of understanding the behavior: Consider the case of one of this article’s coauthors, Clayton Christensen. He’s 64 years old. He’s six feet eight inches tall. His shoe size is 16. He and his wife have sent all their children off to college. He drives a Honda minivan to work. He has a lot of characteristics, but none of them has caused him to go out and buy the New York Times. His reasons for buying the paper are much more specific. He might buy it because he needs something to read on a plane or because he’s a basketball fan and it’s March Madness time. Marketers who collect demographic or psychographic information about him—and look for correlations with other buyer segments—are not going to capture those reasons.

Understanding can help to better optimize the user experience. You might realize that people open your app frequently to do something very specific you did not imagine before. Or you might find out about powerful mechanism explaining why people by a product. I like the mini van example mentionned by Ryan Singer in the podcast below.

Further reading and listening

• How Intercom uses Jobs-to-be-done. Kindly recommended by Arthur Waller from Pennylane. A must read for in-depth knowledge and many examples about the topic.
• Jobs to be Done: a short article about the topic from Chistensen Institute. Clayton Christensen was a Harvard professor who coined the term Disruption.
• 🎧 Shipping work that matters (The Changelog #399): Podcast with Ryan Singer, author of Shape Up and Product Strategy at Basecamp.
• 🎧 🇫🇷 Arthur Waller | Génération Do It Yourself Arthur Waller is co-founder at Pennylane. He mentions using this framework about how they build their product.
• From circleci blog about their new UI that is very very fast: Introducing our redesigned UI: built for increased user productivity