Jobs to Be Done: A Better Way to Understand Customers | Jim Kalbach, Revisited

Summary

Work For Humans — Episode Summary

Podcast: Work For Humans
Host: Dart Lindsley
Guest: Jim Kalbach
Title: Jobs to Be Done: A Better Way to Understand Customers (Revisited)
Release Date: July 21, 2026

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Overview

This episode explores the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) theory with Jim Kalbach, a leading expert on human-centered business and innovation design. Dart Lindsley and Kalbach dive into how JTBD provides a lens for understanding the true needs and motivations of customers (and employees), moving beyond mere product features toward deeper value creation. The conversation covers the origins and practical application of JTBD, ways to integrate it throughout an organization, and how it can drive everything from product improvement to better job design. Listeners will learn how JTBD reframes problems, prioritizes innovation efforts, and operationalizes customer-centric thinking.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Jobs to Be Done? (JTBD)

• Definition: JTBD offers a perspective shift from focusing on a product (“the drill”) to the outcome customers seek (“the hole in the wall”).
• Origin: Traced to Theodore Levitt’s famous quote, later advanced by Clayton Christensen, JTBD is “a framework and a language to talk about problems without talking about solutions” (Jim, [00:03], [03:27]).
• Unbiased Needs Analysis: JTBD allows businesses to discuss and analyze human needs independently of their own solutions, revealing opportunities for innovation previously unnoticed.
  • “It gives you an unbiased way to talk about human needs...independent of what you think they need through the lens of your own solution.” (Jim, [00:03], [03:27]).

2. Moving Beyond Product Features

• Product vs. Outcome: Obsession with product features often skews innovation. JTBD refocuses on what the customer hopes to accomplish.
  • “If I asked you how do you want me to design a drill, you’d say, well, I want a little trigger right here...But if I asked you what you want to do with it, you say, I want to make a hole.” (Dart, [05:44]).
• Benefit: This mindset shift helps businesses prioritize which unmet needs or pain points to address for their customers, streamlining decision-making and resource allocation.

3. Real-World Application: Prioritizing Opportunities

• Example: Jim relates a case where focusing on developers’ jobs (not just the tools they use) brought clarity to where improvements were most needed and helped teams focus efforts.
  • “Very often teams don’t lack ideas...they lack the direction on which ones they should prioritize.” (Jim, [07:15]).

4. Integrating JTBD into the Business Lifecycle

• Throughout Organization: JTBD is not just a research tool but can inform value discovery, solution design, marketing, sales, and employee experience.
  • “You can use jobs to be done at different stages...from that perspective, you can use jobs to be done at different stages.” (Jim, [09:37]).
• Mindset Lens: JTBD is best seen as a lens to pause, question assumptions, and reframe business problems at any point in the value creation cycle.

5. Applying JTBD to Job Design and Recruitment

• Job Postings: Rather than listing employer-centered skills and requirements, describe the job’s outcome for the employee (e.g., “help you find a stage to be on”).
• Benefit for Matching: This attracts candidates whose intrinsic motivations align with job outcomes, speeding up and improving hiring and onboarding.
  • “If you start with looking for ‘we want to help you solve problems’...you’re going to get people who want that because...this is going to resonate with them.” (Jim, [13:11], [13:55]).

6. Levels of Abstraction and Targeting

• “Why” Chain: Don Norman’s critique of the “drill and hole” analogy is addressed—how far up the purpose chain do you go? JTBD helps decide the actionable level for innovation:
  • “If you’re a drill bit manufacturer and you go too high, you’re going to go too broad beyond what you can affect.” (Jim, [15:16]).
• Focusing: JTBD is intentionally reductive—helps pick the appropriate “target job” and stick to what you can feasibly change.

7. Handling Complex Domains: Ecosystem Mapping

• Domains like Housing or Work: In complex spaces, map out jobs and job performers—create visual “ecosystem maps” to clarify options and strategy ([19:06], [22:00]).
• Focus: Choose innovation targets based on business relevance and knowledge gaps while maintaining awareness of the whole landscape.

8. JTBD Methodology: Structuring and Categorizing Insights

• Categories on the Jobs to Be Done Canvas:
  • Target Job (formerly “main job”)
  • Related Jobs
  • Functional Steps
  • Emotional Aspects (how you want to feel)
  • Social Aspects (how you want to appear)
  • Outcomes (success measures)
  • Job Differentiators/Circumstances (contextual factors)
• Notable: “Jobs to be done is very rigorous. It adds rigor, let’s just put it that way. It not only understands the problem independent of a solution, but it does it in a very regular and rigorous way.” (Jim, [27:47], [35:45]).

9. The Problem with Personas

• Personas based on demographics can mislead design; JTBD suggests forming personas after understanding functional, emotional, and social jobs plus relevant differentiators.
  • “We need to decide which are the top three or five that we’re actually going to focus on...then...create a persona.” (Jim, [35:45], [38:00]).

10. Product Lines and Differentiation

• JTBD can unearth the need for product/work lines tailored to specific circumstances (life stage, risk tolerance, job function).

11. Mapping a Personal Job: Example Exercise

• Jim considers his own target jobs: “providing for myself and my family” (table stakes), “developing a career,” and “solving tough business challenges.” Together, they map how to prioritize which to analyze further and innovate against ([40:23]-[43:08]).

12. Costs and Limitations of JTBD

• Granularity over Compression: Avoids rolling nuanced needs into vague labels like “purpose.”
• Cost and Price: JTBD excels at surfacing value but not at determining price points or “costs” (in effort, time, lost options). Those must be layered on later in the design/marketing process ([45:36], [48:05]).
• Externalities: Negative side effects (“barking your knuckles” with a wrench) can be framed as outcomes to minimize.
  • “If you can just name those [imperfections], then you’ll know what your focus should be for where you innovate.” (Jim, [51:22]).

13. Emotional Connection & Product Adoption

• JTBD helps create products that make customers feel seen and cared for—predicting adoption and product-market fit.
  • “You want to pick it up...and go, ‘Oh, how did you know that’s exactly what I needed?’” (Jim, [53:23]).
• JTBD doesn’t replace other design/research frameworks but enhances organizational alignment and customer understanding.

14. Competitors & Analogies

• JTBD reframes competition—not just against direct competitors but alternative ways customers solve the same “job”. (E.g., Milkshake vs. Snickers for morning commutes; helping others via job vs. church or volunteering) ([56:15]–[59:54]).
• Use job steps and outcomes as axes for comparing indirect competitors and borrowing best attributes.

15. JTBD as Alignment and Collaboration Tool

• JTBD brings rigor to team communication, prioritization, and collaboration—making mysterious or subjective research actionable and organizationally meaningful.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the core JTBD shift:
  “Let’s flip it and say, what are the people looking to get done? So start with the outcome, work back towards the technology.” — Jim ([03:27])

• On team focus:
  “Very often teams don’t lack ideas...they lack the direction on which ones they should prioritize.” — Jim ([07:15])

• On defining target jobs:
  “It’s often a strategic decision. Where do you want to innovate?...Everything else is related to that target job. It frames everything else.” — Jim ([27:47])

• On personas:
  “I don’t like putting people into classifications and assuming anything about them. But is it a methodological risk?” — Dart ([35:45])

• On emotional connection:
  “Whenever I pick up one of [Oxo’s] things, I can feel that they’ve thought about me...I feel cared for by that producer.” — Dart ([52:18])

• On organizational use:
  “It’s not enough that you’ve done this analysis, you also have to have a conversation around it.” — Jim ([62:30])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:03] JTBD perspective and value
• [03:27] JTBD origins and shift from product-focus
• [07:15] Example of refocusing teams with JTBD
• [09:37] Integrating JTBD across the business
• [13:11] Applying JTBD to job design and recruiting
• [15:16] Levels of abstraction, “chain of why,” and innovation targeting
• [19:06] Complex products, mapping jobs, and domains
• [22:00] Visual ecosystem mapping (Mapping Experiences)
• [27:47] JTBD Canvas structure and categorization
• [35:45] Issues with personas and segmentation
• [38:00] Differentiators, circumstances, and product/work lines
• [40:23] Mapping target jobs for individuals
• [45:36] The role of cost, autonomy, and aspirations
• [48:05] JTBD and price/cost limitation
• [51:22] Addressing imperfections and externalities
• [53:23] Creating product-market fit and emotional resonance
• [56:15] Clayton Christensen’s milkshake story—redefining competitors
• [59:54] Progress by analogy: adopting best practices from indirect competitors
• [62:30] JTBD as a tool for collaboration and organizational alignment
• [63:19] Where to learn more about Jim Kalbach

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Additional Resources

• Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Comprehensive guide to applying JTBD in various business functions.
• Mapping Experiences: Visual approaches to research synthesis and experience mapping.
• Jobs to Be Done Toolkit: Canvas and resources for implementing JTBD (jtbdtoolkit.com).

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Summary by PodcastSummarizerAI
For a deeper dive, read Jim Kalbach’s “The Jobs to Be Done Playbook” and “Mapping Experiences.”

Transcript

[A]

What Jobs to Be Done ultimately does is it gives you a way to shift your perspective. People don't want to drill, they want a hole in the wall. You might have heard that quote before. Instead of talking about drills all day long, which drill manufacturers love to talk about drills all day long. It's saying, how do we talk about our space, how do we talk with our customers and about our customers without talking about drills? And jobsmithon gives you a framework and a language to talk about problems without talking about solutions. If you can do that, you can identify opportunities for improvement for innovation that you might have otherwise overlooked. It gives you an unbiased way to talk about human needs independent of what you think they need, through the lens of your own solution.

[B]

Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. If you're a routine listener, you know that at the end of each show I ask the customer research question, what do you hire your job to do for you? Well, Jim Kallbach wrote the book on Job to Be Done theory, so I often return to this episode to remind myself of the power and the nuance of that research tool. Jim argues persuasively that Job to Be Done theory is one of the best ways to understand what customers really want from a product, but more when used right, it can be the organizing principle that gets every part of a company pointing in the same direction, all towards satisfying customer needs. Jim is an author, speaker and instructor in innovation design and the future of work with a wealth of experience, consulting for large companies like ebay, Audi, Sony and Citrix. Jim is an expert in human centered business and the co founder and principal of the Job to Be Done Toolkit, an online resource for learning, training and content for human centered business design. He also wrote the O'Reilly Guide to Mapping Experiences, which I recommended to every member of my team. In this episode, we explore the importance of understanding the unmet needs of a marketplace promoting innovation by focusing on the problems that customers want to solve and how this approach can be applied to design the right work for employees. We also discussed the social, emotional and differential factors that affect product market fit and how developing product lines to meet different circumstances can be the key to success. All right, as always, when you enjoy Work for Humans, don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a new episode. And now I bring you my great conversation with Jim Kalbach. Jim Kalbach, welcome to Work for Humans.

[A]

Great to be here. Thanks for having me Routine.

[B]

Listeners of this show know that I ask a question at the end of the show, which is what job do you hire your job to do for you? But we've never had a conversation on the show about that methodology. You wrote a book on job to be done theory and how to apply it. You also wrote another great book, by the way, which is Mapping Experiences, which I didn't really need to do this interview, but I got it and now my whole team's going to get it because it's a fantastic book on different ways of drawing up experiences. But I'm going to start off with a basic question. If I'm leading a company, why would I care about job to be done theory? What would it do for me?

[A]

It's a good question. One important, just short historical context around jobs to be done is that the theory emerged from business thinkers. A lot of people trace it back to Theodore Levitt, who made that famous and now overused quote, people don't want to drill, they want a hole in the wall. You might have heard that quote before, and I've been abusive of that quote, but for good reason. Because I think the essence of Jobs to be Done is in that statement, that if you're the manufacturer of a product or solution of some sort, you're focused on your product or your solution. And what he's saying is there are opportunities for innovation if you flip the script and instead of thinking about your product or looking at things through the lens of your own solution, let's flip it and say, what are the people looking to get done? So start with the outcome, work back towards the technology. Clayton Christensen then picked this idea up and coined the term jobs to be done. The point there is these were business leaders both at Harvard, but business leaders trying to find a consistent way to. To talk about, understand, analyze and operationalize understanding the needs of the marketplace, the people that you're trying to solve. So what Jobs to be Done ultimately does is it gives you a way to shift your perspective. Instead of talking about drills all day long, which drill manufacturers love to talk about drills all day long, it's saying, how do we talk about our space, how do we talk with our customers and about our customers without talking about drills and jobsmed on gives you a framework and a language to talk about problems without talking about solutions. And again, if you can do that, you can identify opportunities for improvement, for innovation that you might have otherwise overlooked. Because guess what? Talking about drills all day clouds. You're seeing it's biased. What jobs we done does is it gives you an unbiased way to talk about human needs in the markets. And I say markets broadly because it's the populations you're trying to serve to talk about what they need independent of what you think they need through the lens of your own solution.

[B]

Right? Yeah. That's the way I often explain it, is that if I asked you the drill, I overuse the drill story, too, all the time.

[A]

Okay, good.

[B]

But if I asked you, how do you want me to design a drill? You'd say, well, I want a little trigger right here that turns it on and off. And if I asked you what you want to do with it, you say, I want to make a hole. Well, if I made a drill for you that had the trigger but didn't make the hole, you wouldn't be happy. But if it has a drill that makes the hole but doesn't have the trigger, you would be. And so it's like the most important thing that you need to know about the product that you're producing.

[A]

And we overlook that by our obsession of ourselves and our brand and our product and our solutions, whether that's in a, you know, B2C setting or a B2B setting or whether you're talking about employee experience, whatever you're talking about, it's natural and it's also healthy. By the way, I'm not saying that drill manufacturers shouldn't think about drills or marketing drills or the price point of. Yeah, think about all of that stuff. What Jobs to Be Done does is says, okay, let's just pause for a second and suspend that reality of us being a solution provider and say, what if we looked at it completely differently? What if we put all of that aside and looked at it 180 degrees from the other side and looked at it. Instead of looking at drills, let's look at holes. And then, like I said, it gives you a language and categories and a framework and methods and techniques. And the Jobs to Be Done playbook that I wrote is essentially a catalog of different techniques that once you're within this mindset of putting the solution to the side, what can you then do? How do you do it? And there's lots of different ways that you can operationalize that. Then let's just suspend reality, apply a technique, and see if we learn something new. And very often, guess what dart, very often you do learn something new.

[B]

Can you describe an example of applying this and learning something new?

[A]

Right. Sure. We can just stay with that hypothetical. And I'm thinking through the catalog of my own experience for a second. Well, I'll give this example. I was just sharing this With a colleague about half an hour ago, in fact, we were looking at developers developing software capabilities. We analyzed that in a way that gave the team that was looking to increase the velocity of developers, that was what they wanted to do. And I said, okay, great. The thing was that they were looking at it from kind of a tool perspective. They were saying what new systems and platforms and dev environments and burn rate tools. I don't even know that they were talking about tools. I didn't even know what they did. But it didn't matter because they were trying to solve the developer velocity problem by looking at it from getting new tools or new solutions. And they said, let's put that aside. Let's just look at the problems that developers have when they're developing software solutions. And we had a conversation that led to new conclusions. Now, it was interesting because most of the pain points that I found, so there's a way to prioritize what I call unmet needs. Most of them they knew already. What they didn't know was how to prioritize those. They didn't know which ones to focus on. One of the big benefits of doing what I said, that is start with Hall's work, back towards the drill, or put your solution aside and let's look at the problems is it'll give you a new perspective on what to focus on. Because very often teams don't lack ideas on what to do. They lack the direction on which ones they should prioritize. But behind that is also a rationale. Let's prioritize these unmet needs for a specific reason. Because our population, the audience we're serving, told us that those were the hardest for them to get done that are most important or other things like that as well too. So that was just an example where I had a team of people who had a ton of ideas and they were just kind of bouncing around from. From one place to another. And I was able to bring focus, I was bringing, able to bring focus to the group.

[B]

So there's one way to think of this as just purely a research tool. Like this is a moment in a business when they're interacting with the customer. But one of the things that really opened my eyes reading your book is that you see this as essentially how the business runs. It's in every step of the business. How does it get integrated throughout the life cycle of a business?

[A]

Yeah, I wrote that in the book and actually I categorized the techniques that I describe in the book. The book is essentially a catalog of various techniques. And I categorize them. By looking at a very broadly a business cycle that businesses have to discover the value that they want to go after and then they have to define it and then they have to design it and deliver it, you're able to apply jobs to be done to both innovation and R and D in terms of product development or service design as well as go to market. Motions. Right. So marketing teams, what language should I use? Sales teams, how should I speak to the customer? And yes, you're right. So from that perspective, you can use jobs to be done at different stages. I don't actually talk about a holistic approach to that. Rather, my point was jobs to be done as a lens that you can bring out as needed in any one of those contexts. You know, the go to market side versus the innovation side or even more specifically marketing, you know, versus product design, for instance. But you can bring out jobs to be done as a way to say, okay, let's pause for a second. We're going down a path and we're making decisions and we're making assumptions. We're making assumptions about the people that we're serving, what they want to hear, what they want to buy and use. Let's put our assumptions aside. So you check your assumptions at the door and then you look at the problem from a different way and very often you end up in a different spot than you would have. It provides focus or insight in a new way that can change your marketing copy or change how a client relation person services a customer post sales, or how a design team goes into an agile sprint. It'll frame things in a unique way. So yes, it can be used throughout any business problem. And there's no job that's too big or too small that I wouldn't be able to apply jobs to be done techniques with. Easier. For me, it's really understanding that mindset shift. For me, jobs to be done is a lens to see problems in a different way and not make assumptions and shift your mindset.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I can give a concrete example of that from my world, which is, you know, I've been applying jobs to be done theory to work itself. And we'll talk about my list that I've generated because you taught me something about how that unstrictured list could be structured. So I want to talk about that. But let's take a look at how we advertise jobs. The way we advertise jobs is I'm going to say to you, hi Jim, here are the skills I want you to have that's how I'm going to advertise a job. That's not how I should advertise a job. That's me thinking about me. What I should be advertising a job with is, hey, let me tell you about the job that this job is going to get done for you. So if you want to be on the stage, I'm going to help you find a stage to be on. If you want to solve puzzles, I'm going to help you find some puzzles. And so it even changes how I interview. People who work for me need to want to understand how things work and make them work better. That needs to be what they want to do. And so I'm going to listen for that, Them wanting to do that job, because I'll know they'll be happy if they're on my team and that's the job they want to do. So it really can affect every single step.

[A]

Totally. Start with the hole and work back towards the drill, or start with the outcome and then work back towards. In this case, the solution is a copy of a job description or how you're going to frame the listing, the posting. Great example. I would say you got the essence of it. Yeah, totally. That's exactly the type of shift. Now, I would say, though, in your example, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have your list of requirements as an employer.

[B]

It's an exchange. It's just unbalanced. I agree.

[A]

If you're in a situation where it's competitive, starting your job listing with, here's what this will get done for you. Right. It's going to read very, very differently. I can almost predict what every job posting is going to be. They're going to start talking about the company. We're a Fortune 500 company and we're looking to strengthen our marketing team. Here's what you need to bring to the table. Every job listing, if you start with looking for, we want to help you solve problems or what did you say? Puzzles. Right. I think is how you. Right.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. If or Bill. There's so many different things that people want from work and different people want different things. And the truth is that if I sell you a product that doesn't do the job you want it to do for you, you're going to be unhappy when you get here when you're, you

[A]

know, employer, employee, match. Right. There's a fit. It goes in both directions as well, too. You both want the thing that you're looking for. And if you as an employer are able to describe what employees are Looking for better. You're going to shorten that cycle of finding the match because presumably the quality of people that apply is going to be higher because they've responded to those words like solve a puzzle or get up on stage or connect with people or travel around the world, whatever that is. You're going to get people who want that because they're going to resonate. This is going to resonate with them.

[B]

Yeah. And the skills one is sort of like Amazon coming to you. And the first thing you see about a product is here's the currencies we accept. We're going to take dollars, we'll take MasterCard, that's what we take.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I had Don Norman on the show.

[A]

Oh, great.

[B]

Don Norman does not love Theodore Levitt's quote about the drill and the hole. And what he said is, look, yeah, of course you want to drill a hole, but why do you want to drill a hole? And he, he started following the chain down and saying, well, it's because you want to hang a picture. So he wasn't satisfied with it for that reason. And I sort of thought to myself, well, both are true, but if I'm a drill maker, I need to know about the hole part. And he was saying, how do you deal with sort of the chain of jobs that can be done?

[A]

It's a great question. And I actually used the example that you just started down. But there's a hierarchy problem or challenge that you face anytime you talk about human goals, right. Which essentially a job to be done is a goal that somebody has is that you can always ask why. If I were talking to Don Norman, I would say, well, why do you want a picture at home? He said, preserve family memories. Why do you want to preserve family memories? So you have a better home life. Why do you want a better home life? So that I'm happy. If you do that to the end Dart, you always end up with happiness, love and self actualization or something like that. Now if I'm trying to innovate right now, I'm an innovator. Let's get practical here. I'm an innovator and I work at a drill bit manufacturer and I go into a design team or some innovation team and I put up on the wall, we want to help people have a happier home life. We make drill bits dart. Why is that my starting point for innovation? Just like you said, I don't deny the fact that there are higher order wise behind that. What I believe is that jobs to be done, better frames, an innovation target In a very, very concrete way. And what it's saying is we're targeting making holes in the wall. You could actually level up and where you want to make change, I say innovation broadly. I mean, anytime you want to improve something or make change, you could say, we want to help people hang pictures on the wall. That could be your starting point for innovation too, which is way better than starting with. We want to make people happy in their home lives. If you make drill bits, you need to figure out what level you want to work at. But at some point in time, here's what I found in my own experience, that if you're a drill bit manufacturer and you go too high, you're going to go too broad beyond what you can affect. What can I as an innovator, somebody who wants to make change, even if it's a small improvement, what can I realistically affect? And that line of reasonings for asking why, why, why, why, why, why, why actually gets us too far away from that. And I've been guilty of that in my past too, because I come from design and design thinking and I've done the same thing and I've asked why, why? And then I go into a brainstorming session and we start way up here. And then it's like a group of product people who have this much control and we come up with all these great ideas to solve world peace and then we go back to our jobs and we do nothing because our targets were too high as well too. So one thing that jobs to be done does is, is it actually confronts that hierarchy and that level of abstraction problem. And it says, where do you want to innovate and can you affect that level?

[B]

How do you deal with big products? Houses. I'm going to use houses as an example. And the reason is the core job of my house, if I was going to bring it down to the basics, is to keep the weather out and to keep good people in and bad people out. And. But it's so much more that I feel like I could get lost in it. And I bring it up because we're about to talk about jobs. And jobs is like that. And so I want to start with a concrete example of a house. So, like, what are the things we want from a house that go beyond keeping the weather out? If I'm designing houses, how do I manage that complexity? On work for humans, we've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees along the way. People started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull. So you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more at that's11f o l d.com

[A]

Great question. I think there are two parts of the answer, and I don't really talk about this much in the book. I think there might be a sentence on each of the two points that I'm going to mention. And one is you need to think about your domain. So you just mentioned the domain of a house or an arena or a field that you're in. It might be. It might be real estate or we're going to go over to work in a minute, right? In that domain, what you want to do is actually list all of the potential jobs. They're probably going to come out at different levels of granularity. So this little hierarchy problem is going to come in there. But what you'll end up with is kind of an ecosystem map for that domain, of the jobs in a little hierarchy. You can also do that with what I call the job performers. So who are the job performers? And it's, you know, you and. And your family. There are guests that come into your house, service workers, maybe, maybe your pets even. And you can list all of those out as well, too. So if you do have a big complex domain, one of the first things that you need to do is kind of sort and separate the world in a job performer map and a job map, ecosystem map, I should say. And then what jobs to be done forces you to do. And this is a good thing because this is where that focus comes from that I just talked about is it says, who do you want to innovate for? And again, I'm using innovation very broadly for any change or improvement you want to introduce. Who do you want to innovate for and where do you want to innovate? Because out of all of those things your job can do, you got to start somewhere. And if you start too broad or too high of a level, you're actually going to get confused. And again, I've been guilty of this as well too in the past in some of my design and innovation work, to have so many factors and levels and people and different things that we're trying to solve for that you end up confusing your stakeholder, your team, and you actually don't come to the single conclusions that you want to Come. So jobs to be done in that sense is reductive. And it actually feels reductive because you're like, there are all these stakeholders and all these job performers and all these potential jobs. You only want me to focus on this one thing is like, yeah, actually, because that's part of jobs to be done is it helps you focus. Now, that said, though, I think there are a series of questions that can help you pick the right target. I call it the target job. And the target job is the one that you're going to pull in and actually then go research. And that is questions like, what are you about as an organization? What are you passionate about? But also what's relevant to you at this point in time? What gaps in knowledge do you have at this point in time? And jobs to be done should also answer questions about the organization or the team that's trying to make a change as to what's relevant, what's most relevant. Okay, out of all these jobs, what's relevant to you right now to understand first? So it's not just picking one randomly. There's a match of, you know, what I'm going to target matches what my intention is.

[B]

Yeah, I actually do get to bring up this book, Mapping Experiences. I'm really happy about that.

[A]

There you go. Right.

[B]

Yeah. This is a book that shows all different ways to model experiences, and many of them are visual, because the visual part of our brain is so powerful that presenting any idea to the visual part is the way to go. At the very end, you've got a piece around ecosystem models and essentially these larger models that you just discussed. I actually think this is one of the most important things that job to be done can do, which is that you can capture enough of these jobs that you can put it onto a map. And I'm going to try to describe this map. It shows this particular map, shows all the relationships of all the entities surrounding retirees, all the services that they receive, and all the things that they need. But by putting it out on a map like this, instead of just wandering around in a swamp of possibility, you get to start developing a strategy around which of these things you want to go after. So I guess what I'd say is that my initial question to you was sort of like, complicated products are a problem. How does job for job to be done theory? The answer is job to be done theory is how to deal with a complicated product.

[A]

Exactly. And it kind of forces you to do that reconnaissance and mapping, if you will, but then also declaring declare a perspective. It doesn't say you're not going to ever look at those other things because you already have the list. It's in the map. You have the list. You can say, we'll do that one next. And there might even be ways to combine efforts as well too, because sometimes jobs are so close to each other and job performers are so close to each other, you might actually want to take two at a time. But do that, you still do the analysis separately as well. That's a good thing. Again, just like going too high in your asking why in innovation, starting way up in the stratosphere is not a good place to innovate. I also believe taking too many variables at once is also not a good idea. When you're trying to innovate or make change, the solutions or the conclusions that you make are just as confusing as the space that you started off with. So the first thing you need to do is sort and separate, clarify, get set, then focus on a target job. You're able to better pinpoint the insights and the pain points and the unmet needs that you're then going to go

[B]

after you've taken a look at the list of all the things that people have said. Yeah, and I realize now after reading your book that it's a completely amorphous list. It's essentially what people have said boiled down to. But it has no hierarchy in it, it has no, no structure to it yet. What did you see in that list? I guess methodologically is what I'm asking, but also anything you saw in that list.

[A]

My approach to jobs to be done relies on a categorization scheme and I just recently launched we can put in the show notes, I guess the Jobs to be done canvas 2.0. I have this tool, it's like as the name suggest, it's a canvas which are, you know, kind of a sheet with, with different boxes, categories of things that you're looking for. It basically boils down from my perspective the eight things that you're looking for anytime you do a Jobs to be done project or your Jobs to be done analysis. And then within each one of those boxes or those different categories, there's also rules of how you formulate the insights there. The other thing that Jobs to be done does really, really well is, is it's able to translate real world thoughts and words and the things that people say, which is messy. If you're trying to find out the needs of a marketplace, that means you got to deal with people and people aren't going to talk to you. In terms of jobs to be done, your list is a perfect example of that. And for me, here's the thing that when I saw that list, I was like my mind was categorizing them. I was saying, oh, that's a functional step. That's a functional job. Oh, that's what I call an outcome. There were some aspirations in there as well too, which actually go up. So I do go up in my chart and I call those aspirations, but that's not my focus. My focus is the target job. There are what I call related jobs were in there as well too. So if you go out and look at the canvas that I just mentioned, it basically lays out those eight categories for you. It's a job performer and a target job and related jobs. And then once you pick the target job, there are the steps and the emotions and the outcomes and the differentiators there as well too. So what my brain did when I saw that list is I started categorizing them and I was saying, oh, I'd formulate that differently and call it an outcome. I'd formulate that differently and call that a step. I'd formulate that differently and call that a related job. So I also see jobs to be done as a language to filter real world insights from real human beings, which is going to be as messy as you can get. And it filters them and it actually normalizes them, puts them into categories and it formulates them in an, in a regular way so that you can compare things better, which I think other types of innovation and methodologies that seek to understand human needs actually don't get. Well, when I look at some of them, they're actually kind of messy to me because the way that they phrase things and categorize things, it's kind of all over the board. And then that's what you're going to take though, into your solutioning as well too. And it's like, well, if that's messy and it's different levels of granularity and it's not formulated well, that's not a good starting point. So jobs to be done is very rigorous. It adds rigor, let's just put it that way. It not only understands the problem independent of a solution, but it does it in a very regular and rigorous way.

[B]

I agree. And I love the way I haven't seen the canvas, I don't think. I love the way you break down the responses. So there's the main job and then there's emotional jobs that are inside the main job and then there Are social jobs that are inside the same jobs? And then there's related jobs. So first of all, I want to talk about the difference between main job, emotional job, and social job. How do you break that down?

[A]

In the book, I write the word main job, but I've actually changed my language to target job. And the reason why I did that was because that's a decision. That's a decision for you as the change maker innovator. You have to declare this is where I want to focus. And that could be at different levels, different breadth. So you can. The way that you formulate that job, that target job has some decision in it. It's often a strategic decision. Where do you want to innovate? And then once you do that, every other part of your investigation is related to that target job. It frames everything else. It's what are the steps of that target job? What are the emotions that the job performer has while they're doing that target job? So it's not all of their emotions. It's the emotions they have while they're doing that target job. What are the social aspects while they're doing that target job? What are the measures of success? I call those outcomes from that job. So I actually call the emotional and the social part. I call them aspects. I don't call them jobs. You'll look at some of the literature and they talk about functional, social and emotional jobs. What I talk about is the target job is functional. We always frame the target job in a functional way. And by that I mean it's just getting from point A to point B, like onboard into a new company, find a new job. Those are functional jobs. But then there are emotional and social aspects of that, of that job. So for me, the relationship is a little bit hierarchical in that the social and the emotional aspects are within the target job that you've pulled out for yourself.

[B]

That makes sense to me. It's actually. It's one of the things I worry about with the job to be done in general is that, okay, I'm going to make a hole with this drill.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But the truth is, I really care a lot about how that drill feels in my hand. It has nothing to do with whether the hole's being made or not. It's. I happen to like makita drills. It's because I. What I used when I was a. When I was a construction worker. But it's also because they have this very smooth acceleration to the motor. Yeah. That just feels good, you know, and they have the right weight.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And that's not anything to do with the job, but I'm going to make a buying choice based upon that. And so I suppose that that's to some extent the emotional job of that thing. Because I do have an emotional relationship with the feel of the drill in my hand.

[A]

Correct. And if I were doing research in this space, I would talk to people making holes in the walls and ask them about how they do that. And that might come up as we're talking to them and what my job is to be done. Brain. The filter in my brain would say, oh, there's an emotional aspect. And it would also tell me how to formulate that thing. Based on what you just said, I would. So all of my emotional aspects begin with the word feel or avoid feeling. So in this case, you want it to feel a certain way and you want it to feel. I wanted to stay in control. But it wasn't. You went smooth. Something about smooth. I'd have to think about how to formulate that.

[B]

It's sort of smooth and powerful. It's sort of like, capable. Like there's a capability to it.

[A]

Yeah. This is the thing with jobs to be done. It's a lot about words and language and how you formulate things. And sometimes it's obvious, but in your case, it's not. So what I typically do is I'll write something down and come back to it later and review my data over and over and actually go to thesaurus if I have to, to find a good word for smooth and powerful. Like, what's a good word for smooth and powerful?

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

And then I would write my sentence like that. I would say feel smooth and powerful. That would be an emotional aspect of getting that job done.

[B]

Okay, I like that. And then let's talk about the social aspect. Yeah, I can make it up, which is that Makita drills might be expensive. And so if it's holding it. If I'm holding it in my hand and people can see it, they can tell that I have status or something like that.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

What are the social jobs that you might come across?

[A]

I'll just tell you how I formulate the insights in that bucket. The social jobs is appear or avoid appearing as. So you want to appear as something. So I'd be talking to you and appear as. So you just said social status. We'd have to figure out a way to formulate that. But appear as. I don't know. You. You tell me. How do you want to appear when you have a Makita drill to others?

[B]

Well, actually let's take it to job, which is that something that people do with their jobs is that they're, they are a kind of adornment, which is I hire my job to look good at parties, Right?

[A]

Totally.

[B]

So what do you want? I mean, honestly, it's a deep mystery to me. I don't know why. I don't know why I care about status. I don't care. I don't understand it. I do know, and I've been interviewing a lot of people about this and I haven't totally pinned down, which is that people have a reference group and that the reference group is who they want to look good to. And for different reference groups, you might want to look a particular way. Like with this reference group, I want to look competent. This reference group over here, I want

[A]

to look cool, Right?

[B]

Edgy, exactly.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Risk tolerant or something.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so I don't completely understand it. I do recognize that this, and I might have talked about this on a show before. I can't remember that. I don't have to look good in this shirt. You don't have to think I look good in this shirt, but I have to think you think I look good in this shirt.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. That's what you put is how do you, how do you want to appear or avoid appearing while you're getting the job done that you've declared as your target job? And here's the thing about jobs to be done. Each one of those categories, and I'll just go over them real quick before I move on. Once you declare your target job, there are. You're looking for the job steps, the functional steps of how it gets done in a chronology. You're looking for the emotional aspects, the social aspects, what I call the outcomes, and those are measures of success. How do you know you did it? Well, and then there's a fourth one that is more contextual. I call those job differentiators, that there are conditions or circumstances that make getting the job done differently. So once I declare my target job, I go out and I talk to people. 12 people, 20 people, whatever that might be. And as they're talking, I'm putting things into those categories. Oh, I hear a step. Oh, I hear a social aspect there and I put it there. What you're trying to do is get a complete list in each one of those buckets that I just named. You're trying to be as complete as possible so that I have a sense of all of the emotions that people want to feel or all of the ways they want to appear and all of their measures of success. And then what you can do is prioritize those. And there's different ways to prioritize them. It can just be winging it and looking at the list and putting one at the top. But there's also very rigorous ways where you can go out and survey people which of these emotions are most important to you and actually get some, in some cases, quantitative data on that. The point that I want to make though is by being very granular and as comprehensive as possible now we would have a list of all of the social aspects that we were able to find around getting that job done and then consider them, talk about them, prioritize them. How does this affect our space? How does this affect how we're going to create a solution? Should we even consider that or not? You want to look cool to this group and you want to look sophisticated to that too. Is that even something that is relevant to us? And if so, how is it relevant to the people we're designing for a solution for? So it gives you things to prioritize and then it gives you a conversation to have and agree on how you're going to create the solution.

[B]

Yeah, I like that a lot. And I know I'm going to go back through the work and start doing that with it. And I also think that if we were to separate it up into those groups, we'd start saying, huh, that's a little skimpy over there. We need to get into that particular one. One of the things that job to be done that I like a lot that seems to help us get away from is the concept of Personas. And you've spoken about this. I'm very cautious about the idea of Personas and I want to see if you feel the same way. Which is the thing about a Persona is it says, look, I'm going to name sort of a demographic, all the demographic attributes of somebody and then I'm going to say what that demographic attributes wants from my product. I think I'm uncomfortable with it because I. I don't like putting people into classifications and assuming anything about them. But is it a methodological risk?

[A]

I think if you do it upfront in the way that you describe that is take some demographic aspect or usually combination thereof, could be region where people live or how much they make, or how high of an education they have, whether they're male or female or non binary or whatever, or some other demographic about them and then you chop people up that way. It helps you as maybe as a marketer find those people because very often you have that data in a database, but it may not help you actually speak to the job that they're trying to get done or to innovate around the job. So there is a risk of creating different segments and Persona. The way that you mentioned based on demographic data. The way that I like to bring the notion of Persona into the work that we just talked about is kind of after the fact. That is we declare a job performer and a target job and then we research that target job, fill in the buckets, prioritize each of those to see which are the most important. One thing that you can then do is look at that job differentiators. That was that last bucket that I mentioned. Those are things that factors or circumstances that make getting the job done differently and you'll prioritize those and very often that warrants actually different Persona. So when you talk about work and a job, what's the job of a job? There are actually probably a lot of differentiators that we could name region of the world, skill level. There's a whole bunch of things that are going to make getting that job done differently. But we need to decide which are the top three or five that we're actually going to focus on. And then what you could do is you can create a Persona that helps you think about well what if this versus that. And by the way, that's actually how I formulate the differentiators. What if it's the first time job seeker versus somebody who's at the end of their career finding a job? I'm just going to say on finding a job, the job might be, the steps are going to, the chronology is going to be the same. Right. You have to determine your criteria. Find, find a job, apply for. The steps are going to be the same, but a first time job seeker is going to be very different than somebody later in their career. So you might and you don't have to, but you might want to actually create two Persona around that to help you come up with solutions that actually address those different. Again, what I call job differentiators.

[B]

Yeah, I mean it's something I find a lot with what people want from their employment. Yes, to some extent it's an attribute of them, but to a large extent it's an attribute of their circumstances. And some of those are tied to life stage, which is I do have kids at home at this point or I do have elders at home or I have to be risk averse right now because a lot of people depend on me. But at other times in my life I can be totally risky. And so it seems to me that this might lead very well to sort of a product line discussion, which is, I'm going to produce it now, a product line that is going to satisfy these different circumstances. Cabinet workers need to have drills that work in tight spaces, for instance, is sort of the thing. Yes, it's something I've recommended to companies is that they should start to think of having a product line of work products that are meeting different circumstances. Really.

[A]

In fact, in the book I call that category of information, actually label it as circumstances. I've called it job differentiators. They're synonyms. The circumstances, the context, the factors that make getting the job done differently. I think the difference is I do that afterwards. So I don't pre segment and then only talk to carpenters that need drills in a tight space. I just say drilling a hole. And I want to talk to all carpenters at first. So I do that differentiation at the end and only after I've identified all of those factors and prioritize the ones that make a difference, make a difference to the job performer, but also the ones that make a difference to me because the next step will be creating a solution. And those factors or circumstances or job differentiators, again, those are all, I'm using those synonymously here, that'll influence and impact the solution that you come up with. But you do that afterwards. You don't do that, don't do that in advance, because if you do that in advance, you're going to be biased, you're going to be biased towards that one, that one thing.

[B]

Normally at the end of the show I ask the question, what job do you hire your job to do for you? But I want to ask it of you in the middle of the interview and then as you talk about it, I want to sort of part it out into what's your main job, what's your emotional job, what's your social job, what's your circumstance? And so what job do you hire your, your job to do for you?

[A]

Yeah, good question. I should have thought more about it after reading the list. I was so intent on everybody else's answer. I didn't actually prepare a good answer for myself, but I did identify with some of the, with some of the answers that I saw. I think at a base level it is about providing for myself and my family. Right. I'd have to think exactly how to formulate that, but it'd be something along the lines of providing a living. Providing a living. For myself and my family. I think there's also some for me personally. I'm answering personally here now. It's around developing a career and developing and extending a career. I would probably formulate it as develop a career.

[B]

Yep. Interesting. Those are on two sort of different timescales. Right. Which is that the career, sort of your long term play, providing for your family might be this year.

[A]

Correct. It was interesting. You were talking about the puzzle. I think there is something about engaging. I don't know how I'd actually formulate this too, but it would be engaging in problem solving in some way. Just this idea of being in a space, a domain that your company is in or that your organization is in and being an expert in that domain and then solving tough business challenges might be something that I would say is also a job that I want to get done. So, you know, providing for, for myself and making a living, developing a career and solving tough business challenges would be jobs that I would say. And then what the jobs to be done framework would say, we would say, okay, great, which one do you want to analyze? Which of those three do you want to analyze?

[B]

Well, this is a good question, which is, let's take a look at providing for self and family.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That may not be a differentiating factor between the products that you might choose.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It may be that there's 50 jobs that you could go do that would provide for yourself and your family. You wouldn't take one that didn't. Right. So we can say, as a product developer, are we meeting that need? Yes, we are. Now we can stop talking about it. In a way we can say, okay, so what's, what is going to be the differentiator for you?

[A]

That's right. By the way, that's where my mind went as well too. And when I gave my answer, I said kind of base level. That's like table stakes, isn't it? And salary are table stakes negotiations as well too. And we know particularly more and more these days with millennials and whatever comes after millennials, people are choosing jobs based on purpose and fulfillment and things like that. And not necessarily salary, they're actually seeing lower salary jobs. Right. The point that I wanted to make is you and I just had a little conversation about that. By mapping that out, this was our little ecosystem map of related jobs. By mapping that out, we can have a conversation around it.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

I don't assume that you think the same thing that I think. We put it out and we have a conversation around it and we nod our head and we Say I agree with you, Dart, which I just did. I agreed with you. That is table stakes. If we have a solution out there, we need to go for developing a career and solving tough business challenges. That's what we want to understand more. Plus, we probably already understand a lot about providing, providing a base living as an employer. I think in general we understand a lot about getting that job done. But what about developing a career in a post pandemic world? Well, let's bring that back forward. That's interesting. If we could do that, we'll attract more people or if we could help them solve, feel like a problem solver of business challenges, that will help us attract more people. So the logic that we just went through really quickly is exactly why you do that job speed on exercise of mapping them out so that you have a rationale for what you're picking, what you're focusing on. Again, it comes back to focus. Dart.

[B]

There's a couple of things in there. First of all, I think in your book, one of your books, you quoted Joe Pine who talked about the experience economy. I just had him on the show. He talked about the next thing beyond the experience economy, which is the transformation economy, products that we consume or experiences that we consume, where the main purpose is to transform us.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so to some extent the career thing is a little bit about bringing to yourself the skills and abilities and the, and the resume that is going to make it possible for you to take the next step in your career. And so there is a way in which that's the transformation economy.

[A]

Agree.

[B]

And which is super interesting because the job is not a hole in that wall over there. It's actually a transformation. To me, one of the limitations of job to be done, I have found is that it, it finds all the value in a product, but it doesn't find the cost. A lot of these books on my shelves will tell you that what people want from work. Actually this is, this is a good question. What people want from work will say autonomy, mastery and purpose. Great thing about a list of three is that it sells books, but not that it actually tells you how to design products. And so the word purpose is to my mind over broad. It doesn't help me to design very much, but autonomy on that list. Very few people say I hire my job to give me autonomy because if you were going to hire something for autonomy, you'd hire unemployment.

[A]

Correct. You want autonomy within your job.

[B]

Right. And so lack of autonomy is a cost of job. And so my feeling is that job to be done is not great at understanding cost.

[A]

Oh, I see what you're saying. Two things. One, just looking at the words purpose and autonomy, my mind would categorize purpose as an aspiration. So that actually goes higher than the target job. And for me, autonomy is actually an outcome that I'm seeking. So I want to. Let's say the target job is find a new job. If that's the target job, purpose is above that. It's a higher. I asked the question, why, Like Don Norman. One of the success criteria, though, if I go down, one of the success measures of finding a new job is to, I guess you could say maximize autonomy, but that's maximize autonomy within the job. So that becomes what I call an outcome statement, or which is a measure of success. So in my framework, one of the buckets were measures of success, and there would be probably about 50 measures of success. Autonomy, decrease the distance from my home, maximize social relationships. I mean, it'll go on and on. And if I talk to 12 or 20 people, I'm going to get a list of about 50 of those things. And autonomy is just one of them. My question is, how do you know that's the most important one to folks? Well, let's get them all and then prioritize them. And you can prioritize them by going back out and asking people, what which of these 50 is the most important to you? It sounds like the authors of these books that you mentioned actually had already done that, maybe not using jobs to be done, but what they're saying is autonomy is one of the success criteria for finding a job. It's not an aspiration, it's a success criteria within the job. That's how I would frame it from a job to be done perspective.

[B]

Yeah, I think they've done a couple of things when they make that list. One of the things they've done is they've. They've said, some people like to solve puzzles, some people like to keep you on stage. They look at all of that and they say, I'm going to roll that up into something that I call purpose. And it loses the detail. And so it's basically, it's a lossy compression of something that actually you wouldn't want to compress that far if you were going to make design decisions.

[A]

Correct. And Jobs to Be Done likes to be more granular. That's why I said 50. 50 of those statements, they get granular. But I'm going to go back to that point that you said about jobs to be done doesn't address cost. Is what you said, and you didn't mean price, you meant cost of a disadvantage.

[B]

Well, it kind of did mean price.

[A]

You did mean price.

[B]

Okay, you pay something to buy a thing and you pay something to buy a job. When you buy a job, you are paying your time, you're paying your opportunity cost of not having other jobs. You're paying all these things. But your job also costs you something, and it costs you something that your employer doesn't receive. It's essentially, it's an externality. So let's focus on the price piece first, which is I hire this product to be cheap. I don't think that the question is likely to elicit that answer. It's not likely to give you a pricing sense.

[A]

No, it doesn't. In fact, I would go far, so far as to say job Speedrun is. Is really focused on what I call the problem space, understanding the problem. And I don't mean your business problem. I mean the problem of the people you're trying to solve. Trying to understand the problem. What jobs to be done doesn't do is tell you what solution to create or how to create that solution or how to market that solution and how to price that solution. It tells you while you're doing those things, here are the things that are going to resonate with your market the most. The feature set, the marketing language, and even the price can be part of that. So. So the outcomes that you find from your jobs to be done analysis can influence your price in terms of knowing what people are willing to pay for by mapping them back to the problems that you're solving for them.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It doesn't tell you the price point, though. It won't tell you that.

[B]

Right. Won't tell you the price point and it may not capture either the externalities. So like a wrench, whenever I use a wrench under a car and I'm doing something hard, I. It comes off the nut and I smack my knuckles and I bark. My knuckles might actually come across that which is, you know, I hate it when that happens. And I'd like a wrench that made that not happen.

[A]

Right? Yeah.

[B]

You know, you might find it that's like an externality of using the product

[A]

or something that for me, I would capture that as an outcome statement. As you were talking, I heard two or three different pieces of information. So if the job is to secure, I'd have to think of a way to say this without mentioning a nut per se, but secure a machinery part to another or something like that. Secure one machinery parting to Another, I would say minimize the chance of slipping and minimize the chance of getting injured. Those would be two of the 50 outcome statements that I would have. Now, how important are those to people? I don't know. Let me collect all of those outcome statements first, and then we'll prioritize those. Does that make sense?

[B]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[A]

In the example that you gave, I would say jobs to be done absolutely would account for that space and for those things. Or at least it can. It depends a little bit, but at least it can. Here's the theory about jobs to be done is that once you declare a job, like find a new position at a company or find new employment, or what is the example we just used? Attach one machinery part to another or drill a hole in the wall. Once you declare that, the assumption is there is a perfect way to get that job done, there is a perfect way to find new employment. And therefore, particularly with those outcome statements that I was talking about, what you're doing there is you're finding all of the imperfections in getting that job done.

[B]

Yeah, that's it.

[A]

All of those imperfections are the things that you need to remove from your solution. So if there is a perfect way, what are all the. What are the. All the imperfections that you need to be removing from your solution till you get to that perfect way. Now, you never get the perfect way. There's always more imperfections that you have to remove. So if you are the manufacturer of an wrench, an imperfection is minimize the chance of slipping, and another imperfection is minimize the chance of getting injured. And I can identify those imperfections in getting that job done, map that back to my solution, and then create a better solution, and that gets the job done better. And then going back to your price question, people are willing to pay more for solutions that get a job done better than others.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So if you only know the imperfections in getting the job, if you can just name those and identify those, then you'll know what your focus should be for where you innovate. And that's what jobs to be done does.

[B]

Let me tell you a side effect of jobs to be done, which is, I guess it's an emotional job. It's actually. It's an attribute. I think, of all that this approach brings all the time. I happen to love a kitchen product line, which is oxo. They're just fantastic at design. And whenever I pick up one of their things, I can feel that they've thought about me. I can feel it in their Measuring cup. I'm kind of addicted to these products because they see me, I know they've thought about me. And so one of the emotional jobs that those products do for me is I feel cared for by that producer. And there are other products I, I pick up and I'm like, this manufacturer hates me or just doesn't give a crap about me. It's a good feeling when a product shows you that you're seen. A product should not be about being a product. It shouldn't be. Look at my design. It should be not about design, it should be about you.

[A]

Right. I would say jobs to be done would help a team, an organization get there more naturally. That's kind of the essence of Jobs to be done is we often express it as product market fit. You're trying to find the solution. The audience, the population that you're serving will pick it up or use it or read it or whatever it is, service, whatever it might be, and go, oh, how did you know that's exactly what I needed? And the answer is we can actually try to predict that by doing this analysis ahead of time. So the one way that I just describe jobs to be done is that it predicts adoption, it predicts why people will say, this is something I'm going to pull into my life. Product market fit. It helps you do that because as an innovator, as somebody creating a product or service or even just trying to improve something, there's always the chance that it gets rejected or people don't like it. Your chances of success are higher if you can have some insight into those factors that will ultimately motivate or lead somebody to pull a solution in towards them. So you're trying to predict the future a little bit and trying to predict exactly that moment that you described. Now, there's no guarantees of success. There are other ways to do that and I'm familiar with a lot of them because I used to be a designer myself. Human centered design, ethnography, contextual inquiry, all these, I love all those. Those are all great. I think Jobs to be done brings a certain rigor and framework with it that is handier and easier to understand. You can then also use the insight that you get from it well throughout the organization, which is how we open this conversation, that it can inform marketing. And I, I work with sales team now sales teams now dart using jobs to be done to help sales discovery calls. Right. I don't know. Ethnography, resources that have work with salespeople. Right. So I think the applicability of Jobs to be done is broader throughout the organization, but that doesn't exclude these other design techniques that I talked about or branding methodologies. I mean, some of the things you were talking about made me feel about what a branding motion might look like, which is we want to appear as if we care about the consumer through our products. So jobspeed done doesn't replace those things, those other things. It doesn't replace usability testing or marketing campaigns or branding or sales discovery. It doesn't replace those. I think it actually enhances those because it gives you insight into why would people use my solution or my improvement.

[B]

One of the things I argue for is that managers should be using it to understand their teams totally and thinking, using it to develop a sensitivity for what people really want from work. There's one last thing I want to talk about, which is one of the things Clayton Christensen says in his famous milkshake story. And for people who haven't heard it, he worked, I think, for McDonald's.

[A]

It was McDonald's.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. He said it once in one of his talks, and mostly he avoids saying it, but it was McDonald's. They wanted to sell more milkshakes. And they had done all this demographic stuff, and they had done all this psychometric stuff, and they had. They knew everything about what people wanted for milkshakes, but they'd never looked at them at what job they hired him for. And it turned out that after they studied, it was to keep them from being bored during their drive was one of the biggest things they wanted to get done. It was entertainment more than anything else. It was also food, keep them from being hungry. But one of the things he said in there is that what you realize by doing this is what you're competing against. And so in the case of a milkshake, you're competing against Snickers, not other milkshakes. You're competing against Snickers and donuts and bagels. And so once you. Once you realize that, you realize what your real differentiation is in terms of your product when it comes to work. Some people, a lot of people say, I hire my job to help others or to solve puzzles, but let's take help others. Well, what's your competitor in that particular case? Church maybe?

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Community groups or I hire my job to give me a worthy opponent is what some people say, well, what am I going to hire for that? Video games. So what do you do with that knowledge about these competitors you hadn't expected? Is it actionable?

[A]

It can be. And one of the plays in my Playbook. So I call it a playbook because it's basically a catalog, discrete techniques. And one of them I have in there is a competitor comparison. And typically when you do a competitor comparison, let's just take milkshakes. Typically you look at features, and I'm going to compare McDonald's milkshakes to burger King, to the corner soda stand. They don't have soda counters anymore, but let's just say there was one of those. Or you can even compare it to ones you would make at home. Let's compare those four things. Typically, what you would do is list the features. So thickness, flavor. I don't know what another feature of a milkshake might be, but there are probably a dozen or so that we could actually list. And a typical competitor comparison is comparing within a category against features. Yeah, what you can do with jobs to be done is you can take, for instance, the job steps that I mentioned or the outcomes, and you can list those. And then what you could do is I can compare a milkshake to a banana to a bagel, and I can see how well do they reach these outcomes for me? Or how well do they reach a job step? There's two different ways to do it. Let's just stay with the outcomes. I want to reduce the chance of feeling hungry later. I want to minimize the distractions while I'm driving. I want to decrease the mess that it makes. Those are things that are not features of a milkshake. Those are. Those are outcomes that people want from hiring those different things. So what you're able to do is you're able to compare different things and then see how your solution might actually stack up against a completely alternative solution. Like, I hire my job to help people. How does that compare to churches? Now, typically, you wouldn't compare a corporate job to a church, to volunteering for a church, but through the jobs to be done, you could actually do that and then maybe get some insight into where churches perform better and then say, how might we. So now I flipped into design thinking here and ideation brainstorming. How might we. Not by mimicking one to one, but how might we introduce some of that church volunteerism thinking. How might we introduce that into our job so we cover more of getting the job done?

[B]

That's really nice. That's essentially where I've been going with this. Which is what makes a great puzzle.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[B]

What are the design attributes of a great puzzle? And then saying, how do we bring that into work? And a good example is great puzzles have incremental wins, you get to solve little bits of it before you solve the whole thing, right? Well, the problem with multi year projects is that you don't get the incremental wins, but you can introduce them by really celebrating milestones in the project. You know, hey man, we just, we just completed our whatever phase. So that's like an example of how you can progress by analogy from understanding the job, then looking at real competitors.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

And then looking at what makes them great and then introducing those ideas.

[A]

Correct. Again, there are other ways to do that. I mean, a lot of, a lot of software companies now look at game design as an inspiration. How to design better software. Do you need Jobs to Be Done to do that? No, you can just do that. I would argue though, Jobs To Be Done gives you a very structured way to actually do that and to be specific and analytical. And then when you're having a discussion in a team, it's also, it's less than opinion and less than who's the loudest in the room. You can actually compare like things to like things in a systematic way and have a conversation that's actually guided and get alignment in your team a little bit better than maybe some of the other ways of doing that. So job speed on. I think for me, ultimately it brings in a way of thinking into any process that you're doing. It brings in a different way of thinking that's fairly structured and fairly rigorous in part, and this is not insignificant, but in part so that you could collaborate and have communication with the other people around you trying to solve problems with you. Because very often that's a problem as well too, is everybody has an idea, but nobody's aligned on which one you want to go for. Everybody has an idea how volunteerism at churches might help employers, but how specifically Jobs To Be Done is not only a collaboration tool, but it's an aligning tool to help the team focus on the single aspect. And it gives you the language and the techniques to bring that focus into your team as well too. It's not enough that you've done this analysis, you also have to have a conversation around it. And one of the things I talk about in the book is, well, how do you facilitate a conversation around a job map? We did a competitor comparison. How do I bring that back to my team so we can make sense of it as well too? So I see Jobs to Be Done also as a kind of a collaboration tool to get a common rationale for what you're focusing on and why you're

[B]

focusing on That I completely agree with that point, which is that having done ethnographic research, so important to be able to bring it back in a. In a compelling way. And that's why I'm going to recommend that people look at both of your books because I think they go really well together, which is that you've got. What is the full title of the Job to Be Done one so that we get that right.

[A]

It's called the Jobs to be Done Playbook. I think the subtitle is aligning products to your markets or something like that.

[B]

Then there's Mapping Experiences. And Mapping Experiences is about making that kind of research visual correct. And there's some in the Jobs to Be Done book. But this is a much more thorough examination of that and it's a much larger format. And some of these drawings require a really large format in order to even see them because they're quite detailed. So where can people learn more about you?

[A]

Yeah, sure. Out on LinkedIn. You can find me Jim Kallbach over on LinkedIn. I love connecting with people and hearing from them on LinkedIn. I also have a website on the heels of my book. In 2020, when it came out, I launched the Jobs to Be Done toolkit. So that's www.jtbd. that's our abbreviation for jobs to be done. Jtbdtoolkit1word.com. We have some free downloads and resources. The canvas that I mentioned is over there and then we also have some webinars that we do. It's a free community event, but we also have some paid content, some training courses, both online and we do live training too over there. So it's an all around resource where you can find more about Jobs to be done.

[B]

That's fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

[A]

Thanks for having me. Dart. It was a great conversation.

[B]

Thanks.

[A]

And I really appreciate your very detailed conversation.

[B]

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.