If you’re building products for users, you have to have come across Clayton Christensen’s famous jobs-to-do theory (secretly hoping you haven’t cause then this post isn’t of that much use to you). If you haven’t, then you must read the book Competing Against Luck in which he walks us through applying the simple and elegant technique that helps you understand your customers. The theory is quite simple and it attempts to help you build your user persona and the role of your product in their lives, by asking the simple question – what job have you hired our product to do.
Your job as creators and innovators is to ask this question, directly or indirectly, and to understand what job is the user is trying to accomplish. In his most famous example, Prof Christensen talks about how they applied this theory to understand McDonald’s customers’ preference for buying milkshakes. If they understood this well enough, they could use the knowledge to create more milkshakes and get more $$. The story goes that they did the usual focus group studies, asked people what flavors they would like to see and iterated on their menu items but did not see any improvement in sales. When they finally applied the jobs to do theory, some very interesting pieces of information emerged. Researchers were hired to observe people who were buying milkshakes. They even asked some of them what were they buying milkshakes for (basically, trying to understand the ‘job’ they had hired the milkshake to do) and what else was a possible replacement for it.
The key observations that came through were that most of the milkshakes were being bought in the early hours of the morning. Customers who generally bought milkshakes had a long commute ahead of them. The thicker milkshakes kept them entertained during the drive. The cups were easier to stow away in the cup holders of their cars and the thick milkshake kept their stomachs filled till later in the day. The customers also informed the researchers that this ‘job’ was earlier being done by bagels, coffee, and bananas but none of them did the job as well as the milkshake. Bagels were hard to eat, hot coffee was dangerous while driving, and bananas were hard to peel with one hand while driving on the freeway. Milkshakes were being hired to do this very specific job. The nature of the job meant that it wasn’t as much the flavor of milkshake that mattered than the availability around areas where people lived who had longer commutes. It also meant that milkshakes were competing with unlikely candidates like bagels, coffee, and bananas.
There are many such examples in the book. Ranging from a community college to a medical equipment manufacturer trying to win one of the largest heart ailments markets in the world. The underlying story remains the same. Understanding customers from the lens of “what job your product is being hired to do”. The better you understand this, the easier it is for you to fix the missing pieces of puzzles and make it a better fit for the job the customers are hiring your product to do.
How Ikea understands its jobs-to-do
The reason Ikea is so successful is that it very clearly understands the job its customers hire it to do. That job is to get a piece of furniture in my house, today, without breaking my bank.
Another interesting example was that of the famous furniture giant Ikea. It does something pretty much every furniture manufacturer can do. It has no complex product lines and does not distinguish between different kinds of customers. The reason it is so successful is that it very clearly understands the job its customers hire it to do. That job is to get a piece of furniture in my house, today, without breaking my bank. It is super simple once you hear it but every aspect of Ikea is designed to fulfill this simple job description.
Let’s look at how Ikea does this. It sells furniture in the form of parts that can be easily transported in the trunk of any regular sized car so you don’t have to spend a lot of money hiring movers or asking your friends for help. Almost all the assembly can be done with one tool and that tool is present along with the parts of the assembly so you don’t lose it. You can walk into any Ikea, pick the furniture you like, get it instantly in your car, take it home and build it. The instant gratification of having built your own furniture is an added bonus. Compare it with the other options of getting your house furnished. You can go to a nice bespoke furniture place but it will take weeks to deliver you the goods. You can look up Craigslist for used furniture but you’ll need to do the ‘heavy lifting’ of getting it from the seller’s place (possibly in a rented vehicle).
As Ikea evolved, it understood that its users even better and then started customizing their experiences to make it an even better fit for the job. It was observed a lot of their customers were families with young children. They added a children’s play area where families can leave them while they shop. Once the job description becomes crystal clear and you design your product to be the ideal candidate that can do it, the product starts to speak for itself. Understanding the job your product is being hired to do, better than your competitors, is a gift that just keeps on giving. The key point that is highlighted again and again in the book is you need to learn to differentiate between your solution and customer’s jobs. A recurring theme in the book is that customers need quarter-inch holes and are not looking for quarter-inch drills.
Writing down your customer’s jobs to do
A tactical piece of advice on defining the job description is to not use adjectives. Things like ‘great user interface’ or ‘convenience’ or ‘affordable prices’ are not job descriptions. The perfect job description needs nouns and verbs. Something like ‘need to keep myself busy during my commute in the tube’ or ‘get groceries close to my home at reasonable rates’.
I love almost everything written by Prof Christensen and I highly recommend his two other books – The Innovator’s Dilemma and How will you measure your life as well. The latter has an excellent take on relationships and how we can apply the jobs-to-do theory to understand people around us and the jobs they’ve hired us to do as spouses, friends, sons, and daughters.
I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweet about startup life and practical wisdom in books.