Understand why consumers make choices

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a framework that helps you understand why and how people buy the products they do. We have found that if you understand the JTBD you greatly increase the likelihood of connecting your product with the right buyer at the right time.

The JTBD premise is that people don’t actually buy products, they hire them to do a job. Features and benefits themselves don’t cause people to buy. They’re part of it but they’re not the causal reason. You need to be able to understand what causes people to hire or fire your product. The JTBD framework helps us understand causality and what drives consumers to buy.

Finding where people are looking to make progress is what innovation all about. These struggling moment are the seed for all innovation. You have to be able to find that struggle, where there’s a push towards the future, where there’s a pull from the past … where the thing that they’re doing now isn’t working and the outcome that they want is better than what they have now. If we can show consumers a better way, better people are going to want it.

The foundation of a job is formed by evaluating two frameworks in the moment as consumers are looking to make progress.

• Demand Generation – What are the forces that will shape demand in the future? What’s next? What is not today but could be tomorrow? Where and how is the demand created?
• Hiring Criteria – How the shopper sells themselves on a new idea. What are the criteria for hiring to solve that problem or that job?

Interviewing recent switchers who represent the edges of the market help us forecast where the market is going and why. Listening to people who have recently made a change not about what they bought, but rather why they bought, we identify the intersection of the hiring criteria and demand frameworks. Through understanding what forces are acting on a consumer at the moment they are making a choice, we understand the mechanisms of value beyond the product and what would help them make more progress than what they are choosing today.

Defining the mechanisms of value beyond product, dimensionalizing these frameworks from a technology independent perspectives, we understand how they go about finding, hiring, using and consuming new thing. This enables innovators to be more creative on the technological side, offering solutions to help consumers accomplish jobs in new ways that are much better than current options as opposed to developing product features from a very ambiguous perspective.