Posted by Greg, in: A Job comprises many different things and means different things to different people. What separates us from other practitioners of Jobs to be Done (JTBD), is we talk about the functional, emotional and social components.
For us – and for a Job to be truly complete – it needs all three elements.
The common mistake people make
Many people talk about the functional aspect of the JTBD, which is “what does the product do?” or “How does it do it?”
For example, look at a rideshare app platform like Uber.
The functional Job is getting people from place A to place B. And All transportation / rideshare products will have that component.
But what sets Jobs apart from other ways to understand why we, as customers, buy is to bring in the social and emotional piece of each of those things.
What sets Jobs apart from other ways of understanding why we as customers buy is to bring in the social and emotional piece of each of those things.
Greg Engle
What should a JTBD include? It’s all about the emotional element
When it comes to the emotional element, this is where we ask ourselves questions like: How does it make me feel? How do I want to feel? How does it affect me?
…and the social element.
And when it comes to the social aspect: this is rooted in how I want other people to see me.
Think about the rideshare example.
Let’s say I am in a new city, maybe for business, and I am meeting someone. I haven’t met them before, I don’t want to be in a hurry. I could get a rental car but I don’t really know the city.
Let’s broadly break this down into the three components.
Functional – “I want to get from point A to B the quickest I can with the less frustration”.
Emotional – “I want to be prepared for that meeting. I want to take the time that I need to collect my thoughts to figure out what I want so that I feel like I’m prepared for that next meeting”.
Social – “When I get there, I don’t want to be seen as scattered or frustrated or not attentive to whatever I am supposed to be doing”.
This is all different when the context is different.
Let’s say I am at home; I’m going out with friends for the evening. I want to go to a few places and maybe have a drink. I want to be responsible, I want to get from A to B with the least amount of friction.
Emotionally, I want to make sure I am safe and my friends are safe, and that I am taking responsibility.
Socially, I may want people around me to think I am being socially-conscious about drinking and driving. I may have kids that I have to show this to. I want them to see me as a responsible adult. Or I might have a friend group that I want to be seen as that or even my professional group. Socially, I want to be seen as responsible.
For other examples of extracting the social, emotional and functional information to create a job, check out our Guide to Building Better Products or learn more about us and how we can help you to identify meaningful info about your customers.
Extracting the emotional, social and functional aspect
To get any value from Jobs to be Done we need to talk about all three components (emotional, social, functional).
What ends up happening is when some people do JTBD, they only have functional aspects, but there is so much more context there. There are so many more things in those contexts that we can pull out and act upon. These contexts have both social and emotion in them.
We need to make sure we are capturing them, and advertising and selling to different people based on their social and emotional wants. You can even develop the product around this.
Applying this to an example: Peloton
Take another example: Peloton. A lot of people say this company only has one job, and that’s centered around community. Community can mean different things to different people. It means something different functionally, but also something different socially and emotionally.
Some people want the community to keep them focused and to be social with it. They want to be in it, they want their friends to be in it. They want to be talking about it, they want to ride together on video. But there’s also other people who use a peloton for many other reasons. They want the instructor in the community to hold them accountable or they just use the calendar to hold them accountable. They may say that’s community but that version is totally different to the first.
When you break down that word ‘community’, you’re going to find a lot of functional differences but you will also find a lot of social and emotional differences too.
Those three things will always be present in a Job, and there’ll be different rankings for each of them. So, jobs are way more emotional than they are social or functional.
These three things will always be present in a Job, and there’ll be different rankings for each of them. So, jobs are way more emotional than they are social or functional.
Functional is like the basic thing I need but the social and emotional need is higher in some Jobs than others. All three can move around. But we need to keep these in mind but that’s what gives us variety and the points of jaggeredness. Jobs are jagged and there are many times functionality may overlap.
It’s the social and emotional aspects that allow me to talk, develop and sell differently to each of my core customer segments.
It’s these aspects that make Jobs multi-disciplinary and used by multiple functions in the business, because they are all rooted in helping customers to make progress. Find out how we work with businesses to help them extract this information to help make meaningful decisions.