Framework library · Innovation and product
Jobs to be done
Customers do not buy products for their own sake. They hire them to make progress in a particular situation, and judge them by how well that job gets done. Describing the job without naming any product shows competitors and gaps that a product view misses. Rating each outcome the customer wants for importance and for satisfaction today then shows where a new offer would be valued.
Use it when
- You are designing a new offer and need to know what customers are trying to get done before choosing features.
- Sales are stalling against competitors you do not think of as competitors, including spreadsheets, manual work or doing nothing.
- Customers ask for features that conflict, and you need a way to decide which needs matter most.
- You are entering a market you do not know and want to describe it from the buyer's side rather than from your product line.
Avoid it when
- The customer and the job are already well understood and the question is how to price or package the offer. Use a pricing test or conjoint study.
- You need to size the market. The job describes demand; size it with TAM, SAM and SOM.
- You cannot talk to people who do the job. Outcomes written from inside the business are guesses dressed as research.
How to run it
Name the job performer
The person who does the job, by role: the terminal operations manager, not the port. If several people are involved, describe the job for the one who judges success.
Write the job without naming a product
Verb, object and context: "keep container moves flowing across the yard through every shift". If a product name appears, the statement is too narrow.
Describe the circumstances and what is hired today
When and where the job arises, what makes it hard, and every current solution, including workarounds and doing nothing. Note why people would switch.
List the outcomes customers use to judge the job
Each as a direction, a measure and an object: "minimise the time to restore service after a night-shift fault". Collect them in interviews, in the customer's words.
Rate importance and satisfaction
Ask job performers to rate each outcome from 1 to 10 for how important it is and how satisfied they are today. The opportunity score is importance plus any shortfall of satisfaction below it.
Build the offer around the worst-served outcomes
The workbench treats a score of 10 or more as worth a look and 15 or more as very high. Set your own bands after the first survey. Outcomes that score low can be met at parity.
Work through it
Answer the questions below, or load the worked example to see a finished one. The drawing updates as you type. Export the result as a PowerPoint deck, a Word document, an Excel workbook, a PDF or plain text.
What you type stays in this browser, so you can close the page and come back to it. It is not sent to Blue Prysm or anyone else, and the exports are made here, on your device. Privacy policy.
Mistakes to avoid
- Writing the job at the level of your product ("use private 5G") rather than the customer's progress. The job should outlast any solution.
- Treating opinions about features as outcomes. Ask what the customer measures, not what they would like built.
- Averaging ratings across segments with different jobs. Score each segment separately or the high-opportunity outcomes disappear.
- Forgetting emotional and social parts of the job, which often decide who gets hired between offers that perform alike.
Where it comes from
The theory has two main strands. Clayton M. Christensen and colleagues describe customers hiring a product to make progress in a particular circumstance ("Know Your Customers' 'Jobs to Be Done'", Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan, Harvard Business Review, September 2016). Anthony W. Ulwick rates each desired outcome for importance and satisfaction and combines them in an opportunity score (importance plus the amount by which importance exceeds satisfaction), which he first published in "Turn Customer Input into Innovation", Harvard Business Review, January 2002. Source.
Outcome-Driven Innovation is a registered trademark of Strategyn. This page describes the opportunity score independently and is not endorsed by Strategyn.
Use it with
Further reading
Work through it with us
The frameworks here are free to use as they stand. If you would rather work through the question behind this one with us, these are the ways an engagement starts.