Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) Framework: A Deep Dive

00:00Let's suspend our belief in ourselves and our brand and our product and our segment. Let's just do that for a moment because we may see things in a different light and we may find opportunities we couldn't see otherwise because we're often blinded by our own segmentation and our own brands and our own solution and our own go-to-market motion. So let's just suspend that belief for a moment. And that's really what Jobs to Be Done allows you to do. You're listening to the Growth Manifesto podcast, where we host in-depth interviews with business leaders, authors, industry experts, and entrepreneurs with a singular focus around

00:32business growth. At the end of each podcast, we want you to walk away inspired, to think bigger, and to have actionable takeaways you can apply to improve your business. Each episode is like a masterclass on a key topic, so make sure to browse the episodes to find the topics that are most relevant to your biggest business challenges today. This podcast is brought to you by Web Profits, a digital growth consultancy that helps challenge brands drive growth in a complex and fragmented digital landscape. You can find out more about Web Profits at webprofits.io. Now, let's get into it. This is Alex Kleanthus, and today we're

01:11talking with Jim Colback. He's an author, he's a speaker, he's a chief evangelist at Mural, and he's the author of three books, including the Jobs to be Done Playbook. And today we'll be talking about how to use the Jobs to be Done framework to drive a lot better performance across business, including marketing and strategy. So I'm really excited about this one. Hello and welcome, Jim. Thanks for having me. Great to be here, Alex. Yeah, this is going to be an interesting one. And this is something that the team at Web Profits have been talking about quite a lot recently, and it's been around for a while, the jobs to be done approach, right? So let's maybe just start by defining it.

01:46And how do you define jobs to be done? Yeah, that's a good question. First of all, the word job is kind of a shorthand for a goal or an objective that someone has. We call it a job. And in English, as you know, sometimes you say, it gets the job done. And it's used in that sense of the word, right? Not in your career or getting hired for a job. So from that standpoint, it's really about focusing on the goals and the objectives that people have in their lives,

02:19independent of technologies or solutions, including your own. Very often when you're studying a market, people, a segmentation that you're trying to serve, you look at them through the lens of your own brand. They're potential consumers. They're potential buyers. What Jobs to be Done says is that's all important, but let's take a step aside first. We'll come back to that consumer and buying journey later. We want to know what the heck are they trying to get done. They're individuals. They're free-willed actors in the world, and they have needs,

02:52and they're trying to get something done. Let's look at that because there might be opportunities for innovation from that standpoint. So the question then arises, well, how do we talk about what people are trying to get done without talking about my own product or solution? And that's what Jobs to Be Done does. It gives us a framework for talking about people's goals and needs without talking about solutions or technology. And where did the concept come from? I think there are roots of it. If you go back, people like Theodore Levitt, a famous Harvard business professor, and then even Peter Drucker, the famous business management author back in the 50s, 60s, 70s. He lived until the 80s, I believe, used the term jobs to be done.

03:37But they never really had any kind of sense of a practice or anything around it. It wasn't really until Clayton Christensen started using the term in the innovator solution, which is the follow-up to his Innovator's Dilemma book. I think that was around 92 or 94. He talks about focus on the job to be done. If you want to fight disruption, focus on the job to be done. And it turns out there were a lot of people at the time kind of using the similar thinking. And then they grabbed onto that term.

04:08So most modern approaches to jobs to be done point back to Clayton Christensen. And then you wrote the playbook on it. And the playbook is extremely in-depth and it's got a whole process around it and so on. And so what gave you the inspiration, just quickly, because I am interested, to write the playbook? I first got in touch with the concept and the field, if we call it a field, of jobs to be done around 2003. And then I started to dabble and use it in my own work. various techniques, because like I said, there were authors out there and people

04:38trying different things out, and I was really exploring them. And then I actually felt confident enough to give a workshop on the topic four or five years before the book came out. So I was kind of learning on how to explain it and what would be the most practical. And really what I wanted to do was take this field that had a lot of question marks around and try to make it accessible and tangible and something that people could grab onto in the book. And just for the audience, it's a fantastic book that just explains everything,

05:11exactly how to execute every single part of the process, which is why it's called a playbook. So just a quick shout out there, just to purchase the book on Amazon, fantastic book. Now, does this apply to B2B or to B2C or to both? It can apply to both. I think a lot of the examples that you see out there when you hear people talking about jobs to be done, they'll often grab onto a B2C example, right? Because it's a little bit easier to explain and it's a little bit easier to grasp.

05:45Is B2C, is that actually easier? I would have thought that B2B is easier because it's like a service-based thing between two businesses where… It's not, and here's why. So, to answer your question, though, jobs to be done could be applied to both B2B and B2C. The complication with B2C is that the buyer in a B2B, sorry, the complication with B2B is that the buyer in a B2B situation is often very different than the person getting the benefit from your innovation, which happens further downstream, right?

06:16So if you're a solution provider, you're going to go to an organization, another business, your business talking to their business. And very often you come up against purchasers and maybe a legal team and people that have IT compliance and things like that. And then behind them are people who roll out solutions and train and install. And then behind that are the people that actually get to use the organization. And they're removed from that point of contact that you as a B2B service provider actually have.

06:47So they're a little bit further away. So you have to extend your thinking when you're using jobs to be done in the B2B domain to really not think about that buyer. Again, that comes later. We don't forget about buying here, Alex. All we're saying is let's put that aside for a second and see if there's any opportunities for innovation by looking all the way down to the person that gets the benefit from your innovation and work backwards. So Jobs to be Done actually thinks backwards. It's really about let's start with the problem and the need and work back towards the technology and then work back towards the buying solution, not the other way around.

07:23Because typically we see things the other way around. And that's where Jobs to be Done adds a new perspective and a new twist on things. So from a consumer perspective, I understand that the problem is easier to identify because the consumer is the end beneficiary of the innovation. The buyer and the consumer are often one and they just wear different hats. In B2B, they're different people, sometimes far apart. But in B2B though, say for example, if there's a software company and it's selling software to

07:54another company and that software is to help a specific individual in their role, the end consumer is that individual within that company. Is that correct? I just want to just make sure that I didn't get something wrong here. No, that's all good. In that scenario, using software, it would be the end user. I avoided using the term end user because that implies a solution. And that's why I said the beneficiary of your innovation, the people who benefit from your innovation, because I didn't want to use the term end user. But if you're in

08:26software, you can think about, let's start with the end user, work backwards towards the technology, and then work backwards from there to the buying decision. Got it. Okay. That's clear now, but let's stick with the B2C side of things, right? Because it's simpler and it's more common. And it's something that I think like a lot more people have challenges with. So you talk about the jobs are essentially goals, essentially that people have. Is that correct? And so if I am selling product, what would be the process of identifying

09:06a job or the jobs that we could potentially fulfill? Yeah, that's a great question. It's one of the hardest for me to actually answer with a clear one-liner or even a paragraph for that matter. And it's something that if I were to go back and rewrite the book, Alex, I'd actually spend a little bit more time explaining. I call this scoping your jobs to be done landscape. Scoping your jobs to be done landscape. And it really begins by answering two fundamental questions.

09:38I assume anybody using the Jobs to Be Done framework is an innovator. So I talk to people as innovators. You're trying to innovate, improve, bring something new to the market. And as an innovator, there are two questions. Who do you want to innovate for and where do you want to innovate? So there is a little bit of a top-down decision that you have to make. Before you get started with your bottom-up research, there's some top-down investigation that you have to do is, who do I want to serve and who do I want to innovate for and what's important for me? What aspect of what they're trying to get done is important for me? You can

10:13always go out and talk to a couple of those job performers and get a reality check against your hypothesis. But it does start a little bit about what's important to you or who's important to you and what are they doing that's important to you, right? So, there is a little bit of a match. There's a duality there between what you observe people actually getting done or you can talk to them about it. And what matters to you as an innovator? And you kind of start there. So Roger Martin, he came on the podcast and he's all about strategy, right?

10:46And he said that a good strategy is all about the where to play and the how to win. And it sounds like before you can really start to identify the jobs to be done, scope or landscape scope. I didn't get that sentence. But it's actually choosing a segment and it's choosing who you want to serve as a starting point. Is that correct? Is that a good? To some degree, I'm just going to, I flinched a little bit when you said the word segment. Yeah.

11:16Because a segment. Flinch away. Flinch away. The word segment very often implies a marketing segment from your own perspective as a brand or a solution provider. Jobs, it's like a segment, but you don't do that type of segmentation because a job performer is anybody that gets that job done, right? Which may not fit into your normal segmentation. segmentation. So classically, the segment, the way that segmentation is done as an organization

11:48may not be your job performer or said another way, your job performer may cut right across your classic segmentation. So I don't think about it as segmentation. I think about it as individuals, the people that you want to serve, that you want to innovate for, who are they? What are they doing that matters to you? So then thank you for that. And yeah, I now notice why you flinched because I do remember, I think I read somewhere, like there's so much content now, but that traditional segmentation is done by demographics or by interests or by location.

12:26And where the jobs to be done framework can actually start to change it is that, and I'm going to use the same word again, but to segment according to the job. So the job becomes the segment essentially, right? And the job could be middle-aged man. It doesn't, yeah. A teenager. Exactly. A grandparent because it's about the job. Anybody who gets that job done. It could be B2C, but B2B. I mean, the way that you traditionally break things up, it's not going to fit into that mold and that's why I flinched. Yeah. And so then if that's the case, right?

12:56And if we're now starting to look at how do we develop a strategy that is effective in market, that is effective across the business, that doesn't look at traditional segmentation, and now starts to look at the jobs to be done thinking, where do you start? Where do you start then? Because it's anyone and it's everywhere. It's a good question. And theoretically, you can actually use jobs to be done to come up with a new way to segment your market after you've had the solution, right?

13:26So you've looked at the problem, you've come up with a solution. You can continue to use jobs to be done for segmentation. But typically what happens is those traditional segments are very strong and to some degree calcified inside of an organization. You might even have teams around them and things like that. And typically what happens is the jobs to be done view needs to marry that traditional organization around segments. And there needs to be a compromise in both directions.

13:57Here's the problem with segmenting and changing the way you view the market completely with jobs to be done is you very often don't have data that tells you what jobs to be done people are trying, what they're trying to get done. It's not in your database. It's not some, one of the reasons why you grab onto demographic data is because you can actually segment mailing lists and sales leads and all those other things. You can actually say, because you have that data. But most often, the job performer that you're going to be targeting, you don't necessarily have the data that's going to be able to segment that for you when you go to market.

14:35So what I'm talking about when I talk about determining who you want to innovate for is way up front. It's who do you want to even create a solution for? And you can use jobs to be done to look at things that way and worry about how you're going to segment or how that's going to marry your existing segmentation later. And I would say, let's just suspend that reality for a moment. That's really what Jobs to Be Done is. It's like, let's suspend our belief in ourselves and our brand and our product and our segment. Let's just do that for a moment because we may see things in a different light and we

15:10may find opportunities we couldn't see otherwise because we're often blinded by our own segmentation and our own brands and our own solution and our own go-to-market motion. So let's just suspend that belief for a moment. And that's really what Jobs to Be Done allows you to do. Could you share an example of how this actually just looks in practice? It's often simpler than you think. Let's see. We would have to think of a type of an organization. One example that I use in my book is if you want to target conference attendees, let's

15:45say you believe that you can help conference attendees get more out of the events that they attend, then your job performer is conference attendees, right? And the target job, how you frame your research would be around attending a conference. And sometimes it's as easy as that. I use that example because that's something I worked in before, and we were actually looking at that as well too. As an organization, we thought we could help conference attendees get more out of that event. Now, that's very different than helping organizers, by the way. So our

16:19solution, we weren't trying to help conference organizers organize a better event. We were trying to help conference attendees get a better experience from the event. So we targeted conference attendees. And that was something that was part of what we wanted to do as a team, as an organization. Does that make sense? Yeah. So it made sense to us because that's what we were passionate about. And that's where we wanted to innovate. We wanted to innovate attending a conference for conference attendees. And so what, or what's an example of a job statement or a job to be done statement

16:54that would have applied to the people that attended the conferences, conference attendees? Yes. So this is where we start to get into some of the details of the jobs to be done technique. And there are different elements. There are different aspects of the job that you can understand framing it all. So you have what's called, first of all, you have the job performer, right? And that's as generic as conference attendee. And then you have what I'm starting to call now in the book, I call it the main job. I'm starting to call the target job, Alex,

17:27to imply that there's a little bit of a choice there. It's your choice. It's what I want to target. I want to target attending a conference, right? And that frames the rest of the elements and the rest of your research. And what you're looking for from there on out, once you know that frame is you're looking for what are the outcomes that people want? What are the emotions they have? What are the social aspects? And then what are the factors or the circumstances? I've been calling these now job differentiators, that there's different ways to get that job done. So when

17:58you talk about a statement, oh, and the other thing you can do is create a chronology or process for attending a conference. There's a before, during, and after, or beginning, middle, and end to attending a conference, right? So when you talk about a job statement, what I hear, is what's the functional job or what's a functional job step, right? And there are rules for formulation. You can't use any technology. You can't use ands or ors. They all got to begin a verb. They got to begin with a verb, right? So, if I'm looking at attend a conference that

18:30begins with a verb, by the way, attend a conference, right? It might start by determine which event to attend, coordinate logistics for attending, and then there might be other other steps in there, like select presentations to listen to or to attend. And at the end, you might have something like, you know, summarize information from the event or something like that. But notice all of those statements that I just mentioned, they all begin with a verb. They didn't

19:04have any technology there. I didn't say, I didn't even say the word notes. I didn't even say summarize the word notes, right, in there, because we just leave it as generic as possible. So when you're creating a job statement, one of the questions I like to ask is, what did they do 50 years ago? Right. And if you can formulate it in a way that covers that question, you're very often expunging technology from your language, right? Because they didn't have iPhones and PowerPoint presentations, you know, 50 years ago at conferences. So you can't say, take a photo of a

19:35slide, right? You see that at conferences these days all the time, right? People take a photo of slide. You can't say take a photo of the slide because that's technology. You have to say capture information during the presentation, right? Because that's what they did 50 years ago, and they might've used pen and paper or a quill and ink, you know, a hundred years ago, right? So we just want to say capture information in a way that is as agnostic to technology as possible. That's what a good job statement has in it. So we've done the jobs to be done framework on

20:07the conference attendees. Yeah. What does a successful jobs to be done framework actually look like? And what does it actually solve for the person actually implementing it? It's not for the end user or for the job performer, but for the person who's executing. Yeah. It's a great question. And it's actually one of the first ones that I ask a team. They say, Hey, Jim, we want jobs to be done. We want to use jobs to be done with our team. And I'll say, why? Because I read your book. Well, that's not a good reason to thank you for buying my book and reading it.

20:39But that's not a good reason to implement jobs to be done. So you got to think about what do you need to accomplish in your team? What are you trying to do, right? Are you trying to look for innovation, new innovation opportunities that maybe have been overlooked by you and others in your market? That's okay. Let's try jobs to be done. There's no guarantees, right? But it's using another technique. And by the way, there are lots of existing techniques out there, everything from ethnography to things like task analysis and their innovation frameworks that are out there.

21:13Most of them are good. And I've tried a lot of them as well, too. And I think jobs to be done can complement some of those things as well, too. Just say, you know, design thinking and agile and techniques like that. I'm not saying you're not going to replace any of those with jobs to be done. it actually gives you more power into those other things that you're doing. So I like to see jobs be done as a complimentary technique for what you're trying to do. But you really got to ask yourself, what am I trying to do? What's the dynamic in my team? And what do I need to convince them of?

21:45Or what do I need to persuade people of, right? And very often I hear teams, they went out and did some research, but there's not a lot of evidence there, or it's very imprecise, or there's imprecise language. And they want to get crisper on how they're taking insight from the market and bringing it back to their team for innovation. And that's what Jobs to Be Done can do. It can give you a lot of rigor and precision and bring that into your market listening efforts. Yeah. One of the things I've found, because I came across this concept a few years ago, it seemed to pop out of nowhere.

22:16And then everyone was talking about it like it was some kind of a renaissance of some sort, right? It was everywhere all of a sudden. And it's still being spoken about today. But it's one of the things which I see its value is really helping companies stop thinking about themselves and start thinking about the customer. Because if you look at a lot of websites, and it's really hard to talk in the customer's perspective, it's all about the company.

22:48It's never about the customer because to talk about the customer, you actually need to understand the customer. And that's where most companies, they don't understand the customer and they try to squeeze their solution into the customer's life versus like, I found this is a really interesting approach just to think about all the goals that they're trying to achieve. and can you fit within that? And can that start to help you identify a way to talk across marketing, across sales, across your product, across actually innovating on the product in some way?

23:22And so that's something I've found. Is that something which you've seen across the board as well? Absolutely. I talk about that in the book, and that's from experience and from talking with folks. I even go as far to avoid the word user and customer because as soon as you call an individual that you're serving a user or a customer, you're implying that there's a solution there, or you're implying that there's a buying relationship there. So I use the words individual, and I talk about human-centered, being human-centered,

23:53which is a level above being customer-centered in my book. And of course, there's been human-centered design. That's been a field for decades. That's been out there. I think the problem with human-centered design, from my perspective, is the word design. That kind of seems like it's only for a part of the organization, the people that do design. But I think it's broader than that. But in any event, what I've been talking about, how jobs to be done can help, is becoming a human-centered business.

24:24Because that's really what you want to do, right? Is you want to become a human-centered business, right? And if you're a human-centered business, you are taking a lot of empathy from the customer perspective, and you'll really be able to see things from the customer perspective. And to your point, what Jobs to be Done does is it gives you a language to talk across marketing and product and sales and customer success and support and even business strategy as well, too. So becoming a human-centered business, I think, requires a language that everybody's talking about. And Jobs to be Done expunges technology and then you reference the brand and all these

24:57really good things. I think that do it in a way that, that other techniques don't do. It has that cross disciplinary language and it, and it's really, really human centered. Yeah. And the thing I really like about it is that it's a job to be done. It's like, there's no hiding behind. It's not a company has to sell a product to a customer. No, it's a job that, that an individual, not a customer, not a user, a job that an individual has to complete. Right.

25:28And it's like, I guess, identifying that and then kind of asking yourself, well, how big is that opportunity? And is that something which we should go into heavily? And if it is, you know, how much should we change the organization, the messaging, all the things to fit that? And I think that's what's really interesting about it as well. Right. Yeah, exactly. And there's another aspect, you know, I was talking about job statements before, but then there's this other aspect around the outcomes. So the main job kind of frames your field of vision, but within that, there's the other aspects, the emotional, social factors, for instance.

26:01And then I think the other important aspect is this idea of outcomes, right? So what are the outcomes that a conference attendee has from attending a conference, right? They want to try to reduce the likelihood of selecting the wrong conference to attend or reduce the effort needed to capture information during the event. or minimize the time it takes to share information with others and so forth and so on. And if you take any job, like attending a conference, what you find is you can actually

26:33gather about 50 or more of those statements. And the statements that I just said also have rigor and a form to them, Alex, as well, too. So it's a combination of the factors that makes jobs to be done really powerful. It's not just about saying, hey, let's look at attending a conference. It's also about what are the outcomes that they want and what are the emotions that they have and what are the factors that are going to make that a different job that people try to get done. And really looking at how those things intersect, that's when you can really start to find opportunities.

27:06Yeah. And I think what's super interesting about that is that, especially in sales and marketing, you always hear about the importance of focusing on the benefit. You got to focus on the benefit. You got to focus on the benefit. And what I've just heard now is that there is a job to be done that has 50 benefits. And that's just from one of the jobs to be done. And there's another job to be done that has like a bunch of other benefits as well. And I think this is a really interesting way and rigorous way, I would say, to find the main benefit, right? Because sometimes it's a bit too big, the benefit, right?

27:38It's like, hey, it's a better life. It's like, okay, cool. I got it. You know, yeah, I'm going to get all confident. I'm going to have like a much better life. but there's a few steps between the aspirational one, let's call it, and the micro one, right? But I figured, like, because you talk about the hierarchy of jobs to be done that goes from aspirations to big job to little job to micro job, right? Can we touch on that quickly and how that affects the process

28:09and the best place to focus? Sure, sure. Well, anytime you talk about, you know, human goals and needs, there's always a hierarchy there. Right. And, you know, the classic example is people like to use, you know, the Theodore Levitt quote, people don't want to buy a drill, they want a hole in the wall. Right. And then I've heard this. I've heard people, they've come up to me and say, well, you don't want a hole in the wall. You want to hang a picture. And then somebody said, well, you don't want to hang a picture. You want to preserve your family memories.

28:40You don't want to preserve your family memories. You want a more fulfilling home life. No, no, no. You don't want a more fulfilling home life. You want happiness, right? Okay. So now I'm a drill bit manufacturer. Let's say we manufacture drill bits, Alex. We're a B2B company. We manufacture drill bits. Should I start my innovation effort with let's make people happy? Or should I start with something closer to home, like get a hole in the wall? You might even go up one level to say, let's hang a picture or a shelf.

29:11You have shelves behind you there. I do too. Or something like that. That's where you might want to start, right? So getting the level of hierarchy, I think, is really important. And I was guilty of this in my career. I've done a lot of design thinking and innovation sessions. And I'd walk in the room and say, we want to swing for the fences, as we say in America. That's a baseball reference. But we want a blue sky. And then you put this big thing up there. Like, again, you're a drill bit manufacturer. And I'd walk in the room and I'd say, let's innovate. Let's brainstorm around making people happen. You're too far away from what you can actually affect as well, too.

29:44And that's part of scoping. We talk about scoping your jobs to be done landscape. It's not only picking who you want to innovate for and where you want to innovate, but also getting that right level of altitude as well, too. And part of the question there is, well, what do you have influence over? What can you actually affect? And you don't want to just go up in the stratosphere and talk about the aspirational benefit before you even figured out how to make a hole in the wall. Let's help people do that first and then think about the aspirations that they might have, but do that at one level up, right? And that's how your business

30:18and your team grows by going one level up. So that's a good thing, but you can go too far too quickly. And so then I'm assuming, and this is a part of the book as well, but I'm assuming a lot of this insight is identified through surveys and interviews. Is that correct? Correct, correct. So there is a little bit of framing that happens. That's when you scope your jobs to be done. Landscape, who do we want to innovate for? Where do we want to innovate? That's a little bit of a top-down decision. And I say a little bit because you can go out and talk to a few people and say, hey, is this something you're trying?

30:51Is this a job that is out there? And is this a job that's worth us pursuing? But then after you've done that framing, what you want to do is you want to go out and talk to people. So jobs to be done research begins with qualitative interviews. And you talk to job performers about getting that job done. You don't talk about your product. You don't talk about your price point. You don't talk about what complaints they have with your solution in the market currently. You talk to them about just getting that job done. And, you know, you can do that starting with about 10 people, let's say,

31:24but, you know, real good jobs to be done in a research effort will get more like 20 people. And let me tell you, if you talk to 20 people, Alex, and you talk to them about attending a conference and the next person about attending a conference, you're going to have a lot of confidence about what are those steps? What is the sequence of steps, which are the smaller jobs below your main job there, but you're also going to hear a lot about the emotions and the outcomes that people want. And that's really what you're doing. What jobs to be done effectively is, here's one another way to explain jobs to be done. It's a categorization system. You go out and talk

31:58to people in your market about what they're trying to get done. And as they're talking, that hits your brain and you say, oh, that's an emotion. I'm going to put it over there in the emotion bucket. And jobs to be done gives you rules on how to formulate that. Oh, that's an outcome. I'm going to put that over there in the outcome pile. Oh, that's another outcome. There's another outcome. Oh, here's a job step. I'm going to put that in the jobs to be done step. So it's a categorization system and it gives you the rules of formulation of that categorization system. What you can then do with it is any or all of the plays in the playbook that I wrote,

32:30you can create a job map and you can create job stories and you can prioritize the outcomes and all these other things as well too, once you have that basic information. But to answer your question, that comes from the bottom up and that starts qualitative. There are ways to then quantify things like what's the most important outcome that people are having difficulty getting done today. And you can do that in a quantitative survey and take those 50 outcome statements and absolutely walk in with a pie chart and point to a graph and say, there's the most unmet need or

33:03hardest to get done outcome that's most important to people. And you can walk in with data if you wanted to. But you don't have to. You can just stop. You can just do the qualitative research and stop there if you want. So jobs to be done is also flexible to meet the scope of your team and your budget and your time and your resources and things like that. Awesome. There's a couple more questions. I think they're pretty easy ones. Maybe not. If there's no traditional segmentation, and if we are starting to look at individuals that are

33:35based on kind of the jobs to be done on specific jobs, let's call it, or specific individuals, are there personas? And if there are personas, are the personas just based on the job itself and they exclude the demographic? Yeah. There can be personas and you cannot use the persona technique with jobs to be done. There's some articles out there that say they're mutually exclusive. Either you do personas or you do jobs to be done. And I was always like, I'm doing both. I never quite got that perspective out there. So there's this kind of myth that

34:09jobs to be done obviate the need for personas. I never quite saw that. On the one hand, you are going to have, depending on your organization, you may have a traditional segmentation going on already, and there may even be personas there. You'll have to negotiate that downstream. And by that, I mean, later on in the process. But within the job speed on process, there's another bucket of information, right? I talked about the emotions, the social aspects, the outcome. There's this another bucket of information that you can gather through your

34:43qualitative interviews, one by one, you listen for what I'm starting to call job differentiators. In my book, I call them circumstances. But these are really the factors that make a difference in getting the job done, right? So for instance, if you're attending a conference and you do it online completely virtually versus in person, that's a big differentiator, right? The steps might be exactly the same, right? Because I still have to decide which conference to attend. I still have to capture the information. I still got to summarize my notes at the end, right? So the

35:14steps should be the same. But if I do it online versus in person, I'm probably going to prioritize the outcomes differently, and I'm probably going to have different emotions as well too. So the job sequence stays the same, but that job differentiator is actually going to point to two different opportunities. So as the innovator, I'm going to say, oh, is it online or is it remote? I'm going to have two different sets of innovation opportunities, depending on how those factors or those differentiators, job differentiators pan out. So you get your point,

35:50to your point about personas, what I like to do is then take the job differentiators that matter most to the people that you're serving and to your project, and you can make personas around them. So if I'm looking at conference attendees, attending a conference, I would want to know what the process is, what the outcomes are, and then I might create a persona for a remote attendee and an in-person attendee, just so that I have anchored that main, because that's a really a big difference when you're attending a conference, right? I've anchored that as two

36:21different personas going into a design sprint or going into an agile development sprint or something like that. It might help the team to think in personas at that point in time. But that's kind of after I've already done some of my initial analysis and laying out the landscape and fleshing that out a little bit. I might then look at those differentiators to actually create different personas. Yeah. And I guess if you were to try to think about the job to be done, that they were trying to come up with the creation of the iPhone.

36:53You know what I mean? That is about the job. That is not about, well, a mother is going to listen to it like that and a child will do it like this. And so it's really interesting how this can actually create a lot of innovation if you just forget about the segmentation. I think so as well. That's really, really interesting. But I think the place where a lot of people will probably start is they are probably going to say, well, here's a segment. and it's going to be, for example, I sell skincare products to this segment. How do I communicate a lot better with them?

37:26That's right. And that's then just the surveys and so on, understanding all that. That seems like an easier step into jobs to be done than saying, let's make an iPhone for our industry, you know, kind of thing. Yeah, I'll agree with that because, and I've made that assumption as I was talking here, and my assumption was you're already in a company and you already have a product on the market. We can talk about jobs to be done for startups in a second, but a lot of the listeners here, I think, Alex, I'm not sure, but a lot of the listeners are like, I'm in a company. We got a brand.

37:56We got segmentation. We got a product on the market. Yeah, that's our audience. And I think you can, right? And in fact, there's a technique called switch interviews, which are really talking about what people are trying to get done with your product. So you start with your product as a way to reverse engineer and back up and say, well, well, why did you first start using this product? And what were you trying to get done? And what led you to getting that done? And you back up and what you try to do is reverse and tease out the job to be done by starting with your own product.

38:28So you can actually do that as well too. Where you ultimately want to end though, is a description of what people are trying to get done independent of your product or your solution. So the goal is innovation. A step towards that goal is a better understanding of the individuals in the market that could benefit from the thing which you provide, right? And I think I've used all the right terminology. I'm going to transcribe and use that. You said it really, really well, Alex. Right. No, it's all yours. You can have it. I'm just happy that I can actually say it well.

39:00And I said it properly. So that's good. One final point, right? And I'm sorry to be so reductive in this whole conversation. But if there was basically just the one thing that somebody would have to get correct to ensure a successful process of, I guess, implementing the jobs to be done framework across their segment or across their team or across their company, what would that be? Yeah. A tough question. And it's often phrased as where do I see people making mistakes?

39:35And there's a couple of areas. One is around scoping, getting the right scope of your jobs to be done. But I have to say, to answer your question, I'm not going to evade it. I'm going to be specific here. I think it is understanding the categorization of jobs to be done, of the different elements, the job, the job steps, the outcomes, the emotional aspects, the job differentiators, understanding how to listen for those. and what goes with that also is formulating things in the right way, right? And job steps

40:08have to begin with a verb, no ands or ors. You got to expunge all technology, not only your own, but all technology from your language. Outcomes, they have their own formulation as well too. Emotional aspects, they have their own formulation as well too. So, really being able to drive that categorization system and how you're formulating things because that's really where the rubber hits the road, right? And if you're not formulating things in the right way, then you don't get any of the theoretical benefits that we were talking about, right? That perspective shift or the

40:39ability to have cross-departmental language in your company and all of those things really depend on that very nuanced skill. And here's the thing about it, Alex, is that it is a skill. It's like learning a language, right? And I can do it fairly easily. Like if I was talking to somebody about attending a conference, my brain would literally say that's an outcome. And I'd be able to write it. I'd be able to formulate it in the quote unquote correct way almost immediately. Sometimes you got to go back and read these things over.

41:10But it takes practice to be able to do that. So there's probably a lot of listeners and people maybe who even read my book and say, I get jobs to be done in principle. And I even get what the heck Callback was writing about in his book. But to actually go out and do it is harder than you think. And it takes a little bit of practice and a little bit of elbow grease. And the promise at the end of that is that there will be fresh ideas and fresh perspectives and fresh approaches for how to grow a business, to increase market share, to increase sales,

41:43and so on. And so, especially in today's world where the better somebody thinks, the better the outcome. I think this is a fantastic time to spend some time in the jobs to be done framework and such a great book. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast as well. It's been such a great conversation, Jim. I really just like our energy and I love how much that, I guess like you know about the topic, right? And just for the audience, the book's available on Amazon and every other book site out there. So highly recommended. If people want to follow you or to speak to you,

42:16ask what's the best way that they can get in touch or that they can connect, Jim? Yeah, these days, LinkedIn, I love connecting with people out on LinkedIn. And I often post there as well, too, some jobs to be done things. Sometimes there's some other things on my stream there, but it's mostly jobs to be done and mostly pointing towards the jobs to be done toolkit. So jtbdtoolkit.com. That's a site that we launched with my business partner after the book to actually kind of continue the conversation. And we have some online training there. We have some

42:52live training courses that you can sign up for. And we do a monthly webinar. It's free. It's a community call. You can come on and ask your own questions. And then there's some articles and free downloads there as well too. And what's that URL again? JTBD Toolkit. That's all one word, JTBDToolkit.com. Jobs to be done toolkit, just in case that wasn't clear. And I will link that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Such a great conversation. And I look forward to speaking to you soon. It was a lot of fun, Alex.

43:23Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to the Growth Manifesto podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please give us a five-star rating on iTunes. For more episodes, please visit growthmanifesto.com forward slash podcast. And if you need help driving growth for your company, please get in touch with us at webprofits.io.