Product Management

Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”

Is innovation inherently a hit-or-miss endeavor? Not if you understand why customers make the choices they do.

Clayton M. Christensen, David Duncan, Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall

Sep 01, 2016 • 14 min read

4.75 (8)

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Innovation

Service Design

Customer Focus

Jobs to be Done (JTBD)

Data Analytics

Summary

Christensen and his coauthors give a deep analytical report on why most businesses are staggering with innovation and the importance of knowing your customers. They state that firms focus more on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data than trying to understand the jobs that the customers are trying to get done. Read the article to know more about why the key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers’ lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs.

Takeaways

Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the customer is trying to get done.
Jobs are multifaceted. They’re never simply about function; they have powerful social and emotional dimensions. And the circumstances in which customers try to do them are more critical than any buyer characteristics.
The key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers’ lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs.